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.”
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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.
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
How so?
Claw machines are gambling
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.
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.
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?
Where’s 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 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.
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?
Booster packs in card games like Pokemon and MTG are gambling. They contain random cards with published, known odds. The cards are worth monetary value. The consensus across the board for these games in their communities is that the packs are gambling, and it is pretty much always better to buy single cards from a third party if you need specific cards.
So are they arguing it should be “legal gambling” here? Because I’d argue the opposite - booster packs are also illegal gambling.
One argument is that gambling requires the chance of a loss - you go to a casino, make a wager, buy a lottery ticket, bet on a horse race, you can lose your money and end up with nothing.
But buy a Labubu, a Lego minifigure blind bag, MtG booster, or a video game lootbox, and while you don’t know exactly what, you will always get something in return for your money.
Then again, “taking a gamble” is a term used for many things, like when you buy a used car without extensively checking the condition first, because you don’t know what exactly you are getting…
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Edit: Hey everyone, you can disregard the above comment by TehPers, because they clarified that they actually aren’t claiming booster packs are illegal:
If you are only arguing about what is or isn’t legal, then you’re wasting your time. I’m not a lawyer, nor in a position to rule on laws. I don’t know if something gave you the impression otherwise.
;P
Thank you for clarifying to all of us that you do not comment in good faith. It makes it much easier for me to know which people to block.
me to know which people to block
Frankly, I don’t mind. I don’t love being accused of posting in bad faith and berated just because you forgot what you originally posted. Cheers.
Flagging @TehPers@beehaw.org on this response, as it applies to both of you. You’re reasonable, longtime, constructive members on Beehaw. Maybe someone’s having a bad day, but it saddens me to see the two of you going at each other. I don’t feel there’s a rift here, just disagreement over wording.
This said, we’re all adults. I’m just more confused than anything, and I’m sure as fuck not going to take a side. This interaction wasn’t Beeing nice.
Seeing as I can’t see the thread anymore for previously mentioned reasons (yet oddly I can reply to you because you pinged me), I’m not sure which mod currently holds the reins over this community, but feel free to just delete the whole thread.
There’s a discussion in another post that is almost certainly related to this one. I alluded to it when I came to that conclusion, which might have confused you.
US law does not view TCGs as gambling, but by the colloquial definition, it is gambling. You say there’s no wager on an outcome. The wager is the price you spend on a pack, and the outcome is the resale value of the contents of the pack.
As for the case against Valve in particular, I make no claims as to what they should or shouldn’t argue in the case. I am not a lawyer. I can’t imagine most people in this instance are either.
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By this definition, buying anything is a wager.
Mostly correct. Buying anything which retains value after the purchase is a wager. This includes shares in a company, collectible items, even a shipping crate of RAM.
You’re not betting on a specific outcome in that definition, which is the “gamble” part of “gambling”.
In the case of TCGs, the bet is that the value of the cards contained in the pack exceed the money spent on the pack. This is very common. And within TCG communities, there is a common understanding that this is gambling.
That’s of course not to say that all purchases of a booster pack are with the intent to gamble. I’ve also played poker and blackjack for fun, and those games are full of wagers, bets, and outcomes. But the bar has never been that all possible reasons to do something are to gamble, just that gambling is a common motivation to do it.
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And yet are not “gambling” as the colloquial understanding of the regulated activity stand, nor certainly things that people want to be covered under gambling regulations.
I didn’t say they were gambling, though trading shares is often associated with gambling. But in all of those examples, you receive something with value that changes in a way that is impossible to accurately predict.
And since this is about what should fall under the regulated activity, doubly-irrelevant.
And here you’re changing the topic to suit your needs. I replied to a comment discussing the definition of the word “wager”. As I’ve told you not long ago today, I don’t care much about the semantics of specific words. I’ll engage in the discussion though.
And since this definition is irrelevant to the regulated activity, it’s irrelevant to TCGs or loot boxes if you are pushing for those to be considered regulated gambling.
What? I’d like to remind you that you responded to me and solo’d out TCG boosters. In my response, I said very clearly that I am not a lawyer, nor do I make any claims as to what they should say in their case.
If you are only arguing about what is or isn’t legal, then you’re wasting your time. I’m not a lawyer, nor in a position to rule on laws. I don’t know if something gave you the impression otherwise.
If you’re arguing about what should or shouldn’t be legal, then it’s not an unpopular opinion that TCG booster packs should be regulated to some extent.
Anyway, I’m disengaging. As you mentioned before, we assume good faith here. That is my initial assumption, so I engaged with the discussion. At this point, I believe you are arguing for the sake of arguing.
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Labubus are basically gambling for kids. I’m not sure they’re sending the message they want to be, here.
I don’t think they care if it’s gambling or not.
They are trying to make the point that they shouldn’t be targetted if other obvious known sources of illegal gambling are being actively ignored.
Either they need to go after everyone or no one. Since going after everyone is probably unlikely, targeting Valve for it would be unfair and may be dismissed.
WRT the US, the entire reason Labubus are not legally considered gambling is because there is no wager on the outcome of them. You pay the same amount each time (not wagering based on desired outcomes), and you always get something back. The question of whether a certain level of outcome-value randomization should instead be used as the litmus test for gambling is not one that has been asked or answered legally.
The specific state-by-state definitions of gambling in the US vary, of course, but generally it consists of a wager on a specific outcome of a contest or chance event, under an agreement to receive some value in exchange based on the result.
Changing to a definition where any payment + any random chance of loot = gambling, would open up a lot of very interesting possibilities, like potentially applying to any randomized loot in a video game (unless you start making specific carve-outs). It’s important to remember that gambling’s definition doesn’t only apply to legal gambling, but also illegal gambling, so grey-market resales of game accounts would have to be factored into the consideration of anything in-game’s value (i.e. you can’t avoid “random loot in a game” being gambling in that case by saying the game can’t be legally traded for the item value, because regardless, game accounts can be traded).
In more concrete terms, if I can buy Diablo 2 (pay fixed cost), get a really good item drop (random chance value outcome), and sell my Steam account to someone who wants that item (money in, money out), why would that be different than that same flow with a loot box?
I’ve of course heard of Labubus, but do you not pick one to purchase? Like, are people literally paying without knowing what they’ll get?
I can’t imagine going to HEB and buying a random box that contains “some kind of food.”
Yes, they’re exactly that; plush doll random chance boxes. It’s funny because gachapons have actually been in the US and Europe for 50+ years, but no one ever really thought of them like this because the toys inside never had real value.
Remember these outside of supermarkets?
