Steam to Crack Down on Digital Gambling Sites

As of late, Youtube, Steam, and the Counter-Strike communities have been shaken by a controversy surrounding Counter-Strike digital goods gambling, and two popular YouTubers who were 'gambling' on sites that they owned as a way to advertise their service. It's a controversy I've taken great care to avoid, because it was everywhere and I didn't really have anything to add to the conversation other than "That's bad, people shouldn't do that."

Anyway. While this controversy has far from reached a conclusion, it has finally forced Valve--the creators of Steam--out of their comfortable hiding-hole to comment on the state of digital gambling on their products. A rare move from them, given how Valve generally tries to avoid... well... doing just about anything, these days.

"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...

...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."

So, for once, Steam is finally going to start doing something. If this something will be big, small, or not amount to much, we'll have to see, but honestly, seeing how Valve won't do anything to fix Greenlight, early access, or any of the many broken features currently on Steam, the big news here is just that they finally stepped up and started policing something.

I just hope it actually works.