A good few years ago now, I watched as my two cousins, Steam voucher in hand (and he didn't even have a gaming PC btw), faffed about with one of those sites promoted by shady Youtubers.

Codes went in. Buttons were pressed. Glances were exchanged.

"Now what?" asked the younger one who's Steam voucher it was.

"Oh nothing," said the older one. "You lost."

I think it was only teenage emoism that stopped him bursting into tears right there.

He's an accountant now, so I assume he learned an important lesson about gambling that day.

Finally someone standing upto Valve for the right reasons.

Interesting how this just happens after Valve wins against the Rothschilds in court, despite the lootboxes being available for the past 10 or so years in Counter Strike and Team Fortress 2.

They're not wrong, it is gambling.

country finally starts cracking down on gambling

oh no wait nevermind they just want to sue a videogame company

KELSHI LITERALLY HAS SUPER BOWL ADS. WHAT DO YOU MEAN GOOD SIR.

People never cease to amaze me.

Finally a lawsuit against valve I can support.

This is coming in so late that it basically seems to be more of a move for someone to run their political career off of. There are so many worse offenders now, while Steam was basically one of the least gregarious ones. Unfortunately for Steam, it is a corrupt market nowadays, and it's always going to be the least corrupt, private entities who get singled out. You can specially tell its political when it's flying under the "protect the children" flag, gambling in general has gotten out of hand and needs to be toned down, for all ages. Going after one company isn't going to fix this, it needs to be legislation wide.

Good, gambling needs to be cracked down its getting way to bad.

Good

In this thread: a complete lack of moral clarity as gamers simp for one of the most profitable companies in the industry. Valve was a pioneer of loot boxes. When they got in trouble for CS:GO skin gambling, they did the minimum to make it look like they didn't allow it and allowed it to make an easy comeback. They sit back and make 30% off the sale of every game on the platform. People should be saying that Valve is very bad and Epic is even worse. Instead gamers feel this strange need to pick sides with a giant company that controls almost all PC gaming. No, we can easily say they're all bad.

On the one hand, good. Valve needs to be held responsible for this.

On the other hand, steam has the best parental controls of any platform I've ever seen. You can just not let your kid play those games. Parents should take responsibility for their kids. Games already have ratings and warnings and such.

On the third hand, I forsee this as being yet another means of forcing ID checks and face scanning into the platform. I don't trust our government not to fuck this up in the worst way possible right now.

Gotta love how they just randomly threw in that long-disproved little tidbit about violent videogames making kids into psychopaths. Way to discredit your whole stance.

I quit playing games with loot boxes. Having said that my experience and valve with loot boxes were they were cosmetic only. I may be wrong about that.