I'm actually confused why it took this long and why other states haven't done the same (is it a jurisdiction thing even if it's online?). Coffeezilla already covered in detail how gambling works in Counter-Strike 2 (but presumably a thing since Counter-Strike Global Offensive). Although I can't imagine it would be much different for TF2 and DOTA 2 (which is probably the actual reason why CS2 and DOTA 2 remain as one of the most played games on Steam - surprised TF2 isn't played that much at #30ish). Also a quick heads up on the typo for loot boxes, the article says it's updated 16 hours ago, so I think they corrected it? I can't find that typo anymore.

This is going nowhere, simply because Valve have loopholes known as their terms of service; the fact that skins or wallet funds have never been able to be withdrawn. They can just say that users pushed the perceived value up, and that gambling sites are operating against ToS by doing trades.

I'd argue that it could be similar to Lenovo's Dive Pit at TwitchCon that injured SEVERAL participants (not just Adriana Chechik). The ToS was violated because people were diving into the dive pit, when it actually says not to jump in. Yet lawyers everywhere wanted to participate in legal action, because ToS doesn't absolve the basic expectations of a reasonable company doing enough care to prevent obvious abuse that would cause harm (technically it's supposed to be a reasonable person, but this is a company as the entity we're talking about here). And in the case of dive pits, it would've been expected to be several feet deep, instead of a shallow foam playpen to even consititute a dive pit, and staff didn't show participants how shallow the pit was, nor did they close the booth within the day of the injuries (only the following day), and even had the announcer go "she's okay!" as damage control even as a blatant lie. No legal action actually happened, so that seemed to be the injured parties' own decisions.

Now in this case, I'm asking for a lawyer to determine if the ToS is what a reasonable company would also employ, and if the inability to withdraw by design is enough care to prevent obvious abuse, which would certainly hurt their case to punish VALVe. It's important for me to state the possibility, rather than assuming VALVe can be sued anytime. But watching Coffeezilla's videos made me honestly believe it's worth it for lawyers to try to analyze and see if there's enough potential to do legal action to further send a message against unregulated gambling. Because ultimately, the abuse and exploit has absolutely turned these games into unregulated gambling since the law is too outdated to prevent things like gambling for minors.

Plus if it gets regulated by the government, then that's a good potential source of revenue for the government spending budget.