valve

Valve compares its loot boxes to Labubus in lawsuit defense

gambling, gaming, legal, loot boxes, new york, steam, valve / Tim Belzer / March 12, 2026

Valve said point-blank that transferability of in-game items “is a right we believe should not be taken away, and we refuse to do that” despite the NYAG’s request. Valve also said it has worries about an NYAG proposal that would require Valve to collect “additional information” from players “on the off-chance someone in New York was anonymizing their location to appear outside of New York, such as by using a VPN.” Such processes, and others to further establish that children were not reselling items, would be an “invasive” violation for every Steam user, Valve wrote.

Valve said it has been “working to educate” the NYAG’s office on loot boxes since they first reached out on the matter in 2023. And while Valve said it would respect any state law that explicitly outlawed randomized loot boxes in games, the NYAG’s lawsuit “went far beyond what existing New York law requires and even beyond New York itself.” Thus, even though it might be easier for Valve to just settle the case, such an outcome “would have been bad for users and other game developers, and impacted our ability to innovate in game design.”

Outside of the New York case, law firm Hagens Berman is preparing a proposed class-action lawsuit in Washington state accusing Valve of “extract[ing] money from consumers, including children, through deceptive, casino-style psychological tactics.” That lawsuit’s arguments focus heavily on Valve’s alleged use of “psychological triggers” like “unpredictable reward schedules, sensory design, near-miss illusions, chasing losses and around-the-clock availability” to form an addictive gambling loop.

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Don’t worry, Valve still plans to launch the Steam Machine “this year”

delay, gaming, Hardware, ram shortage, steam, steam machine, valve / Tim Belzer / March 9, 2026

Valve quickly reconfirmed that it plans to ship the Steam Machine and other recently announced hardware products “this year,” after an official blog post late last week set off some worried speculation about possible delays.

While Steam’s 2025 Year in Review mainly focused on new Steam tools and features released last year, the introductory section focused on the company’s previously announced upcoming hardware plans. However, when that Year in Review post was first published Friday afternoon, it included a surprisingly vague line saying “we hope to ship in 2026, but as we shared recently, memory and storage shortages have created challenges for us.” (Emphasis added.)

As stray chatter about that stray line started to filter through message boards and comment threads, Valve quickly issued a clarification. By late Friday, the blog post had been updated to note that, despite the global supply chain challenges, “we will be shipping all three products this year. More updates will be shared as we finalize our plans.” (Emphasis added.)

Careful readers might notice that even the updated text leaves out the qualifiers that narrowed Valve’s “this year” launch window in the recent past. Valve announced an “early 2026” target in November and later said that “our goal of shipping all three products in the first half of the year has not changed” in a February update (emphasis added). While we’d caution readers not to necessarily read too much into that change (or the initial “hope” messaging), we will note that Valve said in February that it still has “work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of these things can change.”

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How strong is New York’s “illegal gambling” case against Valve’s loot boxes?

gambling, gaming, loot boxes, online gambling, Policy, steam marketplace, valve / Kris Guyer / February 27, 2026

“Calling it gambling because a user could, through several indirect steps, convert an item into cash risks stretching gambling law beyond its traditional limits,” Loiterman said. “If New York’s theory wins, it raises uncomfortable questions about things like Pokémon cards or promotional games (e.g. McDonald’s Monopoly). Courts will be cautious about going that far.”

New York also argues that Valve tacitly endorses third-party services that allow players to easily “cash out” their Steam inventories for real money. Whether Valve is culpable for the existence of those services is still an unsettled question in the law, Methenitis said, as it has been at least since he wrote about the legal implications of World of Warcraft‘s third-party gold resellers nearly two decades ago.

“I think companies have a pretty strong [legal] argument if they make some attempts to police [third-party resellers]—they obviously can’t fully control what people do outside their platform,” Methenitis said. “But if they turn a blind eye to it and allow it, I think they could be found liable.” Loiterman agreed that Valve “providing the tools that enable those [third-party] markets and tolerating them creates some degree of responsibility.”

“Judges tend to be cautious…”

In the end, the lawyers Ars spoke to were generally skeptical that courts would determine that Valve’s loot box system constitutes illegal gambling. Cases making similar arguments about other loot box systems have failed in other jurisdictions, “in part because gambling laws were drafted with casinos and lotteries in mind,” Loiterman said. “Judges tend to be cautious about breaking from an emerging consensus.”

