Valve Denounces Third-Party Gambling Sites, But Won't Block Them (arstechnica.com)

Posted by msmash on Thursday July 14, 2016 @05:20AM from the taking-a-stand,-maybe dept.

Valve is finally addressing the last week's Counter-Strike gambling scandal. The game maker and Steam operator says that it does not directly profit from these gambling sites' actions. In a statement, Valve's Erik Johnson said the following: We have no business relationships with any of these sites. We have never received any revenue from them. And Steam does not have a system for turning in-game items into real world currency. Johnson added that gambling sites work by creating and maintaining their own Steam accounts, which are used to conduct virtual item trading. He adds:Using the OpenID API and making the same web calls as Steam users to run a gambling business is not allowed by our API nor our user agreements.Steam's user agreement includes a passage that forbids "exploiting the Content and Services or any of its parts for any commercial purpose, except as expressly permitted elsewhere in this Agreement." The company won't block these websites, but says it will begin cracking down on them -- by sending them cease and desist notices.

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Re:Won't block them? by Murrdox · 2016-07-14 05:57 · Score: 4, Insightful

The way I understand it, it's actually impossible for them to "block" these services. There would be two ways they could "block" the services, and both of them would have extremely high impact to Steam. First, they could ban the Bots who are collecting and trading the skins that are being gambled on. We all know that this would only be a temporary measure. More bots would simply be created to replace those banned. Secondly, they could alter the API for Steam to prohibit the type of trading that is occurring. However, they would break a lot of legitimate functions if they went this route. So saying that Steam "won't block" the gambling is being pretty disingenuous. It'd be like if Major League Baseball could "block" betting on baseball games by not posting scores online. That's really not a valid or realistic solution to the problem. It certainly looks like Steam is taking active steps to shut the gambling sites down.