Steam marketplace only converts into steam wallet funds which isnt "real" currency.
Now would opening in cases be legally considered gambling under US law is complicated. You pay $2.50 and get a random weapon skin not a direct payout. Valve themselves don't dictate the value of skins in CS the community actually sets the price on things and says yep this skin is worth $300.
The only way to get real money is to trade on 3rd party websites that payout actual cash. Which is technically against Steam's ToS but Valve does a piss poor job of actually enforcing it unless it becomes a major PR issue for them or clear money laundering or fraud is involved.
Which comes back to the arcade discussion. Arcades has plenty of straight up gambling games that only payout in tickets. You could argue well i could resale whatever i get with the tickets thus its actual gambling but nobody has been sued for this AFAIK.
Now considering They let things like polymarket, FiFA ultimate team and other similar gacha/lootboxes exist it will be interesting to see where this goes.
It *should* go absolutely nowhere because the buyer gets exactly what it says on the tin. You buy a loot box, a digital good, and that nets you some random in-game items. There is no possible “loss” scenario where the loot box is empty or money is “lost”, you *always* get goods as advertised. Now, you might not be *happy* with the outcome, but that’s applicable to any “blind” item, like a mystery bag or a TCG booster pack.
Gambling has specific characteristics by definition - you need to have a bet, stakes and you need to have clear win/lose conditions. If you cannot lose and cannot win, you cannot call it gambling. What’s at stake, exactly? The money? There is no scenario wherein you *don’t* pay up. Is there something of value to win? Only outside of the Valve ecosystem, which is already against TOS. Gambling *requires* consideration, risk and a prize, otherwise it’s simply not gambling. Is it a self-perpetuating and addictive Skinner box? Absolutely, but that doesn’t translate to “gambling”, and *if* these things are supposed to be addressed by law then they have to be defined correctly.
So long as the odds of specific rewards are public, I don’t see how anyone could possibly complain about loot boxes as they are. They might not like them on ideological grounds, but my response to that is that nobody’s forcing them to buy any. I fail to see the difference between loot boxes and their IRL blind equivalents, they’re very obviously purchased goods, not any sort of wager.
The fact that this is specifically referencing children (big time “think of the children” moment) is particularly curious as children generally don’t have income - they can only spend whatever money they are given by their parents. This is a non-issue through and through.