Hoeg agreed that “the entire question [in this case] is novel, and… the courts are (small-‘c’) conservative institutions, not generally wanting to adopt novel arguments without direction from the legislative branches.” Even if Valve’s loot box system “may start to smell a bit like gambling,” Hoeg said he would “honestly be surprised if the courts went along with the characterization without a new law aimed at it.”

“I view it as a weak case offered primarily for political grandstanding/coverage over real legal effect,” Hoeg concluded. “We shall see, though.”

How strong is New York’s “illegal gambling” case against Valve’s loot boxes? Read More »

New York sues Valve for enabling “illegal gambling” with loot boxes

Counter-Strike, gambling, gaming, lawsuit, loot box, new york, Policy, valve / Paul Patrick / February 26, 2026

Opening a valuable skin like this in a loot box is akin to winning a lottery, New York alleges in a new lawsuit. Credit: Twitter / Luksusbums

The lawsuit also takes Valve to task for allowing third-party sites that facilitate the resale of in-game skins for cash. While the suit notes that Valve has “sporadically enforced” rules against so-called skin gambling sites—which use Steam inventories as virtual chips for gambling games—it alleges that Valve “has not acted against sites that permit the sale of Valve’s virtual items.” The suit cites “internal communications” from numerous Valve employees suggesting that the company was OK with such “cash-out services” for Steam items as long as off-platform gambling wasn’t explicitly involved.

We’ll see you in court

In a press release announcing the suit, state Attorney General Letitia James said the gambling Valve’s system enables can “lead to serious addiction problems, especially for our young people. … These features are addictive, harmful, and illegal, and my office is suing to stop Valve’s illegal conduct and protect New Yorkers.”

In 2016, Valve faced a pair of civil lawsuits from parents concerned about Valve’s connection to skin gambling sites—those suits were eventually dismissed. Around the same time, Valve received a letter from Washington state threatening “civil or criminal action” if Valve didn’t crack down on skin gambling, but the state stopped short of filing a lawsuit in that matter.

In addition to asking Valve to modify or eliminate its loot box system, the New York suit asks for Valve to make “full restitution to consumers” for the disgorgement of “all monies” received from its gambling system, and for fines of “three times the amount of its gain.” Ars Technica has reached out to Valve for comment.

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RAM shortage hits Valve’s four-year-old Steam Deck, now available “intermittently”

gaming, ram shortage, steam deck, steamos, Tech, valve / Tim Belzer / February 17, 2026

Earlier this month, Valve announced it was delaying the release of its new Steam Machine desktop and Steam Frame VR headset due to memory and storage shortages that have been cascading across the PC industry since late 2025. But those shortages are also coming for products that have already launched.

Valve had added a note to its Steam Deck page noting that the device would be “out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.” None of Valve’s three listed Steam Deck configurations are currently available to buy, nor are any of the certified refurbished Steam Deck configurations that Valve sometimes offers.

Valve hasn’t announced any price increases for the Deck, at least not yet—the 512GB OLED model is still listed at $549 and the 1TB version at $649. But the basic 256GB LCD model has been formally discontinued now that it has sold out, increasing the Deck’s de facto starting price from $399 to $549. Valve announced in December that it was ending production on the LCD version of the Deck and that it wouldn’t be restocked once it sold out.

The Steam Deck’s hardware is four years old this month, and faster hardware with better chips and higher-resolution screens have been released in the years since. But those Ryzen Z1 and Z2 chips aren’t always dramatically faster than the Deck’s semi-custom AMD chip; many of those handhelds are also considerably more expensive than the OLED Deck’s $549 starting price. When it’s in stock, the Deck still offers compelling performance and specs for the price.

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Why $700 could be a “death sentence” for the Steam Machine

console, gaming, microsoft, Nintendo, pricing, Sony, steam, steam machine, steamos, valve / Kris Guyer / February 6, 2026

Bad news for Valve in particular?

On the surface, it might seem like every company making gaming hardware would be similarly affected by increasing component costs. In practice, though, analysts suggested that Valve might be in a uniquely bad position to absorb this ongoing market disruption.

Large console makers like Sony and Microsoft “can commit to tens of millions of orders, and have strong negotiating power,” Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out. The Steam Machine, on the other hand, is “a niche product that cannot benefit in the same way when it comes to procurement,” meaning Valve has to shoulder higher component cost increases.

F-Squared’s Futter echoed that Valve is “not an enormous player in the hardware space, even with the Steam Deck’s success. So they likely don’t have the same kind of priority as a Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft when it comes to suppliers.”

