In February of this year, New York Attorney General (NYAG) Letitia James sued Valve over the loot boxes present in games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2. In a report from Reuters, James said that the mystery boxes were “promoting illegal gambling and threatening to addict children” and referred to them as “quintessential gambling” in violation of New York gambling laws.
Today, Valve posted a statement on steampowered.com sharing its thoughts on the lawsuit. The blog post was not attributed to anyone specific, but in it Valve writes about mystery boxes being perceived as gambling. “We don’t believe that they do, and were disappointed to see the NYAG make that claim after working to educate them about our virtual items and mystery boxes since they first reached out to us in early 2023,” the blog reads. “We rarely talk about litigation, but we felt we should explain the situation to you.”
In the post Valves equates its mystery boxes to playing cards citing Pokémon, Magic: The Gathering, baseball cards, and Labubu as equivalent products. It also highlighted its efforts to shut down gambling sites taking advantage of Valve items writing that it has shut down more than one-million Steam accounts that attempted to engage with gambling activity.
Valve writes that the NYAG wants to eliminate the ability to share and transfer digital items and demands that more personal data be collected to aid in age verification. “We believe it’s in our and [Steam users’] interest to only collect the information necessary to operate the business and comply with law,” Valve writes, and continues saying, “It may have been easier and cheaper for Valve to make a deal with the NYAG, but we believed the type of deal that would satisfy the NYAG would have been bad for users and other game developers, and impacted our ability to innovate in game design.”
Valve also responded to NYAG comments made about video games as they relate to real-world violence. “Those extraneous comments are a distraction and a mischaracterization we’ve all heard before. Numerous studies throughout the years have concluded there is no link between media (movies, TV, books, comics, music, and games) and real world violence. Indeed, many studies highlight the beneficial impact of games to users.”
Valve wrote that it will comply by any laws New York legislature passes governing mystery boxes, but ended the post with, “Ultimately, a court will decide whose position—ours or NYAG’s—is correct. In the meantime, we wanted to make sure you were aware of the potential impact to users in New York and elsewhere.”
You can read Valve’s full statement here.
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