Valve has moved to dismiss the New York Attorney General’s lawsuit against the company, which claims loot boxes in its games such as Counter-Strike 2 promote illegal gambling and threaten to addict children.
There is no evidence I have seen that Valve supports 3rd party market places, and like I said the steam user agreement explicitly forbids them. There is nothing illegal about their own market place because you are paid in steam wallet funds and steam wallet funds cannot be exchanged for real world money. This case is going to flop, valve will win this one.
Valve then allows the contents of loot boxes to be traded for platform currency.
Unfortunately that platform currency has a real monetary value because it can be traded for real monetary goods because you can use it to buy a steam deck of other valve hardware.
It is this direct chain of events that make this illegal gambling because this is not something you can do with baseball cards or Pokemon cards.
three core elements common to all gambling laws: (1) consideration, (2) chance, and (3) prize. So long as one of these three elements is not met, a loot box system is not “gambling”. The “chance” element is inevitably met in any form of loot boxes, but the “consideration” element can arguably be avoided by making loot boxes acquirable only by exchanging virtual currency that itself arguably has no “value”, and the “prize” element can arguably be avoided by making the loot box drops account-locked. Where the loot box drop cannot be transferred, sold, or “cashed out”, there is arguably no “prize” no matter how rare the drop is or how useful it is for in-game purposes.[1]
There is no evidence I have seen that Valve supports 3rd party market places, and like I said the steam user agreement explicitly forbids them. There is nothing illegal about their own market place because you are paid in steam wallet funds and steam wallet funds cannot be exchanged for real world money. This case is going to flop, valve will win this one.
Valve makes you buy a key to open the loot boxes.
Valve then allows the contents of loot boxes to be traded for platform currency.
Unfortunately that platform currency has a real monetary value because it can be traded for real monetary goods because you can use it to buy a steam deck of other valve hardware.
It is this direct chain of events that make this illegal gambling because this is not something you can do with baseball cards or Pokemon cards.