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.”
Claw machines are gambling. Those coin machines that you get a sticker or a plastic spider out of is gambling. Kids having been gambling for decades. Hell even coin pushers is gambling.
I feel like we need to fully define gambling before any of this is settled. I believe anything where you give money for some kind of return but have a chance of recieving nothing back, then that is gambling. If you are guaranteed to get something for your money then thats not gambling. Thats just a purchase.
I cannot agree with this at all. If you’re guaranteed a piece of candy, but on top of that you have a 0.0001% chance of getting a million dollars, then buying that candy for $100 is absolutely gambling and not a purchase.
There has been a lot of posts about how people order a single SSD from amazon and end up with a whole box of SSDs. And if i go to amazon and order just a single SSD in hopes amazon screws up and sends me a full box instead, then i just gambled.
Should we go after amazon for encouraging gambling?
Amazon should be giving a full box of SSDs to every customer buying a dingle SSD, with 100% probability.
And complementary RAM
Yep. There are too many people who don’t understand addiction, and think that gambling is the root cause problem, rather than one of many systems that preys on addiction disorders.
The reality of addiction is that it will always find something to fulfill it without treatment, and banning or regulating every trend of collectibles that pops up is not an actual solution. Banning or regulating specific structures that intentionally prey on addiction is important.
Too many people mistake their feeling-based objection to gambling that was inherited from the protestant moral objections, with actually being about solving predation on addiction.
I honestly am not sure this is only about addiction. Instead i think this is mostly about parents who dont monitor their childs activites and want aomeone to blame for their child spending thousands of dollars on a video game.
I mean gambling in general, not just loot boxes or TCGs. Gambling is not a bad thing. Gambling addiction is, but it’s bad because it’s addiction.
gambling is still fundamentally bad because the very concept is predatory and harmful
I disagree. I’m not much of a gambler … never done anything but nickel slots. I put in $5 and generally get about a half-hour of entertainment. If I get above break-even, I cash out and am done. I got a free lunch out of it at a Montana gas station in college.
It’s generally more like $5.15 than $10, but on a road trip, who doesn’t like free food?
I’ve been to Vegas once. Same deal. Put $5 in a nickel slot. This time, I got free booze, so even though I lost all of my $5, I still came out ahead.
I am very much an addictive personality, but for some reason, I never caught the gambling bug. So I’m throwing stones at a glass house while residing in one … in my case, I’m envious of anyone who can have just one or two beers.
If you’re gambling to try to fix your economic situation or recoup prior losses, you’re no longer seeking entertainment. But if you know your limits and stick with them (something I absolutely cannot do with alcohol), I don’t see how spending $30 gambling for a few hours is materially different than going to a movie and buying popcorn. You can’t get a soda included in that $30 these days.
My college roommate is a bit more adventurous. Both of us were there with our fiancees to see Penn & Teller, and he was more of a $25 buy-in blackjack player. He won enough to pay for their entire trip on his last hand before the airport shuttle. And then didn’t do any gambling at the airport.
To say that gambling as a concept is inherently predatory doesn’t square with my experience. But instilling it in kids via video games definitely is.
How so?
This is a bit more complicated, imo. In the US, I would agree they are gambling. They are literally programmed to only close the claw strongly enough to grab shit after X amount of money has been put into the machine.
However, in Japan this is against the law. They are games of skill without the bullshit. You can even ask the clerks operating the establishment to reset the prizes to make it easier to get something if it falls over or is pushed too close to the glass. IIRC, you can also just ask to buy a prize outright without even playing the game.
Sure Japan has a way to protect people in regards to the claw machine. But gacha games and gachapon are huge in japan. And those are more predatory than loot boxes. So we still need to draw the line and sort out what actually is and isnt gambling.
Look at carnaval games, a mobile gambling group that targwts children? If we have loot boxes be labeled as gambling who is to say that we wont label everything else as gambling.
Where is the line?
Games of Chance vs games of skill.
“But poker is a game of skill!”
No it fucking isn’t. You can mitigate your losses by folding early or bluffing, but you can not guarantee a win by being “better” when the luck of the draw is still against you, unless you’re counting cards.
I still believe that is too broad of a definition. I go back to carnaval games. Those are games of skill but they are made in away to reduce your chance of winning, so luck is still a major factor.
Meanwhile loot boxes are neother a game of chance or a game of skill. They are a purchase and you get what you get. What are those mystery box toys called that everyone was going crazy for last year? LuLu dolls or whatever. Those are loot boxes. Should we regulate them like we are trying with video game loot boxes?
I would narrow this down to including monetary cost and reward.
A game of primarily chance, such as slots, roulette, poker, blackjack, or even MTG’s Ante variation where something of value is offered (money, chips, resellable cards) and something of value is rewarded would be gambling. Note that chance would be a primary mechanic of the game, but skill may still be involved.
Marjorie Taylor Greene is involved in this? I mean, voters did gamble on her.
I hate her. She has the worst initials.
Also, she’s generally a bad person, but that’s irrelevant.
I never got into trading cards or tabletop gaming. My college roommate, on the other hand, when running out of disposable cash, would traipse down to the WotC on The Ave with his Warhammer figurines and enter competitions. He was no longer short on money afterward.
(apologies to the rest of Beehaw for going Seattle-specific)
That’s not really true, in Japan claw machines use the same variable strength bullshit that happens in the US. They are explicitly classified as gambling under Japanese law.