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Valve Can't Catch a Break: Two More Lawsuits Just Dropped
If you thought the legal heat surrounding Valve was already intense, brace yourself because things just got a whole lot more complicated. Two new lawsuits targeting the company have been filed, and they hit from completely different directions.
We already covered the New York Attorney General's lawsuit last month, which took direct aim at the loot box systems in CS 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2. Now, a second class-action suit is making essentially the same argument. And as if those weren't enough, a British music rights organization is piling on with its own legal challenge involving music rights in video games sold on Steam.
Another loot box lawsuit, same accusations
Law firm Hagens Berman has filed a new consumer class-action lawsuit against Valve.
“We believe Valve deliberately engineered its gambling platform and profited enormously from it,”
said Steve Berman, Hagens Berman’s founder and managing partner.
The complaint leans on Washington state law, which defines gambling as staking something of value on a chance-based outcome and argues that Valve's loot box system checks every box of that definition.
According to this latest lawsuit, Valve’s loot box feature is a “deliberate, carefully engineered revenue model,” which allows Valve to profit not only on the sale of the loot box key, but also subsequently through a 15% commission it collects when users sell their prizes through the Community Market.
It also points to the Steam Community Market and third-party skin trading platforms as proof that Valve knowingly facilitated real-money gambling. The firm's founding partner Steve Berman didn't hold back: "Valve knew children were on the other end of these transactions."
Now music rights are in the mix
On a completely separate front, the UK collecting society PRS for Music has filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Valve over Steam. PRS spent "many years" trying to get Valve to engage on licensing, without success.
The core issue is that while publishers of games like Grand Theft Auto, Forza Horizon, and EA Sports FC do hold sync licenses covering the music inside their titles, those licenses do not cover what happens when a game is downloaded or streamed via Steam.
PRS Chief Commercial Officer Dan Gopal was direct: "Legal proceedings are not a step we take lightly, but when a business's actions undermine those principles, we have a duty to act."
With Steam now controlling roughly 75% of the PC games market and with 147 million monthly active users, the scale of potential liability is hard to overstate and PRS says it will push forward unless Valve steps up to make things right.
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Featured Image Credit: Valve
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