Take-Two Interactive has an interesting response to gamers upset with what the company does with the in-game currency they buy. In an ongoing dispute over whether money is essentially stolen when a game’s servers shut down, Take-Two characterized in-game virtual currency as “fictions created by game publishers.”
Currently Take-Two is facing a class-action lawsuit in California related to microtransactions in the NBA 2K games. Particularly, the lawsuit takes issue with the fact that when Take-Two takes down servers for old games, players lose access to the virtual currency (VC) that they bought.
According to Axios, the suit alleges that: “By removing Plaintiff and the Class members’ VC, Defendants took and stole their personal property, or fraudulently appropriated property that had been entrusted to Defendant.”
In response to the lawsuit, Take-Two’s lawyers are targeting the claim that virtual currency is property. Game File reports that the company’s attorneys filed a request to dismiss the lawsuit last week. The argument goes that gamers might have paid to obtain the currency, but it’s not something they can actually own.
In the filing, Take-Two’s attorneys write: “VC is not plaintiff’s property. Instead, in-game VC are fictions created by game publishers, subject to the publishers’ terms of service and user agreements.”
That said, lawsuits targeting microtransactions of all kinds seem to be popping up more frequently. In May 2023, Nintendo faced a class-action suit over the loot boxes in Mario Kart Tour. And NBA 2K has run afoul of microtransaction issues before, with Belgian and Dutch gambling laws in 2018.
