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2 words: Digital ID
This is what this is about. What ALL the law suits are about, these are just straws they are grabbing at to make it look like something different. Check out OhNoItsAlex on YT, he has great breakdowns. My post about this yesterday preceded his video about it, his video is way more detailed.
I'm going to get downvoted but honestly I'm not 100% against some form of digital ID. I don't think these half baked, unthought through state laws and patchwork state systems are anyway way to go about it though and they certainly do not have enough safeguards in their laws to limit surveillance which I'm sure there are those who crafted the laws to intentionally leave that out and they certainly didn't have any inkling of cybersecurity in mind when they proposed these laws.
I mean we in the modern age already have a crap ton of digital ID's flying around using our NFC enabled devices and 2FA systems commercially and we mostly don't blink a single eye on these systems and generally regard them as a safer alternative now. And let's not pretend that these corporations aren't tracking the living heck out of us already with this.
I'm a bit of a privacy advocate/cypherpunk and I agree with you.
The problem is companies should never need know this information except what is absolutely necessary for business. Like if they ship you something, they need to know your name and address (and that could even go away with Japan's model where you just give a code and the post office only knows your address, but I digress).
Another thing is that age verification technologies already exist in such a way that the government doesn't know what you're accessing, and the company only knows you're above 18 and nothing else. These are called Zero Knowledge Proofs.
But since the technology exists, the government isn't utilising it, and instead doing some moral panic "Think of the children!!!1" and setting up mass surveillance and data harvesting, I watch what they do, not what they say.
You're right, you will definitely get downvoted with that opinion. The corpos sucking up data to track and advertise and whatever else is annoying, and i don't want to make it even easier for them. And i definitely don't want to help my shitass government round up undesirables any easier than they already can (including from those corpos...). There are no positives that i care about from an actual digital id. Privacy is harder and harder to come by everywhere in life, i don't want to give an ID to use discord, steam, lemmy, or anything else.
I'm not trying to defend Valve here. But NY winning this sounds absolutely awful. There is no good reason for them to want Valve to be collecting so much more identifying user info and only bad things will come from that.
Don't do loot boxes then.
As for more user info, that I can agree with up to a point and I certainly don't trust a corporation, even Valve to do the correct thing and protect additional PII.
Nah, fuck the AG for tying these 2 issues together. They don't give a fuck about gambling, they just see a huge marketplace ripe for online ID and are snaking their way into it if they can.
As a NYer, I'm pretty pissed at the AG when a few months ago I was pretty happy with her. Between this, and their insane plan to force our PCs to implement age verification; Leticia James is intoxicated on the smell of her own farts.
The games aren't marketed at children and I'm sorry but even though now that I understand the scope of how the loot boxes in these games work, I don't think it's really a good idea to lable this child gambling. If a kid is playing a game rated M, that's not the fault of the company who sold it, it's the fault of the parents who didn't supervise their kids.
This is absolutely just a push for ID verification and the "think of the children" slant it's using is disingenuous.
I want loot boxes to be outlawed (if they can be redeemed for monetary value), but this is just straight up authoritarian and extremely invasive.
On the physical side, popular products used in this way include baseball cards, Pokemon, Magic the Gathering, and Labubu. In the game space, digital packs similar to our boxes date back to 2004 and are in widespread use.
I think that video game loot boxes are very much different when you're hiring psychologist to maximize fomo and extra currency to make kids spend more with 100 gems short of your next purchase.
But if they want we can outlaw baseball cards and Pokemon too. I'm good with that.
I mean, it's not different. Pokemon and MtG also have departments to try to entice users with fomo. It's what marketing is. It's why they have limited runs, promotional crossovers, etc. Valve is just more open about the process.
If anyone wants a recent decent video on how MTG has been using FOMO tactics with their direct-sale products, see here.
Valid point. Still I think that there's a notable difference between the physical vs digital aspects though that makes digital much worse.
There's seems to be more effort involved with cards because they're physical, more ritual maybe of going to the store to pick up a pack of cards or having to wait for the delivery giving it that cool down time vs digital where access is instant gratification and gambling dopamine hit.
Another thing I've noticed is that those companies that have tried physical loot boxes haven't faired well either and haven't taken off like their digital counterparts. Maybe it's that mix of seeing physical items vs value and waiting for the next hit kind of dampens the gambling addition effect.
And then there's the whole money into currency with the whole 1000 gems for 99 bucks to buy a 950 gem item psychological predation that you don't have in physical collectibles, at least not that I'm aware of.
I guess overall I find the digital loot box just on another level of predatory, exploitation of addiction much worse than physical collectibles.
But hey I'm all for regulating physical items for gambling too. It would be interesting to see a actual study on them like they've done with loot boxes.
Valve is closer to physical because they have a market place. In a way it's more fair then any other game. (They still control the marketplace so it's not as fair as physical). Also as a slight defense to digital, at least we're not manufacturing and shipping more plastic waste for landfills just so people can get their gambling kick.
I mean ethically we might just wanna regulate them, not outlaw them. Just like all the rules regarding online poker before the trumpet entered the picture.
extra currency to make kids spend more with 100 gems short of your next purchase.
Valve doesn't do that in their games though?
Valve I think are the most "ethical" implementations of loot boxes that just straight up charges cash.
I'd just change a few things, as I've enjoyed games with collectibles since very young because of how cheap they were and how they pushed me to broaden my social circles to trade my spares. So I'd be fine if instead of having a market for them we just traded those with friends on Steam.
Valve should just go nuclear and disable access to Steam for all NYers. That will get them to care about who they vote for real damn quick.