Valve enables gambling?

[Fanatical Meat]

I don't really get this but its a interesting question when does trading become gambling

The civil suit hinges on allegations that Valve knowingly enables and abets third-party gambling efforts through its Steam game-sales service. Sites like CSGOLotto allow players to submit their Steam credentials and upload in-game "skins" (cosmetic changes to in-game items like weapons) to a betting pool.

In some sites' cases, those bets can end with players cashing their uploaded skins out and getting real-world currency in return.


http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/...d-party-trading-sites-alleges-illegal-scheme/

Thoughts?

 

[nurturedhate]

If I go and buy some random fruit from the grocery store then take it to a completely separate store where I can throw it into a pool in the hopes that I get different fruit or in some cases money in return the grocery store that originally sold me the fruit did not enable my gambling.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

If I go and buy some random fruit from the grocery store then take it to a completely separate store where I can throw it into a pool in the hopes that I get different fruit or in some cases money in return the grocery store that originally sold me the fruit did not enable my gambling.

When they start to market more oranges for gambling are they involved?
I don't really understand this trading market stuff.

 

[sweenish]

That much is obvious.

And the question is easy. When you gamble with them.

 

[aigomorla]

Ahhh.... real money RNG box rewards which is sellable for real cash is gambling.

I dont care how nice you want to spice it up. But its the same as picking lotto numbers or doing BINGO.

Real money RNG rewards should never be allowed to trade as it will always find a way to the black market to get converted back into real currency.

 

[Anubis]

this is gambling, just like daily fantasy sports is gambling

 

[Vivendi]

It's gambling, more importantly, it's underage gambling.

 

[Artorias]

If anyone is not familiar with the situation this is all stemming from the disaster that is CS:GO.

Its all blown up so much that you have offshore gambling site owners promoting their own services, winning, and doing it all without disclosure on YouTube that they are the owners themselves.

CS:GO is such a cesspit right now, you literally have half the community being sponsored by these type of sites, from pro players, casters, streamers, tournaments, I wouldn't be surprised if a vast majority of these sites are participating in money laundering, its fucking nuts.

I'm still curious as to how Valve gets away with their crate scheme, its straight up gambling and being promoted to children.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Someone explain where the money is. Lets say I make a penis hat CS:GO skin, is that collateral for a tournament that I can win real world cash?

 

[TidusZ]

If anyone is not familiar with the situation this is all stemming from the disaster that is CS:GO.

Its all blown up so much that you have offshore gambling site owners promoting their own services and winning without disclosure on YouTube that they are the owners themselves.

CS:GO is such a cesspit right now, you literally have 50% of the community being sponsored by these type of sites, from pro players, casters, event tournaments, I wouldn't be surprised if a vast majority of these sites are participating in money laundering, its fucking nuts.

I'm still curious as to how Valve gets away with their crate scheme, its straight up gambling and being promoted to children.

you can win a $5k-10k "souvenir" gun out of chests that drop just from watching stream, when I heard that it's just like who is paying 10k for a gun

 

[JAG87]

I don't know about abetting, but they certainly enable it.

Valve saying that the sites use their API to access steam account info like any other service is such a steaming pile of bs. Valve should be restricting the access to services that enable trading or gambling of any of their digital assets outside of the Steam platform.

I would not call it gambling because skins are not really equivalent to chips. Chips have a fixed worth and can be readily converted to real currency at the casino, at any time. Skins can only be converted to cash on a supply and demand based trade. If Valve cashed-out your skins, then it would be full-on gambling.

Still, considering there is a marketplace that Valve created to convert digital assets into currency, and has enabled external sites to authenticate steam accounts to enable gambling such assets, you could say they are basically enabling gambling. All they would have to do to make it right is disable access to external trading/gambling sites. That can't be that difficult.

 

[Artorias]

Someone explain where the money is. Lets say I make a penis hat CS:GO skin, is that collateral for a tournament that I can win real world cash?

I'm not sure what you mean, but what you do is bet your own skins on a tournament, basically like sports betting, bet on players, teams, results etc.

I'm not too familiar with the gambling because I have never gone to these sites, but I presume your winnings can be given to you in more skins, more valuable skins, or cash.

 

[Artorias]

If anyone wants a good overview this video sum it up well. The Youtuber is not me obviously haha, but he seems to be one of the more genuine people in the community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KpzKjUGgxgc

 

[sweenish]

It seems most people don't know what gambling is.

Can you get a rare skin and just sell it for money? Yes. How is that gambling? What did I have to lose? What was my gamble?

Can I take my rare item and wager it against a certain match outcome on someone else's site? Yes. That is gambling. I have something to lose in the hopes of a bigger payout.

 

[gorcorps]

Sounds similar to how Japan pachinko parlors get away with gambling. Basically when you win, you trade in your balls/credits for trinkets in the pachinko parlor. There just so happens to also be a shop next door that has a suspicious desire to pay you cash for those exact trinkets.

The rub in this case though is it involves minors. I don't see how it's Valves fault though.

