Valve: we’re cracking down on Steam-enabled gambling sites

The emergence of gambling sites for in-game virtual items has caused an uproar in the gaming industry, especially with news that some prominent YouTubers own these sites or rigged bets.

The gambling primarily centred on Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, being one of Valve‘s most popular video games around.

Now, Valve has issued a statement, distancing itself from the sites and saying it hasn’t received cash from them.

“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.”

It added that the gambling websites merely use Steam’s OpenID API to authenticate ownership of virtual items.

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“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).”

The team behind Steam added that it would start cracking down on the sites in question.

“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,” the company wrote.