Hacker News Reader

Comment by levemi | Hacker News Reader

This story isn't about Valve but the author sure made it seem like it was. A third party site uses Valve's API to enable users to bet skins on esport competitions. This third party site uses Valve's API. Valve is in no way involved in betting. The only thing they haven't done is turn off access to the API for this third party company.

This is probably more because of Valve's management structure than it is about any policy. Valve is a flat company with no managers. People work on what they want to work on. Jobs like customer support and policing API use are akin to taking out the trash, nobody wants to do it but someone has to. It just isn't a priority.

Anyway, ignorant article with a dishonest attempt at trying to spin two things together "illegal betting!" "valve" and failing.

View on HN

No, Valve sells scratch-off tickets. Or if you like, they give you the ticket ("case") and sell you the coin to scratch it with ("key"). Same thing.

They're not directly involved in the sports betting aspect, but they'd be running an illegal lottery without the fiction that their digital goods have no real world value, which is the same fiction maintained by the betting houses.

It stretches credibility to say they aren't very involved.

I don't buy "scratch-off ticket" analogy. How are those crates with randomized prizes different from a pack of pokemon cards that are randomized with cards with differing value? They are pretty identical in the terms we are talking about.

A failed suite was brought against pokemon in 1999. [http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/24/nyregion/suit-claims-pokem...]

To the extent that there is a liquid secondary market in trading cards, I'm not sure there is a real line between them and retail gambling instruments. But, some things cases have more in common with scratchers than Pokemon booster packs:

- They're available instantly in effectively unlimited quantity, as many as you want to buy.

- Although technically there are many gradations, the quality label of an item ("Factory new", "battle-scarred", etc.) is incontrovertible and easily verified.

- As a digital good, liquidation is extremely low-friction and virtually risk-free. In fact:

- You can click a button from within the game itself to see the current market value in USD -- sorry, in "Steam credit" -- and another to immediately offer the item for sale at that price.

- Maybe most relevant to this thread, even without liquidating they can be easily used as currency to participate in unregulated online roulette, slots, sports betting and more.

So, yeah, there are some differences.

Astute analysis, Valve's proximity to the secondary market seems to be the issue here. They also appear to allow you to generate keys for games that can then be sold[0][1]. This provides you with an indirect way of cashing out your earnings.

[0]https://www.g2a.com/call-of-duty-modern-warfare-2-steam-cd-k... ($7.23 USD vs Steam price of $19.99 USD)

[1]https://www.g2a.com/mass-effect-trilogy-origin-cd-key-global... ($13.66 for all 3 Mass Effect games or $34.99 on Steam)

They don't allow end-users to generate keys for games - that is restricted to the publishers or game creators (in smaller cases).

The keys on those sites are generally sourced from physical copies in cheaper regions (as mentioned in a sibling comment), cheaply sold bundles (Humble Indie Bundle, and other similar sites), and other such sources.

You could possibly make an argument for gift-copies of games[0] being resalable, or games that can be added to third party systems (ME2 gives a CD key that can be added to Origin, for example) though the latter would be limited to one attempt per-game per-account.

[0]http://www.g2play.net/category/24773/factorio-steam-gift/

I'm under the impression those "cheap keys" are from other regions where games are sold for cheaper, and can potentially get your account locked.

> Valve is in no way involved in betting.

Valve makes money when people buy or sell skins, which in this case is akin to buying or cashing in one's poker chips. There's also no way that Valve doesn't know that this is going on. While they're not involved in the strictest sense, they continue to allow this gambling to happen (by not policing their API) and make money by doing so.

I wonder what the legal implications are for valve here, vs the third parties that are facilitating the gambling. Surely the companies taking bets are also taking a rake (how else would you pay for your infrastructure/support overhead) and this is illegal in most of the US. Does Valve, by indirectly profiting from the wagering exchange actually bear some (legal) responsibility?

Are the companies that issue stock responsible if people bet with them in poker games?

A better question would be whether NASDAQ or any other stock exchange is responsible if people use them to trade poker bets. What if NASDAQ was making a large profit on those exchange fees?

Valve is not only issuing the stock, but it's also acting as the stock exchange and taking exchange fees. It may not make them any more "responsible", but there is a whole lot of moral gray area there.

>Anyway, ignorant article with a dishonest attempt at trying to spin two things together "illegal betting!" "valve" and failing.

How is a system where you spend real money in the hopes of receiving a valuable item by random chance not considered betting/gambling? Because that's effectively what system like the skins in CS:GO is at its core.

As someone pointed out above, that's not different than trading card games. It's arguably more restricted than real world trading cards because you can't sell them outside valves market.

But now imagine there's a company that lets you bet on card games using those cards.

There are two main gambling themes in CSGO which people here are conflating.

There's the slot machine like gambling of buying keys and opening cases.

But there's also sites which literally let you gamble on sports or even just virtual roulette etc using skins as currency.

I'm aware of the gambling sites, but that's not Valves doing. If people gambled with pokemon cards, no one would care.

You play with those cards, you don't play a game with the skins. The cards are the game in a CCG, skins are the not the game in CS:GO

> you don't play a game with the skins

Except you do play a game with them. (though they affect that gameplay aesthetically)

That's what I meant. The game is not centered around skins. It is not a "Collectible Skins Game", but an FPS. CCG's are, as the name implies, all about the cards and what you can do with them.

Yu-Gi-Oh does have identical cards with cosmetic differences. Are those not part of the game?

I have to admit to knowing nothing at all about Yu-Gi-Oh, and therefore have no basis to make an informed response, sorry.

Valve do not provide a public trading api that is needed to run these sites, they mostly use steamkit2 an open source library that was made from re

This problem applies to any app store.

Good catch, I blew right by that detail on my first read.

Assuming that Valve just hasn't gotten around to closing this loophole seems remarkably charitable, if not naive.

Valve is making untold millions on people gambling for items in the game itself. They're looking the other way as secondary markets allow for monetization. I respect Valve as a game maker, but I have no respect for this extremely dubious, gray-market gambling. Claiming that the article is "dishonest" when Valve is one of the largest beneficiaries of this seems dubious.

It's also worth noting that this is very real money. I can put $70 on my Steam account and buy a new triple-A game....or in the land of Valve I can sell some skins and buy the game. It is trading things in CS:GO for real world value, so comparisons to closed-systems (throughout this thread) seems deeply suspect. I can also use that CS:GO loot to "gift" a new game to a friend who then pays me in the real world. And so on.

With us, it fails. With state attorneys general, it's another pound of flesh.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com