IT House reported on March 12 that last month, Valve was sued by the New York State Attorney General’s Office for continuing to use paid box opening and item trading systems in games such as “Counter-Strike 2” and “DOTA 2”. Today, the company that operates the Steam platform and develops "Half-Life" issued a long statement on the Steam support website in response to the lawsuit, defending its unboxing mechanism and comparing it to real-life products such as baseball cards and Pokémon cards.
IT House noted that Valve said in a statement to New York players: "This type of unboxing mechanism in our games is widely used, not only in video games, but also in the real world. Generations of people have grown up opening baseball card packs, blind boxes, and blind bags, and then trading and reselling the items. In reality, such popular products include baseball cards, Pokémon cards, Magic cards, and Labboobs, etc."
Valve also explained that players can play the game normally without paying to unbox it, because all unboxing items are cosmetic items. Notably, Valve says its data shows that "most" players don't open any boxes at all and just play the game normally. The company says this means players who don't pay won't be at any disadvantage.
In a lawsuit filed in February, the New York State Attorney General claimed that Valve "condoned gambling" through its popular online games and digital store Steam, accusing it of violating New York State's anti-gambling laws, and requested a permanent ban on Valve from promoting gambling-related features in games and forcing the company to pay various fines for violating New York State laws.
Valve said in a statement that it cooperated with the investigation by the New York State Attorney General's Office and showed them "how we have banned accounts for years on gambling sites that violate the Steam User Agreement by illegally using Valve game items." Gambling sites have been a major problem for Valve and were directly named in the New York state lawsuit.
Valve said: "Valve will never cooperate with gambling websites. So far, we have banned more than 1 million Steam accounts that have been abused by third parties and involved in gambling, fraud and theft. We have also launched functions such as transaction withdrawal and transaction cooling to curb the operation of gambling websites and protect Steam users from fraud. At the same time, we prohibit any gambling-related institutions from participating in or sponsoring our game events."
Elsewhere in the statement, it was mentioned that Valve is "deeply concerned" about some of the changes the New York State Attorney General's Office wants to make to Steam's mechanics, and is particularly strongly opposed to banning users from trading and reselling digital cosmetic items obtained from loot boxes.
"We believe that the transferability of digital game items is beneficial to consumers – users can sell or exchange unused and unwanted items, just like people can resell or exchange physical items such as Pokémon cards and baseball cards," Valve said. "The New York State Attorney General proposed to deprive users of the right to transfer digital items in Valve games. We believe that transferability is a right that should not be deprived, and we refuse to do so."
While this stance appears to be on the side of users, the fact that Valve itself does not allow users to resell or trade their purchased digital games on Steam weakens the persuasiveness of its rhetoric. If transferability is a right, shouldn't it apply to all digital items on Steam, not just loot boxes and keys?
Finally, Valve responded to the New York State Attorney General's Office's statement regarding "Video Games and Gun Violence" in a press release regarding the lawsuit. The office said in a press release that Valve "promotes games that promote violence and guns" and is one of the reasons for "the epidemic of gun violence" in the United States.
Valve reasonably refuted this claim in an open letter to New York gamers: "Furthermore, while the core of this case is the issue of blind box unboxing, we feel it is necessary to respond to the remarks made by the Attorney General's Office regarding games, real-life violence, and minors. These irrelevant remarks are purely a red herring and a mischaracterization we have heard before. Numerous studies over the years have confirmed that there is no correlation between media content (movies, TV, books, comics, music, games) and real-life violence. In fact, multiple studies have also pointed to the positive effects of games on users."
Although many people agree that Valve has failed to control skin trading and gambling over the years, the Attorney General's inclusion of this statement in the press release also caused many netizens to turn against the lawsuit.