 

[Artorias]

Sounds similar to how Japan pachinko parlors get away with gambling. Basically when you win, you trade in your balls/credits for trinkets in the pachinko parlor. There just so happens to also be a shop next door that has a suspicious desire to pay you cash for those exact trinkets.

The rub in this case though is it involves minors. I don't see how it's Valves fault though.

Valve is not enforcing their own terms of service, they do not allow bots as accounts and that's how all of these sites operate, they all use bot accounts to transfer items automatically between users.

They have in the past shut down bot accounts and a lot of money just went poof, for some reason they have stood by and watched all of this unfold the past couple years.

I can just imagine the tears when a few hundred thousands dollars worth of skins go poof when those accounts get wiped, that's going to be epic.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

All valve are doing is allowing people to trade skins, not gamble them.

There's no possible way to stop people gambling with 3rd parties, they can make it harder by not allowing trading via APIs or other similar methods with known gambling sites and their IP addresses but the fundamental problem is that once someone has an asset, they can give that asset to a trusted 3rd party, so can someone else, and that trusted 3rd party can roll some random number and assign the total assets back to whoever is decided to be the winner.

All you need for that is 2 things,
1) A trusted 3rd party (gambling site, a friend, escrow, whoever)
2) The ability to trade items

1 will always exist and will never be able to be stopped, Valve will never stop providing 2 because it's too valuable to the players.

 

[aigomorla]

All valve are doing is allowing people to trade skins, not gamble them.

false... your purchasing RNG boxes with real money for epic skins.

You then take whatever epic skins u get from loot, and mail it to a broker.

Broker then takes the skin and converts it back to real money.


There are different odds in payout according to the rarity of the skin which the cash box RNG offers.

This is gambling, and the fact it can be converted back to real cash, well, that's a very big no no which is on par to almost online blackjack.

For valve to fix this, they need to disable trading period.
However they don't because then they know less people will buy these cash boxes, hence why they are probably going to lose in court.

And finally once they lost in court, the gaming control board will probably then spank them so hard as well as push very heavy fines for minor gambling + gambling without permit or license in the US, and also potential money laundering, that steam will not have a good year..

 

[Fanatical Meat]

false... your purchasing RNG boxes with real money for epic skins.

You then take whatever epic skins u get from loot, and mail it to a broker.

Broker then takes the skin and converts it back to real money.


There are different odds in payout according to the rarity of the skin which the cash box RNG offers.

This is gambling, and the fact it can be converted back to real cash, well, that's a very big no no which is on par to almost online blackjack.

For valve to fix this, they need to disable trading period.
However they don't because then they know less people will buy these cash boxes, hence why they are probably going to lose in court.

And finally once they lost in court, the gaming control board will probably then spank them so hard as well as push very heavy fines for minor gambling + gambling without permit or license in the US, and also potential money laundering, that steam will not have a good year..

Good simple explanation, thank you.

 

[Artorias]

false... your purchasing RNG boxes with real money for epic skins.

You then take whatever epic skins u get from loot, and mail it to a broker.

Broker then takes the skin and converts it back to real money.


There are different odds in payout according to the rarity of the skin which the cash box RNG offers.

This is gambling, and the fact it can be converted back to real cash, well, that's a very big no no which is on par to almost online blackjack.

For valve to fix this, they need to disable trading period.
However they don't because then they know less people will buy these cash boxes, hence why they are probably going to lose in court.

And finally once they lost in court, the gaming control board will probably then spank them so hard as well as push very heavy fines for minor gambling + gambling without permit or license in the US, and also potential money laundering, that steam will not have a good year..

Valve is smart, they have been offering these RNG boxes for years with TF2 and nothing happened, albeit you couldn't easily convert and cash out they probably knew of the loopholes, they wont get smoked that's for sure.

 

[Fanatical Meat]

Relevant update, steam will be sending out TOS notices to gambling sites

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2016/07/13/valve-cs-go-skin-gambling-ban/#more-382563

 

[Artorias]

Well that was fast.

http://store.steampowered.com/news/

To be honest they shouldn't even be giving them a heads up, they should have just nuked every one of those accounts, the scum are just going liquidate all the accounts now.

 

[PrincessFrosty]

You then take whatever epic skins u get from loot, and mail it to a broker.

Broker then takes the skin and converts it back to real money.

Right, and Valve aren't doing any of those things, people are doing it. Valve are simply selling products and giving the customers the ability to trade those products with other people. What customers then do with those products is completely up to them and out of valves control.

 

[aigomorla]

Right, and Valve aren't doing any of those things, people are doing it. Valve are simply selling products and giving the customers the ability to trade those products with other people. What customers then do with those products is completely up to them and out of valves control.

that isnt going to hold in court especially in the case of minors.
Trust me, the instant the words "minor" is thrown, all sense of fairness is toss'd out the window and heavy regulation is mandated in the US.

 

[Vivendi]

Valve knew what they were doing, there were sporadic calls against these gambling sites before and that minors were using them but Valve didn't take any action since there was no public backlash. Finally there's now some court case(s), youtube drama, etc, so they are going to take some PR action against these sites.