Valve responds to New York AG's "illegal gambling" lawsuit: "disappointed to see the NYAG make that claim"

Today Valve have made their first public comment regarding the recent lawsuit filed by the New York Attorney General's office via a blog post released on Steam. In the post Valve disputes claims made by NY AG Letitia James that Counter-Strike 2 and Valve's other titles promote "illegal gambling through video games" arguing that cases and other collective items are not an integral or negative part of the game experience.

Valve's statement focused on their efforts to "educate [the New York AG's office] about [their] virtual items and mystery boxes", their similarities to tangible collectibles, and the company's effort to stamp down on bad actors and gambling sites using their items:

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. 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. 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—because the items in the boxes are purely cosmetic, there is no disadvantage to a player not spending money.

In the process of cooperating with the NYAG’s investigation, we shared with them our efforts over many years to shut down accounts found to be using Valve game items on gambling sites in violation of the Steam Subscriber Agreement. We also shared with them our efforts to combat fraud and theft of users’ items and our extraordinary measures to stop gambling sites from taking advantage of Steam accounts and Valve game items. 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. We’ve also shipped features (like trade reversal and trade cooldown) to discourage gambling sites’ ability to operate and protect Steam users from fraud. And we forbid any gambling-related business to participate in or sponsor tournaments for our games.

The company also raised numerous concerns about the impact of the NYAG's demands removing the ability for users to trade items, and privacy concerns over handing over mass amounts of user data to the NYAG's office:

The NYAG also proposed to gather additional information (beyond what we normally collect in the course of processing payments) about each game user on the off-chance someone in New York was anonymizing their location to appear outside of New York, such as by using a VPN. This would have involved implementing invasive technologies for every user worldwide. Similarly, the NYAG demanded that Valve collect more personal data about our users to do additional age verification—even though most payment methods used by New York Steam users already have age verification built-in. Valve knows our users care about the security of their personal information, and we believe it’s in our and their interest to only collect the information necessary to operate the business and comply with law.

In closing Valve said they do not plan on settling the suite or backing down, "ultimately, a court will decide whose position—ours or NYAG's—is correct. In the meantime, we wanted to make sure you were aware of the potential impact to users in New York and elsewhere."

You can read Valve's full statement here.