Mechanized
Member
Fucking awesome! If something like this can win, then maybe we can get rulings against blind box lottery bullshit up next.
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Player sues Valve over illegal gambling regarding CS:GO
- Thread starter ashecitism
- Start date
SirPinkyNose
Member
Can't win.
Valve does not endorse skin gambling, nor having any direct connection to gambling website.
He did not gamble in any of Valve's platform, but via a third party website which exploit Steam's trade feature.
This case is like suing card company because underground gambling network uses their cards.
Valve does not endorse skin gambling, nor having any direct connection to gambling website.
He did not gamble in any of Valve's platform, but via a third party website which exploit Steam's trade feature.
This case is like suing card company because underground gambling network uses their cards.
Generalpsyduck
Banned
Good. I've know a few people that are absolutely addicted to gambling skins. Valve has to do something about it
7DollarHagane
Banned
I like the skin economy and betting is a part of it. Valve doesn't condone it or support it in any way.
The only result a lawsuit like this will have is more lockdowns on the steam api and less freedom to do what you want with digital items. It's a bad idea.
The way things work now is not bad. You gamble at your own risk.
The only result a lawsuit like this will have is more lockdowns on the steam api and less freedom to do what you want with digital items. It's a bad idea.
The way things work now is not bad. You gamble at your own risk.
Shang
Member
While this particular suit is horseshit, I do think something needs to be said about that whole scene. I have multiple friends who were near-cripplingly addicted to that game and buying/trading/betting on skins. Hell, my friend sent me a link to csgojackpot, where upon being there for 20 seconds, saw a dude gamble away $3000.
I'm not going to fully blame Valve/the third parties for people being stupid, but it definitely seems like Valve is more than willing to let this craze go on because, at the end of the day, it nets them money.
I'm not going to fully blame Valve/the third parties for people being stupid, but it definitely seems like Valve is more than willing to let this craze go on because, at the end of the day, it nets them money.
This and what you're describing are two totally different things. One involves real money being exchanged among independent parties under conditions of dubious legality. The other is services rendered for money paid. Until your blind boxes start giving you cash outright, it's just another feature of the game.
7DollarHagane
Banned
They need to get help, and not from valve.
If cell phone game companies can sell unlimited game boosts and rare item loot boxes to people and hunt whales that spend $3000 a month on the game, Valve can do what they want with their item market.
While skins are not the most positive element of CSGO they are fun and I like the idea of game items having real value and being very desirable and actually rare.
No because the gambling sites use the API only to see what items you have. You have to do in client trades with automated bots. Valve has and will ban the bots if they find out. You are working around Valve if you use these sites.
7DollarHagane
Banned
They don't really ban the bots or seek them out though. If they wanted to shut down the gambling economy they could do it just by having a trade limit per day per account and better filters for bot accounts, or require trades to have a phone number attached.
This is really an awful thing and I'd hate to see the third party markets shut down even if some of them are shady.
Abilidebob
Member
Chances are your rares were already worthless. In this specific case, Valve released the Immortal Chest II for 2016 which contained a Windrunner Immortal that makes the Rainmaker effect (the main reason it's a prestige item) look like piss.
https://youtu.be/N1Iz4Md9Evw?t=30
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgnqRKwHXYY
SirPinkyNose
Member
Almost all rares are worthless unfortunately.
But that bow has a sharp price drop because Valve just added a new bow with better effect at much lower price yesterday.
7DollarHagane
Banned
Yes, I sold this knife that I got from a $2.50 key for $1450 after the site's fees a few years back.
The gambling aspect uses market prices to determine the cash value of your items which you then wager against live matches with odds determined by the value of items placed on each team.
All of this is because the steam API is open and lets you log in and let other sites see your inventory. These sites run bots that send trade requests, you trade your items to their bots, then their websites evaluate the value of your items.
The only thing valve is involved in is the API being available for other sites to use, and allowing trades on steam. Everything else happens outside of valve/steam's view.
They have pushing Steam Guard hard by putting trade limits on account without it so they have been and they're requiring trade confirmation through the Steam Guard device.
I would argue it's one of the main reasons CS:Go is so popular, in fact.
Yes, I sold this knife that I got from a $2.50 key for $1450 after the site's fees a few years back.
