But you can buy products and then sell yhose if you wanted to for legal tender.
In league of legends, I can get random essence from the chests. If I get enough of those, I can buy stuff from the store I could also buy for real money.
The only difference with valve is that they just show the outright amount instead of hiding it behind vbucks or some other fictional currency.
you could sell enough skins to buy Valve’s products, including hardware such as the Steam Deck and their VR headset
Yes, but to me, this is even an upside. Playing CS:GO for years and being able to sell all the skins you collected and converting them into enough money for a steamdeck seems to be a great deal and awesome functionality. If I stop league of legends, all the skins I earned in the game are basically lost.
Is your critique solely because of loot boxes or something else? Because I feel we mess up two topics: Lootboxes being immoral (something I would agree with, but with much worse offenders) and third-party sites offering an illegal casino on valves platform. I just don’t see valve responsible for that but rather the third party sites.
Its not just software that you can buy as in the case of LoL and essence. You can also buy highly expensive hardware produced by Valve itself which you can either keep or sell irl just like you would sll your phone or laptop. I.e. there are accessible ways to convert into irl value. I’m not intimately familiar with LoL, but can you convert essence into a VR headset or something similar? Afaik, the answer is “no”.
It might be something you personally like but that’s not the issue. The issue is whether the system is similar enough to gambling to warrant similar regulation. And there are a lot of arguments in favour of regulation. Understandby, this is relatively low on lawmakers’ priorities. However, some EU countries have already moved in that direction, ouright banning games with gambling systems if they fail to uphold laws.
In league of legends, I can get random essence from the chests. If I get enough of those, I can buy stuff from the store I could also buy for real money.
The only difference with valve is that they just show the outright amount instead of hiding it behind vbucks or some other fictional currency.
Yes, but to me, this is even an upside. Playing CS:GO for years and being able to sell all the skins you collected and converting them into enough money for a steamdeck seems to be a great deal and awesome functionality. If I stop league of legends, all the skins I earned in the game are basically lost.
Is your critique solely because of loot boxes or something else? Because I feel we mess up two topics: Lootboxes being immoral (something I would agree with, but with much worse offenders) and third-party sites offering an illegal casino on valves platform. I just don’t see valve responsible for that but rather the third party sites.
I think I didn’t explain it well enough.
Its not just software that you can buy as in the case of LoL and essence. You can also buy highly expensive hardware produced by Valve itself which you can either keep or sell irl just like you would sll your phone or laptop. I.e. there are accessible ways to convert into irl value. I’m not intimately familiar with LoL, but can you convert essence into a VR headset or something similar? Afaik, the answer is “no”.
It might be something you personally like but that’s not the issue. The issue is whether the system is similar enough to gambling to warrant similar regulation. And there are a lot of arguments in favour of regulation. Understandby, this is relatively low on lawmakers’ priorities. However, some EU countries have already moved in that direction, ouright banning games with gambling systems if they fail to uphold laws.
So counter strike was not gambling before they started to sell hardware?