But you can’t exchange loot box rewards for money.

You can.

Steam has a market place for items that result from opening lootboxes.

Thats… the entire CS2 gun skin market.

You can sell those for actual money, that money is now in your Steam Wallet, and you can now say, buy a game with it.

I’ve done this a few times, selling off a bunch of random crap items I forgot I had, from a game I don’t play anymore.

Then go buy a $10 - $20 game with it.

Hell I think I very partially bought my Steam Deck using similarly generated funds, paid roughly for the sales tax or whatever.

Beyond that, the actual lawsuit has whole sections dedicated to showing that Valve knows people buy/sell/trade these kinds of things on third party platforms, and they have very inconsistent policing of this.

I don’t know enough about the law specifically to know if that in and of itself is some kind of actual crime, but it certainly doesn’t look good that in a fair number of instances, Valve knows real money is changing hands for these items, and chooses to do nothing.

Hell, going further with all this:

I once knew a guy on a the dev team for a game that had been approved for Steam Marketplace items.

If him and a buddy wanted to try some new game?

He’d look at the Steam Market to see what of his game’s in game items were very rare and thus highly priced.

Then, being the dev, he’d poof some of those items into existance.

Post em up for sale on the market and hey in 30 minutes, now he’s got the Steam Wallet money to buy a game.

tl:dr: you very much can exchange the lootbox results for money, even technically literally physical tangible goods.

To be frank, lootboxes are gambling, and Steam is a functional monopoly.

(Note that being a functional monopoly and being an exploitative monopoly are not the same thing, though it does get complicated when you consider all the laws of all the countries in the world)

I think this particular lawsuit is legitimate and should proceed.

But!

The other part of that is that Valve is basically the only major player in the gaming space that isn’t currently completely imploding or massively downsizing or dissapointing investors or having to get bought out by foreign royal families.

So, they all really hate that Valve can ‘do nothing’, and continue to win.

Valve doesn’t have a board of investors… they’re a private company, that’s their secret sauce… and… all the other publically traded gaming companies?

You got a whole bunch of people who sit on multiple boards, of multiple different companies in the space, at the same time, and/or just cycle through actually working for one of them in an executive position and bounce around from one company to another, every roughly half decade.

They either know each other or literally are the same people, and functionally constitute a big club, that Valve isn’t part of.

So, those people can work together, literally conspire, to pull various levers in various game industry lobby groups, and talk to other people to convince them they should really go after their shared, common competitor.

Corporate tactics.

Losses from legal outcomes are literally a cost of doing business: These people factor that in to the moves they make.

They do not ‘play fair’. If they did, they wouldn’t be on these boards.

Ironically… you can describe and model this kind of behavior, tactics and strategy… with game theory.

Is the Wendy’s account still around for people to like, offer her a cigarette, tell her she looks like she needs one?

Reply hazy, try again.

(eventually something will catch)

If you steppy on snek, its just ‘what the heck?’

If you hug a nope rope, you’re probly dead, dope.

If you kiss a danger noodle, you’ll need a whole kit and kaboodle.

(in the spirit of the milk vs coral snake sayings)

Ah, I love them!

Good work!

Huzzah!

Probst! … … ?

Is… does it make sense to say ‘Probst’ outside of a drinking context?

… its been a long time since I’ve gone drinking with Germans, lol.

… Can we get a Blorb with an Orb, pondering?

According to my ss-ss-sources, the preferred nomenclature is ‘danger noodle’.

Good lord the blorb.

What a well fed pigeon.

Man, I dunno if you’ve heard,

BUT THE BIRD IS THE WORD

BA BA BA BA BA BA OOH MAH MOW MOW

OOH MOW MAH MOW

WELL DON’T YOU KNOW, ABOUT THE BIRD

WELL EVERYBODY KNOWS THAT THE BIRD IS THE WORD

Oh dear.

Yes, that is what I meant, but … I now realize I should have specified that.

Yes, you don’t need to mainline the coconut water for it to be good for you lol!

Ahem, well lets hope it wouldn’t end up petrifying you. =P

I did not realize one could be allergic to coconut, but yes probably avoid that then lol!

It… probably would not ‘burn’ with the same intensity, as its less acidic than lime.

But… being allergic to it… and then mainlining it… seems like a bad idea that would probably also hurt.

:0

No man, you gotta upgrade to Big Gulp based logistics.

… Lime juice through an IV is probably going to be extremely painful to endure, and could just kill you.

For starters: “My blood is on fire” is roughly what that would feel like, lime juice is extremely acidic.

Beyond that: It isn’t sterile.

So you’re literally mainlining bacterial infections.

Extremely bad idea, its such a bad idea that it would basically constitute a horrific form of torture/execution.

This also works for hangover recovery.

Coconut water is awesome!

… The… Pacific theatre?

Whole bunch of tropical islands?

Huh!

Well TIL, thank you!

Oh you’re right!

I thought it might have been the main connection between the guitar and the amp… that would have a lot more current in it, potentially, right?

I keep forgetting that I actually need to use the glasses that I now have, lol.

… Wouldn’t there be enough electrical power in this that you might wanna cover that in electrical tape?

I’ve not jerry rigged an amp before, but I did once build a ramshackle ‘home media pc’ for some roommates once, out of old spare pc parts i had lying around, using the box their xbox360 came in as a ‘case’.

Got a paperclip with some rubberized covering, snipped a bit off the two ends, and then you had to short the right two pins on the … whatever the socket is that would normally go to the front io panel is, you had to do that to turn it on lol.