The gambling aspect uses market prices to determine the cash value of your items which you then wager against live matches with odds determined by the value of items placed on each team.
All of this is because the steam API is open and lets you log in and let other sites see your inventory. These sites run bots that send trade requests, you trade your items to their bots, then their websites evaluate the value of your items.
The only thing valve is involved in is the API being available for other sites to use, and allowing trades on steam. Everything else happens outside of valve/steam's view.
Right, but it's something Valve could easily stop, they certainly know it's what goes on and they just kind of wink and nod and ignore it because it brings them money. That's exactly what the suit is saying.
I still don't get why CS:GO skins are worth so much money. They're usually just texture swaps. Compared to the blingification arms race of Dota 2 items these "skins" are truly paltry cosmetics, yet their market value cannot be denied.
The 18th Letter
Banned
Everyone that wants Half-Life 3 should be rooting for Valve to lose this.
If they can't depend on skins to fund their failed projects they're going to need a new source of income and hope it comes from a game that everyone wanted a decade ago.
If they can't depend on skins to fund their failed projects they're going to need a new source of income and hope it comes from a game that everyone wanted a decade ago.
Because of this, basically. It's self perpetuating and now the gambling is one of the main aspects of CS:Go. I mean, a poker chip is literally just a ipece of garbage but it also has a value. The value of these things has long since stopped being related to anything but their rarity and prestige.
7DollarHagane
Banned
They are powerful status symbols in the community.
When I played matches with that knife for the two week trade wait i constantly got comments and people stunned to see it. People would huddle around me at the start of the match to see it. They may just be texture swaps but the effect they have on players is real.
I'm sure that Valve makes a ton of money off of DOTA2/CSGO/TF2 but they probably make way more money off of taking a 30% cut of everything sold on Steam.
Yes, I sold this knife that I got from a $2.50 key for $1450 after the site's fees a few years back.
The gambling aspect uses market prices to determine the cash value of your items which you then wager against live matches with odds determined by the value of items placed on each team.
All of this is because the steam API is open and lets you log in and let other sites see your inventory. These sites run bots that send trade requests, you trade your items to their bots, then their websites evaluate the value of your items.
The only thing valve is involved in is the API being available for other sites to use, and allowing trades on steam. Everything else happens outside of valve/steam's view.
but do they gamble and win money or the skin which they can in turn sell?
He's got a point about the age verification not happening. Online Poker requires you to have a credit card if you're doing that.
, but Valve didn't create this aftermarket that the community did. The community itself wanted to gamble on eSports matches with their skins and created the sites. Valve's only involvement is allowing "OpenID"-like logins to let the sites see the users inventory via API's. Valve didn't create these sites, so I don't think the suit holds water.
The skin, that's literally it. No money is changing hands outside of the value of the skins. It's still "gambling" in the sense that you're "putting your money where your mouth is" in putting these valuable knives and skins up to bet, but there is no actual money changing hands outside of people selling them on eBay for Steam Wallet credit.
Then again US laws gimp online poker and all sorts of gambling in the first place
The skin, that's literally it. No money is changing hands outside of the value of the skins. It's still "gambling" in the sense that you're "putting your money where your mouth is" in putting these valuable knives and skins up to bet, but there is no actual money changing hands outside of people selling them on eBay for Steam Wallet credit.
Gamesadict
Member
7DollarHagane
Banned
they make even more money off the thousands and millions of keys they sell for those cases daily.
BoosterDuck
Banned
because no skins = no skill
Lactose_Intolerant
Member
game of skill
7DollarHagane
Banned
You are paid out in skins which you can have traded back to your steam account. None of the betting sites i'm aware of pay out for skins in cash.
There is a separate site that will list skins for real money sales by other buyers and take a fee in the transaction.
Or you can try to sell it to someone in a private sale but it's a guaranteed way to get scammed since you have to trade to them in steam and get paid some other way with no guarantees of chargebacks or anything.
The site that runs the skins marketplace takes steps to verify buyers so that they can avoid chargeback claims. They have a multi-person staff in canada.
The 18th Letter
Banned
CSGOLounge which lets you bet skins on matches getting you more skins if you win.
