Valve Faces Lawsuit Over Video Game Gambling

bloomberg.com

9 points·robocaptain··3 comments

A lawsuit against Valve for gambling violations was really a long time coming and I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. For those not familiar, CS:GO contains cosmetic items which are distributed through chests. Chests cost real money and will randomly give the purchaser a cosmetic item. These cosmetic items have real-world values ranging from pennies to hundreds of dollars and can be sold at independent online stores [0] (against Steam's policy, although this rule is unenforced) or used to buy Steam merchandise (ie. video games).

Of the two people I know who play CS:GO neither play for the matches, but only use it to gamble. It's worth noting Valve isn't the first or only game to have these illegal markets built around them [1] but it's by far the largest.

[0] https://skinxchange.com/

[1] http://iskmarket.com/

Isn't the biggest difference that the skins have no real world value other than the market price a person is willing to pay for it? You can't cash them in like casino chips, they are digital goods with no inherent value, you have find someone willing to pay for it.

IMO Valve has no responsibility here, as you can use anything as a currency. The government can't stop you from trading baseball cards.

Actually several parties have tried to make the case that sports cards constitute an illegal lottery, e.g: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB846202501868224000

From a brief read around though I couldn't find any successful suits.

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