Last month, the New York Attorney General (NYAG) brought a lawsuit against Valve accusing the company of promoting “illegal gambling” through its randomized in-game loot boxes. On Wednesday, Valve issued its first public comment on the case, comparing its digital loot boxes to randomized real-world purchases like blind-bagged toys or packs of trading cards.
“Generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive,” Valve wrote. “On the physical side, popular products used in this way include baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Labubu.”
Though that may seem like an apt comparison on the surface, Valve’s loot boxes differ from these real-world examples in large part because of Valve’s control of the Steam Marketplace, which serves as the only legitimate way to exchange or resell those items. While owners of real-world items are free to trade or sell them however they want, Valve has cracked down on many third-party sites that enable the exchange of in-game items—especially when those items are used as glorified chips for gambling games.
Lawyers told Ars last month that Valve’s control of that marketplace—and its 15 percent commission on item resale—helps establish the inherent economic value of the randomized items it sells, both to players and to Valve itself. That could be a crucial legal element in a courtroom in turning a mere “random purchase” into legally defined “gambling.”
How so?
Gambling systems always play into human psychology, and are always not in your favor.
CS loot boxes in particular have many systems designed to catch human pyschology.
Even the most simple single shot gambling like roulette is not in your favor. Any content box randomizes what you get, incentivizing more pulls, duplicates and unwanteds.
So is poker not gambling? Mahjong? When it’s 4 people playing together (not at a casino, for instance), how can it always be you who has worse odds? That’s of course rhetorical; you actual have equal odds, barring cheating or simple skill differences.
And once you make “playing a game that you are likely to lose” as the litmus test for what is gambling, why would you play any competitive games? Half of a competitive bracket has to lose more than they won, by definition.
You are conflating gambling as it happens within controlled, predatory, capitalist institutions, with Gambling as a concept. Gambling is not immoral or harmful intrinsically, but gambling institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to Gambling, are. Institutions that intentionally exploit addiction to alcohol or cigarettes or hoarding or whatever, also are. But it doesn’t make alcohol as a chemical compound itself, immoral.
And just in case it needs to be stated, merely enjoying Gambling doesn’t equate to gambling addiction.