PlayStation 5 in horizontal orientation, compared to Xbox Series X in horizontal orientation — Sony and Microsoft might have an advantage when negotiating volume discounts with suppliers. Credit: Sam Machkovech

The size of the Steam Machine price adjustment also might depend on when Valve made its supply chain commitments. “It’s not clear when or if Valve locked in supply contracts for the Steam Machine, or if supply can be diverted from the Steam Deck for the new product,” Tech Insights analyst James Sanders noted. On the other hand, “Sony and Microsoft likely will have locked in more favorable component pricing before the current spike,” Van Dreunen said.

That said, some other aspects of the Steam Machine design could give Valve some greater pricing flexibility. Sanders noted that the Steam Machine’s smaller physical size could mean smaller packaging and reduced shipping costs for Valve. And selling the system primarily through direct sales via the web and Steam itself eliminates the usual retailer markups console makers have to take into account, he added.

“I think Valve was hoping for a much lower price and that the component issue would be short-term,” Cole said. “Obviously it is looking more like a long-term issue.”

Why $700 could be a “death sentence” for the Steam Machine Read More »

SteamOS continues its slow spread across the PC gaming landscape

AMD, ARM, gaming, Lenovo, NVIDIA, steamos, valve / Tim Belzer / January 7, 2026

Over time, Valve sees that kind of support expanding to other Arm-based devices, too. “This is already fully open source, so you could download it and run SteamOS, now that we will be releasing SteamOS for Arm, you could have gaming on any Arm device,” Valve Engineer Jeremy Selan told PC Gamer in November. “This is the first one. We’re very excited about it.”

Imagine if handhelds like the Retroid Pocket Flip 2 could run SteamOS instead of Android… Credit: Retroid

It’s an especially exciting prospect when you consider the wide range of Arm-based Android gaming handhelds that currently exist across the price and performance spectrum. While emulators like Fex can technically let players access Steam games on those kinds of handhelds, official Arm support for SteamOS could lead to a veritable Cambrian explosion of hardware options with native SteamOS support.

Valve seems aware of this potential, too. “There’s a lot of price points and power consumption points where Arm-based chipsets are doing a better job of serving the market,” Valve’s Pierre-Louis Griffais told The Verge last month. “When you get into lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that maybe is competitive with x86 offerings in that segment. We’re pretty excited to be able to expand PC gaming to include all those options instead of being arbitrarily restricted to a subset of the market.”

That’s great news for fans of PC-based gaming handhelds, just as the announcement of Valve’s Steam Machine will provide a convenient option for SteamOS access on the living room TV. For desktop PC gamers, though, rigs sporting Nvidia GPUs might remain the final frontier for SteamOS in the foreseeable future. “With Nvidia, the integration of open-source drivers is still quite nascent,” Griffais told Frandroid about a year ago. “There’s still a lot of work to be done on that front… So it’s a bit complicated to say that we’re going to release this version when most people wouldn’t have a good experience.”

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Reporter suggests Half-Life 3 will be a Steam Machine launch title

gaming, half-life, Half-Life 3, hl3, rumor, steam machine, valve / Kris Guyer / December 16, 2025

If you can take your mind way back to the beginning of 2025, you might remember a fresh wave of rumors suggesting that Half-Life 3 was finally reaching the final stages of production, and could be announced and/or released at any moment. Now, though, 2025 seems set to come to a close without any official news of a game fans have been waiting literal decades for.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a Half-Life 3 announcement and/or release isn’t imminent, though. On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that “everybody I’ve talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be a launch title with the Steam Machine.”

Straw—who has a long history of reporting gaming rumors from anonymous sources—said this Half-Life 3 information is “not [from] these run-of-the-mill sources that haven’t gotten me information before. … These aren’t like random, one-off people.” And those sources are “still adamant that the game is coming in the spring,” Straw added, noting that he was “specifically told [that] spring 2026 [is the window] for the Steam Machine, for the Frame, for the Controller, [and] for Half-Life 3.”

For real, this time?

Tying the long-awaited Half-Life 3 to a major hardware push that has already been announced for an “early 2026” window certainly sounds plausible, given previous leaks about the game’s advanced state of development. But there are still some reasons to doubt Straw’s “adamant” sources here.

For one, Straw admitted that the previous information he had received on potential Half-Life 3 launch and/or announcement dates was not reliable enough to report in detail. “I had been told a date. I was not going to report that date because they weren’t 100 percent confident in that date,” he said. “That date has since passed.”

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Microsoft takes down mod that re-created Halo 3 in Counter-Strike 2

counter-strike 2, CS2, DMCA, engine, gaming, Halo, microsoft, source 2, takedown, valve / Paul Patrick / December 15, 2025

Last month saw the release of Project Misriah, an ambitious modding project that tried to re-create the feel of Halo 3 inside Valve’s Counter-Strike 2. That project has now been taken down from the Steam Workshop, though, after drawing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint from Microsoft.

