This lawsuit is targeting Valve not because they are a platform or storefront that provides games with gambling, but rather is due to gambling in games that they themselves have developed. From the first line in the article:
New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users “pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value.”
The suit is not claiming that lootboxes are gambling in and of themselves, it’s claiming that the lootboxes in valve’s own games counts as gambling because you can sell the items for steam wallet funds through the steam community market, which can then be converted into cash via multiple methods, most notably by purchasing a steam deck with wallet funds and then selling the steam deck for cash, which is not against any laws or steam’s terms of service.
Personally, I agree that the line needs to be drawn more strictly than just requiring the possibility of converting the winnings into cash, and that lootboxes are predatory regardless. But this case isn’t about lootboxes in general, it’s about the very real problem of valve actively enabling and encouraging gambling with actual monetary value. We can’t easily change the laws, but valve is (allegedly) breaking the laws as they already exist.
I highly recommend factory games! Factorio, Satisfactory, Dyson Sphere Program, Shapez 2, Captain of Industry, to name my favorites. I also hear Mindustry is great and is free. All of these games run perfectly on linux (some via proton) and work offline just fine.
Factory games can be mentally taxing in a similar way that programming can be, but less abstract and more hands-on. If you disable enemies (it’s always an option in these games), there’s no pressure or stress of messing up like there is in Oxygen Not Included.
You can easily put hundreds or thousands of hours, and years of your life, into a single save. There’s always goals to shoot for, production to expand, new paradigms for structuring parts of your factory, and ways to rework or improve what you’ve already built.
I look at it as if my world and factory is a zen garden that I visit and spend some time tending to it, since there’s always something to work on. it helps me avoid getting overwhelmed. there’s no rush, there’s no standards to live up to, it’s purely your own little world that you can design however you like and work on at your pace. There’s always a million little dynamic puzzles to solve, and a million different ways to solve them. Or if you’re not feeling up to solving puzzles, you can fix up an older factory design, or add to the aesthetics of an area of your base.