CSGOWild (similar to CSGODiamonds) which lets you deposit the skin and get that money back in "emeralds' which you can gamble with. You can then use those emeralds to buy skins
OPSkins isn't a gambling website, but it's where you sell/buy the skins you get from CSGOLounge, CSGOWild and other similar sites.
I hate, hate CS:GO gambling and wish that there was some kind of age authentication put in place in order to participate in the Steam economy. Doubt the lawsuit will amount to anything though.
That said, it's seriously depressing that pretty much any and all Valve-related news for the last couple years has been about them getting sued, someone talented leaving the company, them making a stupid decision or mistake in regards to Steam or them telling everyone, or being defensive about, how great VR is.
That said, it's seriously depressing that pretty much any and all Valve-related news for the last couple years has been about them getting sued, someone talented leaving the company, them making a stupid decision or mistake in regards to Steam or them telling everyone, or being defensive about, how great VR is.
I don't think this will go anywhere, but everything about digital game microtransaction gambling crates pisses me off.
It's wildly exploitative and I think the only reason it hasn't gotten mainstream news traction is its too hard for Old People to fully understand the implications of just yet.
I expect it to blow up at some point, but I don't know how long it's going to take or what the fuse will be.
It's wildly exploitative and I think the only reason it hasn't gotten mainstream news traction is its too hard for Old People to fully understand the implications of just yet.
I expect it to blow up at some point, but I don't know how long it's going to take or what the fuse will be.
CertifiedFP
Member
Will that still be working out for them in a decade though?
Every 3rd party on with ambition is moving towards creating their own launchers and storefronts where they don't have to pay Valve 30%, nor have their titles sit next to Digital Homicide's latest Kusoge. Origin proved you can defy Valve in the PC gaming space and succeed. GOG is gaining more and more momentum each day. The biggest PC games out there are non-Steam. Overwatch proved a new FPS IP can be successful without Steam, and without the cosmetics market of CSGO and TF2 - In addition to having a much greater lid on hackers than Valve has ever bothered to consider. Hell, a niche VN became a hit and one of the most beloved VNs in the west without a Steam release. Black Desert - That's not on Steam either. Anecdotal, but quite a few people I've been in guilds with in MMOs like WoW, FF14, and Planetside 2 have claimed to have never used Steam at all when I asked for external contact info, instead offering a Skype name or more recently a Discord handle.
Steam lost EA, then Riot Games, almost lost Ubisoft, and there's some warning signs out there that Bethesda might be transitioning away from Steam similarly to Ubisoft - Right now the only developers who I see focusing on making themselves more present on Steam are companies that are too small and/or weak (Either as a whole or just in the PC gaming space) to venture out of Valve's benevolent shadow - Particularly Japanese publishers in this case who until recently assumed PC Gaming = Eroge (IIRC Gust's president unironically asked why westerners like Eroge so much when asked if Gust was interested in expanding into the PC space to capitalize on the large PC gaming market in the west), or indie developers who don't have much of a choice.
...And even then, the most successful indie game ever (Or uh, formerly-indie. It got kinda murky when $2.5 billion changed hands.) was explicitly non-Steam, because the developer thought that Valve wouldn't let his release-model slide. Granted, that was before Early-Access, and I'm fairly certain that Early-Access exists because Valve is kicking themselves to this very day for not getting a 30% cut of the massive amount of revenue that game got they could have gotten had they allowed Early-Access back then.
Honestly though I just think Valve needs a good kick in the balls already. And for one very important reason.
3.
The crate aspect actually has nothing to do with it though. for example in overwatch there's no gambling because the goods don't have any cash value, you can't actually earn money from it. It's the fact that valve makes it trivial to gamble these items and then also exchange them for real money that makes it gambling.
It's still gambling, you're paying real money for a chance at something you want. If they had no value to anyone, why would anyone buy loot crates? If it's not gambling, why can't you just buy the content you want? They know the psychological hook works, and the odds mean it's more profitable than selling items directly.
It's the 'pay real money for a chance of something valuable' part that raised my eyebrows and then my hackles as I saw it seep into more and more games.
Any game where the items are tradeable makes it an order of magnitude worse, but I find them all repulsive. See: Japans ocean of Puzzle & Dragons style games with slot machines for content purchases.
They're all gross, the worst of the worst aspect of f2p gaming.
SirPinkyNose
Member
I smell hypocrisy.
