Valve responds to New York Attorney General's lawsuit alleging lootboxes are gambling

Valve is being sued by New York Attorney General Leticia James on allegations that in-game lootboxes break the state's gambling laws. Now the company has issued a lengthy response letter that presses back against the AG's allegations.

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The NY Attorney General's lawsuit against Valve, whose press release loudly proclaims "Attorney General James Sues Game Developer for Promoting Illegal Gambling Through Video Games," seemed to come out of left field and caught the gaming world off guard.

It's been weeks since New York made the lawsuit public, and Valve has now published a statement refuting some of the claims and providing interesting context on the interactions that preceded the legal complaint.

In the statement, Valve says that it was first contacted by the New York Attorney General's offices about lootboxes in 2023, and that Valve complied with all the AG's requests.

"We were disappointed to see the NYAG make that claim that after working to educate them about our virtual items and mystery boxes since they first reached out to us in early 2023.

"We shared with the NYAG that these types of boxes in our games are widely used, not just in video games but in the tangible world as well, where generations have grown up opening baseball card packs and blind boxes and bags, and then trading and selling the items they receive."

Not surprisingly, though, the vast majority of players who jump into Valve games like Counter-Strike don't actually buy any skins or lootboxes at all. Most people just actually play the game and don't spend extra money.

"Players don't have to open mystery boxes to play Valve games. In fact, most of you don't open any boxes at all and just play the games."

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Valve says that it has fought back against skin gambling sites, as well as the account fraud and theft often associated with these sites.

"Valve does not cooperate with gambling sites. To date we've locked over one million Steam accounts that were being misused by third parties in connection with gambling, fraud, and theft."

The Steam operator also says that it outright refuses to change some of its policies, especially the policy around being able to trade and transfer digital items.

"Transferability is a right we believe should not be taken away, and we refuse to do that," Valve said.

In perhaps the most surprising part of the message is the revelation that the New York Attorney General's office allegedly floated the idea of adding invasive tracking to help authenticate user data from New York residents.

Valve says that this would have forced them to add in "invasive technologies for every user worldwide," essentially meaning that all Steam users would have to be exposed to some kind of tracking technology.

The company is prepared to defend itself in court, and is willing to comply with all laws, should New York pass new legislation making mystery boxes illegal.

"We respect New York's right to determine the laws governing behavior in the state. We will 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."