Only in America
Isnt Syndicate British? What did they UK version of the FTC do to him?
Only in America
Yep. It's crazy how they can get away with this with no repercussions.
I wonder whether the loophole these crooks used to get away with this is that Steam Wallet funds can't be converted back into real-life currency?
So anything users technically do with skins in terms of trading them or using them to bet on 3rd party sites can't be used to provide them with real-life earnings.
If so, then laws need to be changed ASAP, as this is pretty disgusting.
Tbh, Valve is a facilitator of all this, as far as I'm concerned. It's the first time I'm hearing about the Steam Community Market and it just sounds shady as hell to me.
Might as well go against the BEP. After all, some money made there gets used for gambling.I wonder whether the loophole these crooks used to get away with this is that Steam Wallet funds can't be converted back into real-life currency?
So anything users technically do with skins in terms of trading them or using them to bet on 3rd party sites can't be used to provide them with real-life earnings.
If so, then laws need to be changed ASAP, as this is pretty disgusting.
Tbh, Valve is a facilitator of all this, as far as I'm concerned. It's the first time I'm hearing about the Steam Community Market and it just sounds shady as hell to me.
Didn't they send a C&D to dozens of sites for them to stop doing their shtick or they'd block the Steam API?
Really?!? That's all they had to do? The API is unchanged and all the shady exchanges are still possible, but Valve is going to self-police the API term violators?
Wow. Scuttlebutt is that a casino in our state just got fined $130,000 for having over the course of a year around 30 total underaged gamblers intentionally sneak into their giant, multi-door hotel-resorts, for anywhere over 30 minutes (the time limit) before being found by security and reported to the regulatory agency.
Now the time limit for all of us is 10 minutes. Hardly seems fair. What's Valve's time limit?
¯_(ツ_/¯
As someone who works in a gambling company...
We would get shut down on the spot and fined heavily if we tried to do something like this.
Might as well go against the BEP. After all, some money made there gets used for gambling.
Not a single of those sites uses the market in any way.
How can you claim these site "don't use the Steam Community Market in any way" when their entire premise is to facilitate gambling with skins that come from that very marketplace?
What would you do? Locking the Steam API would be a terrible thing for everyone, not just the gambling sites. Stopping the trade of items? Again, screwing everyone because of those fuckers? Steam trading is one of the best things of the platform, it'd be incredibly sad to see it going away. Is there any solution to it that wouldn't completely screw over legal users? Aside from the individual blocking of the API of the gambling sites and shutting them down, any other solution I think would be worse for the legal customers.
What would you do? Locking the Steam API would be a terrible thing for everyone, not just the gambling sites. Stopping the trade of items? Again, screwing everyone because of those fuckers? Steam trading is one of the best things of the platform, it'd be incredibly sad to see it going away. Is there any solution to it that wouldn't completely screw over legal users? Aside from the individual blocking of the API of the gambling sites and shutting them down, any other solution I think would be worse for the legal customers.
The problem as I see it is indeed with the Steam API as it allows virtual goods on the Steam Marketplace to be used outside steam by anyone to do who knows what.
Locking the API =/= stopping trading of virtual goods on Steam. It would mean stopping the movement of those virtual goods from Steam to 3rd party platforms where the kind of scummy shit in the OP can occur. In the name of "openness" and by releasing this marketplace API into the wild, Valve is indirectly allowing what is described in the OP.
Of course, valve isn't responsible for it. But perhaps Valve can do more to prevent it, since they're the ones with control over the API for the platform they created.
What happened is that there were two commissiones at the time. The FTC is supposed to have 5, appointed by the president. (But no more than 3 from one political party.) During Obama we had a mostly D commission. Now we have an R commission.what happened to "FTC are gonna go hard on these motherfuckers", "FTC does NOT play around with stuff like this", "they crossed the FTC. they are well and truly FUCKED"
The FTC is an understaffed and underfunded organization that does a lot of good work that rarely gets mentioned. This is one painfully bad decision, I agree, but it doesn't undo the rest of the work the FTC does.FTC is a joke
You do realize people can get skins without having to buy them from the marketplace, right?
There is literally ZERO in the marketplace that facilitates anything at all. CS GO item gambling was a thing before the fucking market even existed.
False, false, and false again.
The API is used for a lot more than trading. And you don't even fucking need the API to operate a gambling website either.
False, false, and false again.
The API is used for a lot more than trading. And you don't even fucking need the API to operate a gambling website either.
I see, I agree that more regulation could be helpful. But the problem is indeed in how to stop those websites without screwing your other users.
How is that relevant?
I can get an Xbox without buying it directly from MS Store, but that doesn't change the fact that the original source of that item is MS.
False, once again. Pinging inventories and setting automated trade offers is ridiculously easy even without access to the API. You might want to actual research things.Do you even know what an API is?
API = Application Programming Interface... It's absolutely required to allow 3rd party websites/platforms to even recognize what these virtual goods even are. These third party sites setup to facilitate gambling of virtual items from the Steam Marketplace MUST use Valves API to do this (they even state this in the article Kotaku wrote on the subject more recently).
You can all that is required for gambling without ever touching the SteamAPI. You can just create simple scripts to check inventories and send trade offers.Like, if you could throw out a layman-friendly overview of some of the tech shit on how these pipelines work, I think that would be super-informative for me.
Do you even know what an API is?
API = Application Programming Interface... It's absolutely required to allow 3rd party websites/platforms to even recognize what these virtual goods even are. These third party sites setup to facilitate gambling of virtual items from the Steam Marketplace MUST use Valves API to do this (they even state this in the article Kotaku wrote on the subject more recently).
I see, I agree that more regulation could be helpful. But the problem is indeed in how to stop those websites without screwing your other users.
Those sites use the Steam API to do stuff like checking your inventory to see what items you have. They use bot accounts for the trading of items, and as far as I know Valve has been banning quite a number of those gambling bots. Problem is that you can't really blanket ban the API for 3rd party users as there's quite a few legitimate uses for it, from helping trading sites to organizing tournaments with bots to even Steamspy.
And by the way, completely locking the API would NOT stop gambling sites in any way.
The original source of the items used isn't the Steam Marketplace.
False, once again. Pinging inventories and setting automated trade offers is ridiculously easy even without access to the API. You might want to actual research things.
You can all that is required for gambling without ever touching the SteamAPI. You can just create simple scripts to check inventories and send trade offers.
No-one is saying a blanket ban is the answer, but knowing how these shady outfits are orchestrating these scams (e.g. bot accounts are even against Valve's Steam User T&Cs), Valve can do more to clamp down on this shit.
What's scummy is that the trades which are a direct result of these shady gambling practices, Valve is earning money off with their % cut of all Steam Community transactions. So whether Valve is responsible for it or not, they're directly profiting off these practices.
All you need is for the person to have their profile public.How can you access other user's steam inventories without access to the API? That sounds like at best a serious breach of data protection and at worst a lawsuit waiting to happen.
Again, they aren't. No one goes sell their skins that they won from gambling on the Steammarket, they will go to third party sites like OP Skins to sell it for actual money.
All you need is for the person to have their profile public.
Like, if you could throw out a layman-friendly overview of some of the tech shit on how these pipelines work, I think that would be super-informative for me.