A U.S. federal court has dismissed the latest in a series of lawsuits against Valve, in which the plai.jpgs accused the creators of the Steam platform of running unregulated games of chance selling skins for characters and weapons in the online shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Some of the paid add-ons cost over $1,000.
In 2016, Forbes accused Valve of using virtual weapons to turn gamers into serious gamblers. The company was criticized by the Washington State Gambling Commission.
Valve managed to avoid liability due to the wording of the lawsuit, which accused the company of defrauding plai.jpgs who never used Steam.
The parents of the players went to court. They accused Valve of spending money on cases in CS:GO, and then placing bets on third-party gaming sites. The plai.jpgs emphasized that the company promoted gambling and misled the public about its own activities.
The court sided with Valve because of the terms of the agreement with the site, which provide for the resolution of legal problems with a Steam subscriber through arbitration. The plai.jpgs failed to prove the company's connection with third-party sites containing gambling games with game skins. One of the arbitrators concluded that minors learned about such pranks from friends, not from Steam.
The parents filed a lawsuit in the Court of Appeal, citing the fact that it was not they who confirmed the agreement with the platform, but their children. However, the plai.jpgs failed to substantiate the complaints.
After that, the parents accused Valve of disguising unlicensed gambling as video games by selling loot boxes and CS:GO keys to their children. The plai.jpgs' argument was the concealment of the risks of the game boxes and the opacity of the chances of winning. To this, the defendants objected that loot boxes do not fall under the concept of gambling in the United States.
Valve has taken a stand against gambling sites with skins for CS:GO. In 2016, the company demanded the closure of 20 such resources, which led to the cessation of some of them.
In October 2019, Valve banned internal operations with loot box keys in CS:GO on Steam to counter fraud on the site. Acquired keys began to be assigned to player profiles.
In February 2021, Valve lost a patent infringement case for the creation of the Steam Controller. The court acknowledged that the company used the button design on the back of the gamepad, which is patented by Ironburg Inventions and SCUF Gaming. The court ordered Valve to pay the plai.jpgs $4 million.
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