Valve Condemn CS:GO Gambling

If you're a regular YouTube viewer or a player of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive then you'll no doubt be aware of the gambling scandal. If you're not, the idea is quite simple, albeit controversial. In-game crates are filled with skins, hats weapons etc, and then players are able to submit a set value of their own skins to the site. Once they have given their items away, they get a crate of random items. This crate might have awesome, rare items in it and that's what players will hope for. Of course, like all gambling, there must be losers, and as such, many crates contain low value items, causing the gambler to make a loss. 

Because real money isn't changing hands, this isn't illegal. It is against Steam's Terms of Service though. Further to this, two big YouTube Counter Strike: Global Offensive players were exposed for being owners of one of these gambling sites, and promoting it via videos in which they showed themselves winning big from crates. The controversy was due to the fact that they didn't disclose the fact that they had a vested interest in the site. 

In response, Valve have issued a statement to confirm that they are not happy about their API being used in this way. The company aim to crack down on this practice, so as to discourage gambling with in-game items. 

 "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.

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. We'd like to clarify that we have no business relationships with any of these sites. We have never received any revenue from them. And Steam does not have a system for turning in-game items into real world currency.

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.

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. 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."