It's not trivial for anyone to get cosmetic items.
TheRedSnifit
Member
Any legal regulations against CS:GO crates would 100% hit Overwatch too. The fundamental "problem" of gambling cash money for worthless cosmetics is still there.
Anyways, this lawsuit is saying that Valve is responsible for people going to a third party websites that give out actual money to bet. Valve can't really do much about them beyond trying to shut them down, which may not even be possible depending on where the site is located.
I know people don't like crates, but it really isn't different from something like Magic cards, which have been legally sold to minors for years. And it's pretty easy to gamble with high-value Magic cards through third-parties.
Most likely. I strongly doubt that Origin has been growing from strength to strength, Blizzard has always done its own thing as Battle.net predates Steam by several years, and GOG isn't a massive money maker.
Further, Ubisoft didn't toy with the idea of leaving Steam. You're undoubtedly thinking of a few upcoming Ubi games being removed from the store back in late 2014, however they returned less than 24 hours later. (Ubi had a tendency to drag its feet with making games pre-purchasable in the UK, so I feel confident in saying that what actually happened is someone accidentally removed the games from all regions instead of just the UK, as opposed to mistakenly bumping the "Leave Steam" button early.) In the 18 months since, there has been exactly zero indication that Ubi is transitioning away from Steam (the opposite, in fact, with Ubi only improving how its client integrates with Steam), and in the five years since Origin launched, no other publisher has left Steam behind, with the quasi-exception of Microsoft. Looking forward, Acti still has no intention of transmogrifying Battle.net into its own version of Origin as Infinite Warfare is Steamworks, and the same is true of Bethesda and Bethesda.net as Dishonored 2 is Steamworks. That a mass exodus is relatively imminent strikes me as decidedly unlikely.
piratepwnsninja
Member
Despite it not being that long, there should be a tl;dr in the OP that says this isn't about the random crate loot so that people stop immediately going there as what they think the suit is about.
This is the big thing no game company wants to deal with, and why< I think, companies drag their foot on addressing some these problems. It's a can of worms no one wants to open.
Lol some of yall take this way to seriously.
7DollarHagane
Banned
how do you assess the monetary value for taxation? Some DOTA items that used to be worth hundreds are worth very little now. Skins fluctuate in value based on demand.
That would be up to the legislatures, not the courts.
Just like anything else, when you sell the item that is when you record the value for taxation purposes.
No, it wouldn't. And you've hit on why in the second paragraph. Valve not only doesn't try to stop it, they're fully aware that that is the primary driver of their economy.
Overwatch boxes encourage you to spend money, but they pay out exactly what you put in: 4 random items with no monetary value at all. CS:Go boxes are designed around the implicit knowledge that you can gain money for spending money. Gambling by definition is the notion that you've got the potential to GAIN monetary or material goods, a fixed digital box where you have no way to sell what you get is not the same thing. One is RNG, one is legally considered gambling.
CertifiedFP
Member
League of Legends used to used to be on Steam until it started to get big and DOTA 2 began to compete with it.
Even if you negate the others, THAT'S the Big One right there. Also as I do recall, there's been a LOT of whispers concerning a Bethesda.Net launcher. I'm not saying the transition will happen this year for any already announced games, but foresight is oft 0/0. Everyone thought Battlefield 3 would be a Steamworks game until it wasn't.
Also I'm pretty sure that Battle.Net as a launcher wasn't until after Steam was a thing. Wasn't Battle.Net ingame-only until they needed a more sophisticated patching system for WoW?
Wow has had a launcher since it came out, about a year after Steam. it wasn't 'battle.net' as a launcher for several years though, it was just wow before that. It didn't have a store integrated either since there wasn't anything to buy. There weren't digital versions to get for quite a while
If wizards supplied the APIs to make it possible, made no effort to try and stop it, and was fully aware that that had become LITERALLY THE ONLY REASON FOR THE CARDS TO EXIST, it might be different. It's not that Valve could completely stop it in all ways even if they wanted to, it's that they basically encourage it, and they bank on it for sales of their keys.
It's not that different from the G2A stuff going on recently, where they KNOW they'er selling plenty of stolen goods, but don't make the slightest effort to stop it because their business is based around it. Valve KNOWS they're essentially selling poker chips, and they make it as easy as possible because they want that buck.