New York Sues Valve For Enabling 'Illegal Gambling' With Loot Boxes

Source: Slashdot

Lawsuit Overview

New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter‑Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users “pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value.” Read the full report.

The suit notes that while many randomized video‑game loot boxes have drawn attention and regulation from various government bodies in recent years, the New York action calls out Valve’s system specifically for “enabl[ing] users to sell the virtual items they have won, either through its own virtual marketplace, the Steam Community Market, or through third‑party marketplaces.”

According to the complaint:

• The vast majority of Valve’s in‑game loot boxes contain skins that can only be resold for a few cents.
• The rarest skins can be worth thousands of dollars on marketplaces both on and off Steam.

This, the suit argues, fits the statutory definition of gambling as “charging an individual for a chance to win something of value based on luck alone.”

The Steam Wallet funds that users obtain by directly reselling skins “have the equivalent purchasing power on the Steam platform as cash.” However, if a user wishes to convert those Steam funds to real cash, they can do so relatively easily—for example, by purchasing a Steam Deck and reselling it to any interested party, as an investigator demonstrated while preparing the lawsuit.