Modder Froddoyo introduced Project Misriah on November 16 as “a workshop collection of Halo ported maps and assets that aims to bring a Halo 3 multiplayer-like experience to Counter-Strike 2.” Far from just being inspired by Halo 3, the mod directly copied multiple sound effects, character models, maps, and even movement mechanics from Bungie and Microsoft’s popular series.

In the weeks since, Project Misriah has drawn a lot of praise from both Halo fans and those impressed by what modders could pull off with the Source 2 engine. But last Wednesday, modder Froddoyo shared a DMCA request from Microsoft citing the “unauthorized use of Halo game content in a [Steam] workshop not associated with Halo games.”

A trailer announcing Project Misriah, posted last month.

In a social media post sharing that DMCA text, Froddoyo ruefully said that players should “make sure to give your thanks to Microsoft” for the project’s fate. But in a comment on Project Misriah’s YouTube trailer, Froddoyo noted that, following the takedown, the project “will not be worked on or uploaded in the future. But hey, it was fun while it lasted. Thank you to all of the players and supporters of [the] project. We will use the knowledge and skills obtained from this to cook up something else!”

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Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama.

AMD, drivers, gaming, steam, steam machine, steamos, valve, Windows / Kris Guyer / December 4, 2025

When Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine hardware last month, some eagle-eyed gamers may have been surprised to see that the official spec sheet lists support for HDMI 2.0 output, rather than the updated, higher-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 standard introduced in 2017. Now, Valve tells Ars that, while the hardware itself actually supports HDMI 2.1, the company is struggling to offer full support for that standard due to Linux drivers that are “still a work-in-progress on the software side.”

As we noted last year, the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard.

“At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements,” AMD engineer Alex Deucher said at the time.

Doing what they can

This situation has caused significant headaches for Valve, which tells Ars it has had to validate the Steam Machine’s HDMI 2.1 hardware via Windows during testing. And when it comes to HDMI performance via SteamOS, a Valve representative tells Ars that “we’ve been working on trying to unblock things there.”

That includes unblocking HDMI 2.0’s resolution and frame-rate limits, which max out at 60 Hz for a 4K output, according to the official standard. Valve tells Ars it has been able to increase that limit to the “4K @ 120Hz” listed on the Steam Machine spec sheet, though, thanks to a technique called chroma sub-sampling.

Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama. Read More »

Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one

gaming, pc, PC Gaming, price, steam machine, steam machines, valve / Mike M. / November 25, 2025

After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”

Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.

“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.

The new comments follow similar sentiments relayed by Linus Sebastian on a recent episode of his WAN Show podcast. Sebastian said that, when talking to Valve representatives at a preview event, he suggested that a heavily subsidized price point would make the Steam Machine hardware into “a more meaningful product.” But when he suggested that he was imagining a console-style price in the range of $500, “nobody said anything, but the energy of the room wasn’t great.”

Forget about $500

Based on these comments, we could start estimating a potential Steam Machine price range by speccing out a comparable desktop machine. That would likely require building around a Ryzen 5 7600X CPU and Radeon RX 7600 GPU, which would probably push the overall build into the $700-plus range. That would make the Steam Machine competitive with the pricey PS5 Pro, even though some estimates price out the actual internal Steam Machine components in the $400 to $500 range.

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Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be.

Analysts, components, gaming, Hardware, steam machine, steam machines, tariff, valve / Tim Belzer / November 13, 2025

If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.

At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.

DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”

A loss leader?

At the other end of the spectrum, Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen predicted the entry-level Steam Machine could come in as low as $549, rising to $749 for the 2TB version (plus an additional $50 for bundles including a Steam Controller).

To Van Dreunen, Valve’s unique position as a private company with a loyal fan base means it can “price its hardware to hit its own strategic sweet spot rather than mirror the competition.” And in this case, he said, that could mean taking a “modest” loss on the hardware as a way to get more gamers invested in SteamOS.

Getting people to buy more games on SteamOS could be worth a lot more to Valve than any Steam Machine hardware profits. Credit: Valve

“Just like Sony and Microsoft, the real money isn’t in the box, it’s in the ecosystem you enter once you buy it,” Van Dreunen said. “To me the question isn’t whether Valve can afford to eat margin. It’s whether they want the SteamOS footprint to grow fast enough to justify it. … Strategically, this is about expanding the platform, not squeezing the hardware.”

Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be. Read More »