Steam har for kort tid siden offentliggjort, at de har banlyst al form for gambling af skins med øjeblikkelig virkning.

Der findes i dag utallige hjemmesider, hvor man kan gamble sine skins på forskellige måder, såsom kampe mellem hold og roulette. I dag vælger Steam at sætte en stopper for dette, efter at de i flere år har døjet med utallige problemer, ved at lade disse hjemmesider eksisterer.

En ansat hos Steam, Erik Johnson, som udgav den chokerende nyhed, fortæller alt du bør vide her:

In 2011, we added a feature to Steam that enabled users to trade in-game items as a way to make it easier for people to get the items they wanted in games featuring in-game economies.

Since then a number of gambling sites started leveraging the Steam trading system, and there’s been some false assumptions about our involvement with these sites. We’d like to clarify that 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.

These sites have basically pieced together their operations in two-part fashion. First, they are using the OpenID API as a way for users to prove ownership of their Steam accounts and items. Any other information they obtain about a user's Steam account is either manually disclosed by the user or obtained from the user’s Steam Community profile (when the user has chosen to make their profile public). Second, they create automated Steam accounts that make the same web calls as individual Steam users.

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. We are going to start sending notices to these sites requesting they cease operations through Steam, and further pursue the matter as necessary. Users should probably consider this information as they manage their in-game item inventory and trade activity.

Der har været en del skandaler, med gambling relaterede sider, hvor den seneste var CSGOLotto. Det er dog ikke kun CS:GO som rammes, men også DOTA2. Det er dog ikke klart, om det er alt gambling, hvor sider som CSGOLounge bliver ramt, eller om det kun er roulette sider, som står for skud. 

Med gambling af skins ude af CS:GO, betyder det også tab af sponsor aftaler og annoncer hos mange firmaer. Kan dette i sidste ende være et stort tilbageslag af Steam? Anders Blume er dog ikke enig, og skrev følgende på Reddit omkring annonceringen. 

Basically a lot of really big real-money betting sites are already in this space and more are looking to get in. The difference is these are in theory regulated so that under-age betting is much harder to do, which is a good thing. There are lots of other benefits with regulation and its actually a topic Ive been looking into lately but I wont go into that now.

There absolutely was a time where CS:GO viewership would have taken a huge dip if the APi had been restricted like this, because for a while a few sites became the only place people went to look for games basically. For a long time now these sites have lost that power partially because the CS:GO viewership is already mainly activated by bigger events, that people will generally watch just because.

Anyway, a fun thing maybe could be if some of these more well known sites that are regulated actually end up putting money back into the eco-system like they do in football(soccer if you love freedom), which would actually make for a much healthier system than one where people have to compete against the unregulated madness that was the skins gambling world.

I would still say a much greater threat to the health of the game, is over saturation and a lack of proper schedules which means there is just too much content.

Hvad mener du, er det den rigtige vej, at Valve vælger at gå?