What's more shocking is that Valve allowed this to get so far.

There isn't actually an organized news article for this yet, but watching this unfold has been fascinating.

For some background, Gambling in some form is legal in all but one state. (I refuse to accept the existence of a place called Utah.)

However, it is heavily regulated, inspected, and subject to severe punishment if something is up. Anything harder than charitable gambling often has to be registered, too.

The situation here, to be said akin of Pachinko parlors using a two step system to get money, (as far as I loosely understand) is very not legal.

Discuss! I also have a question: Does this affect your opinion of Valve in any way? Or has their other goofs put their reputation firmly in the red already?

Allegedly. Even if they turned a blind eye to it, it's not their responsibility in the first place.

Furthermore, there's no valid reason for gambling to be illegal among consenting adults. Lawmakers who outlaw it are in the moral wrong.

Good thing it isn't like CS go isn't played by people who aren't adults.

Oh, wait.

So you support gambling among consenting adults but not CO Go because the players are not adults?

Makes sense. That ole crook Yannis Varoufakis worked for Valve once and designed digital items to be bought with real money. That son of a gun almost bombed my country and economy in orbit with his stupid, amateur, witch-doctor ass-pull dick-moves! Only the top tier scum can push illegal activities in the face of people, through perfectly/seemingly legal means...

I'm all for going against valve when they deserve it but I don't see how they are responsible for something a third party came up with.

Turning a blind eye to an illegal activity can be judged as supporting that activity. They have to be careful here in order to remain innocent. After all they have some kind of commercial interest in it. If for example somebody had told them about it and they would have ignored it, I guess there is a bit of danger involved for them.

How much they benefit from this is questionable. Gambling sites do little for Steam except have items change from one hand to another through the trading system (which doesn't get Steam anything, unlike the market for instance). On top of that, lately 'fake' gambling websites (as in, they allow you to trade items to them, play and even win, but never give items back) are among the more common complaints when people shout 'I was scammed' on the help forums.

The only time I imagine there's some benefit to them is if people who don't already have things to gamble buy them from the Steam market.

If Valve is guilty parents are guilty too. After all money don't fall out of sky to jobless teens.

All this crap will do is give Valve a fine at most and more crap for us the consumers all because some people are too lazy to educate their own children. Not long time ago I could simply buy something by inserting my CC numbers. Now I have to insert various confirmation codes just to login, the password is not enough.

Don't see how Valve is at fault here.

Maybe they didn't expect that gaming could become gamBLing :P

I have had pretty good gambling problem.. anyway.. I'm getting better.. as if! =)

Like other fellow posters above me, I fail to see why it is Valve to be blamed for this "incident".

^ This ^

Worst thing is that it's not unexpected at all: we could dig dirt of CS:GO for a whole week at it would seem normal, unsurprising. I don't like when games take that turn where they are expected to have shady businesses on the side.