Valve answers New York's gambling suit as a class action is filed

Two weeks after the State of New York took it to court, Valve has given its side. In a statement posted on the support pages of Steam, its game store, and reported by HLTV and Dot Esports on Wednesday, March 11, 2026, the publisher of Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2 said it does not believe that the paid boxes in its games break New York's gambling laws.

The reply came as a second front opened. On Monday, March 9, a proposed class action was filed against Valve in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, Dot Esports reported. It makes a similar argument under Washington law, on behalf of players across the United States. Valve had not answered that second suit in public when the report was published.

Both cases are at their first stage. No judge has ruled on either, and what each filing contains is an allegation.

HLTV and Dot Esports, March 11, 2026; New York Attorney General's complaint of February 25, 2026.

What Valve's statement says

Valve's statement, as HLTV reports it, speaks of mystery boxes, and lists the forms they take in its games: crates, cases and chests. A player pays to open one without knowing which cosmetic item, such as a weapon finish, is inside.

According to HLTV's account, the statement sets out New York's claim, that these boxes violate the state's gambling laws, and then rejects it. Valve says it was disappointed to see the attorney general make that claim, and that it had been in talks with the office about its virtual items since early 2023.

The defense rests on three points. The first is a comparison with the physical world: Valve says boxes of this kind are common there and names packs of baseball cards and blind boxes. Dot Esports adds that the statement also mentions Pokémon cards. The second is that opening them is optional. "Players don't have to open mystery boxes to play Valve games," the statement reads, as quoted by HLTV. The third is that the items are purely cosmetic: they change how something looks, and a player who spends nothing is at no disadvantage, the statement says.

The statement also lists what the company has done about misuse of its platform. Dot Esports reports that Valve says it has locked over one million Steam accounts tied to gambling, fraud or theft, and that it introduced trade cooldowns and trade reversals to protect users.

Valve addresses the text to its players. HLTV notes that the company said it wanted them to be aware of the potential impact of the case on users in New York and elsewhere.

The claims Valve is replying to

The suit was announced on Wednesday, February 25, 2026 by New York Attorney General Letitia James and filed the same day in the Supreme Court of the State of New York, County of New York. It names three games: Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2.

The 52-page complaint argues that a loot box meets each element of gambling under New York's Penal Law. The player stakes something of value, a key that costs US$2.49 before tax for most boxes. The result is left to chance, since the item is drawn at random on Valve's servers. And the item won has value, because it can be sold: on the Steam Community Market, the marketplace inside Valve's store, for funds that can be spent on the platform, and on outside sites for cash.

That third element is where the two sides are furthest apart. The state's filing cites a Bloomberg report of March 2025 that valued the Counter-Strike skin market, skins being the name players give to these cosmetic items, above US$4.3 billion. It estimates that about 96 percent of the items that come out of Counter-Strike cases are worth less than the key that opened them. Valve's reply, in the accounts HLTV and Dot Esports give of it, answers with the comparison to card packs and blind boxes sold in shops.

New York brings three claims, one under the state constitution and two under the Penal Law's sections on promoting gambling. It asks the court for a permanent injunction, for the handing over of the money made from the practice and for a fine of three times Valve's gain. The complaint names no total.

A proposed class action in Washington

The second case comes from players. Dot Esports reported on March 11 that two of them filed a complaint against Valve Corporation on March 9, 2026 in the federal district court for the Western District of Washington, and that they ask to represent a nationwide class: every player who bought keys or paid to open loot boxes in Valve's games and received items worth less than what they paid.

A class action, in the definition of the glossary published by the United States Courts, is a lawsuit in which one or more members of a large group sue on behalf of the whole group. The same glossary says the district court must find that the claims of the class members have questions of law or fact in common before the case can proceed as a class action. That is why the filing is called proposed.

The complaint covers the same three games as New York's. By Dot Esports' account it describes the same mechanism: boxes earned while playing, keys bought for about US$2.49 to open them, a random cosmetic item at the end. It quotes Washington's legal definition of gambling, "staking or risking something of value upon the outcome of a contest of chance," and argues that the items are things of value under the state's gambling law because they can be sold on Valve's market and on third-party platforms. It points to the way the boxes are built, with what it calls slot machine style animations, random distribution and tiers of rarity.

Several of its figures match those of the New York filing: the estimate that roughly 96 percent of the items from certain Counter-Strike cases are worth less than the key, and an analysts' estimate that the Counter-Strike skin economy passed US$4.3 billion in 2025. The plaintiffs ask for damages, for restitution of the profits earned from loot boxes and for an order barring the practice.

Two cases, side by side

The lawsuits share a theory and differ in almost everything else: who brings them, which court hears them and which law applies.

The first is an enforcement action: a state applying its own law to a company, with a fine among the remedies it requests. The second is a private claim, brought by players for money they say they lost. Dot Esports describes the Washington filing as coming shortly after the New York one.

Three years of contact before the suit

Valve's remark that it had been talking to the attorney general's office since early 2023 matches the record in the state's own filing. The New York complaint says the two sides signed tolling agreements, contracts that pause the legal deadline for bringing a claim, covering the period from April 5, 2023 to February 6, 2026. The suit followed 19 days after the last one ended.

The sequence since then has been short.

What Valve has changed in its games

The statement defends the boxes as they are. In the months around the lawsuits, Valve has nonetheless changed how some of them work, and the German step is the most recent example. HLTV reported that at the start of March the company announced that players in Germany can only open in-game containers through a feature called the X-ray Scanner, in order to comply with German law on gambling and games of chance.

Two earlier changes concern Counter-Strike. In September 2025 an update added the Genesis Uplink Terminal, which offers the player skins to buy directly at a set price, as Esports Insider and HLTV both recalled when New York filed its suit; HLTV described it then as a move away from loot boxes. In December 2025, according to Esports Insider, Valve updated its Tournament Operating Requirements, the conditions organizers accept to run Counter-Strike events, to stop teams and organizers from promoting third-party skin gambling and case-opening sites through logos on broadcasts and jerseys.

That last rule is where the subject of the two complaints meets the competitive scene: it governs what a Counter-Strike team may wear and what a tournament broadcast may show.

Regulators outside the United States have been over the same ground. HLTV noted in February that the Dutch gambling regulator classified paid loot boxes as gambling in 2018, that the decision was overturned in 2022 while case opening stayed restricted in the Netherlands, and that in October 2025 a committee of the European Parliament adopted a report recommending a ban on loot boxes for players under 16.

What comes next

Neither report gives a date for a hearing in New York or in Washington. In New York, the attorney general's three claims stand as filed on February 25. In Washington, Valve had made no public response when Dot Esports published, and the filing remains a proposed class action.

Valve's own statement points to the same place. Ultimately, it says in the passage HLTV reproduced, a court will decide whether its position or the attorney general's is the correct one.

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