Valve says it will fight New York’s loot box lawsuit
Since 2023, Valve claims to have been working with AGs to explain how its virtual items and mystery boxes work. He claims that players “don’t need to open mystery boxes to play Valve games” and that most don’t do so “because the items in the boxes are purely cosmetic.” Valve plans to challenge James’ claims in court, but says it would comply if the state legislature passes regulations regarding loot boxes.
When the complaint was filed, James issued a press release saying that “Valve has made billions of dollars by tricking its users, many of whom are teenagers or young people, into gambling in hopes of winning expensive virtual items that they can cash in on,” citing game mechanics that resemble a slot machine and can award items worth up to $1 million.
The company, however, says it is “seriously concerned” about changes the lawsuit is pushing Valve to make, such as making boxes and digital items inside non-transferable. “We believe that the transferability of a digital game item is good for consumers: it gives a user the ability to sell or trade an old or unwanted item for something else, in the same way that an owner can sell or trade a tangible item like a Pokémon or baseball card,” Valve writes. “Portability is a right that we believe should not be taken away, and we refuse to do so. »
Other proposals he opposes include collecting additional information to determine whether a user in New York is using a virtual private network (VPN) to disguise their location and perform age verification, despite existing payment methods offering built-in age checks. “The type of commitments that the NYAG required of Valve went well beyond what is required by current New York law and even beyond New York itself,” Valve wrote. “It might have been easier and cheaper for Valve to make a deal with NYAG, but we believed the type of deal that would satisfy NYAG would have been bad for users and other game developers and would have impacted our ability to innovate in game design.”
