This explains quite a lot. I’ve only ever played a couple of games that have loot boxes (Destiny and Overwatch and like Battlefield) and you don’t pay to open those.

I think I was missing that key detail which is you’re paying to open the loot boxes and that’s the “wager”.

If the loot boxes were free to collect and open then they wouldn’t have a starting value.

After that, assigning a value based on rarity for resale of the items would be on the players, not on Valve.

But now I agree that that is problematic even if I don’t agree with the way the NYAG is going about trying to fix it.

I especially object to the save the children angle as none of the games are rated E or even rated for children.

Someone else in the thread brought up how kids can get around this with a gift card, but I question why they’d need a gift card to buy free games. Sounds to me like that’s a case of parents not doing parenting.

Even if you used the gift card to pay to open the loot boxes, that seems like a problem with the parents too. I don’t know why it’s any more acceptable to sue Valve over this than it is to legislate who can buy gift cards. Like technically the parents own the gift card in the same way we don’t let kids have legal ownership of anything else.

A literally solution would be preventing the purchase of gift cards by minors or preventing gift cards from being used to buy anything not rated for everyone. Or not rated for kids.

I’ll put it another way, kids aren’t allowed to buy x-rated content. But you absolutely can use a gift card to purchase x-rated media from x-rated sites. It’s one of the things being proposed by several people in the wake of age verification stuff. So by the same logic a child could do that.