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It'll be up to a court to decide whether there's merit to the New York attorney general's lawsuit against Valve, which claims that loot boxes are, essentially, gambling. But Valve is already attempting to win the battle in the court of public opinion. In a new statement addressed to fans of games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 in New York, the company says it has "serious concerns" about the demands expressed by NYAG Letitia James and her office.
Valve, naturally, does not believe that its "mystery boxes" violate New York gambling laws. The company says in its statement that it was "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. We rarely talk about litigation, but we felt we should explain the situation to you."
The company offers the same argument in favor of loot boxes that other publishers have used in the past: that they're essentially the same as "baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Labubu." The company also says it's shown the NYAG office its efforts to combat fraud, theft of virtual items, and the relisting of game items on gambling sites "in violation of the Steam Subscriber Agreement."
"We have serious concerns with many of the alterations the NYAG claims are necessary to make to our games," Valve adds. "First, the NYAG seems to believe boxes and their contents should not be transferable," meaning you shouldn't be able to sell or transfer your digital items, which you can currently do through user-to-user trades or the community market.
"The NYAG also proposed," Valve claims, "to gather additional information (beyond what we normally collect in the course of processing payments) about each game user on the off-chance someone in New York was anonymizing their location to appear outside of New York, such as by using a VPN. This would have involved implementing invasive technologies for every user worldwide."
Valve also claims the NYAG "demanded" that the company "collect more personal data about our users to do additional age verification." That's exactly the sort of privacy incursion that's gotten people so mad at Discord recently, and Valve is keen for the brownie points in pushing against that. The company says it "knows our users care about the security of their personal information, and we believe it’s in our and their interest to only collect the information necessary to operate the business and comply with law."
Valve's arguments in players' favor might ring hollow in the ears of some, since the company didn't offer much public fight against pressure from banks and credit card companies when it started axing adult Steam games.
Valve says it would "of course comply if the New York legislature passes laws governing mystery boxes – something it has not done despite considering the issue a few times," since that would be that kind of law "would be the result of a public process, presumably with input from the industry and New York gamers." For now, though, it does intend to fight the NYAG's lawsuit.
"The type of commitments the NYAG demanded from Valve went far beyond what existing New York law requires and even beyond New York itself," the company says. "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."
This is all unrelated to the recent class-action complaint against Valve's loot boxes.
