[ENG] Valve stepping in to shut down the gambling sites

[Dizzy©]

Hello, Epvpers readers. As the title says we will be talking about valve and CS:GO gambling.
As a lot of people know CS:GO gambling is big deal. A lot of people play CS:GO just for the gambling system because is addictive and easy to start. According to report there were more than 2.3 billion in bet skins gambled in 2015. Literally, you can gamble in CS:GO at the age of 11 know one will know that you are below the age of gambling and that you are breaking the law. As the gambling websites do nothing to check the age of their customers. Finally after a lot of scandals Valve is stepping in to shut down the gambling websites.

The biggest scandal would be with csgolotto. Two youtube stars Trevor "TmarTn" Martin and Tom "ProSyndicate" Cassell. Have been promoting csgolotto without any disclosure of owning the website.
Valve has spoken out about this scandal and said that they will try to shut down websites like csgloto.
Valve said : "In 2011, we added a feature to Steam that enabled users to trade in-game items as a way to make it easier for people to get the items they wanted in games featuring in-game economies," Valve's Erik Johnson explained in a statement "Since then a number of gambling sites started leveraging the Steam trading system, and there's been some false assumptions about our involvement with these sites."


There was a guy that filed a class action lawsuit alleging that Valve has allowed an illegal online gambling market to develop.
Litigation is pending but Valve has responded to this.
Valve said: "We'd like to clarify that we have no business relationships with any of these sites," Johnson said. "We have never received any revenue from them. And Steam does not have a system for turning in-game items into real world currency," he said, directly conflicting a statement in the lawsuit that said this was possible.
He also went to say that: "These sites have basically pieced together their operations in two-part fashion. First, they are using the OpenID API as a way for users to prove ownership of their Steam accounts and items. Any other information they obtain about a user's Steam account is either manually disclosed by the user or obtained from the user's Steam Community profile (when the user has chosen to make their profile public). Second, they create automated Steam accounts that make the same web calls as individual Steam users."

After that Johnson went to talk about what valve is doing about this.
Valve said: "Using the OpenID API and making the same web calls as Steam users to run a gambling business is not allowed by our API nor our user agreements," he said. "We are going to start sending notices to these sites requesting they cease operations through Steam, and further pursue the matter as necessary. Users should probably consider this information as they manage their in-game item inventory and trade activity."

It is very strange that valve is doing this only now. As these sites were here for a long time making profit of kids.

There's nothing more at the moment to talk about this as valve is still taking actions. I will try to update this thread up to date.

Thanks for reading.