Beware, whole generations of people already got turned into gamblers!

Ok, actually the amount doesn't matter much. And I get what you mean, it's a form of gambling. But as Pheace already mentioned, it's not essentially different from buying a Magic the Gathering booster pack. I even collected football cards when I was a kid, and buying a pack was "gambling". And then there was all the trading of cards, with friends and at the Sunday market. I'll admit though that I was supervised by my parents (after all, I had to ask them for the money :-D), and probably many kids now are less (or not at all) supervised, and things can get easily out of control.

What I meant in my original post is that now there's a whole new ecosystem of skins gambling that is way worse than opening lootboxes. I was aware of trading and scams, I imagined that somebody would be buying/selling stuff with real money, but I learned today that now you can bet on CS matches using skins as currency, and as of late there are sites like the one reported in the video whose sole purpose is letting you put skins on the table against somebody else's skins and flip a coin to see who wins it all.

For me, lootboxes could be questionable for kids, betting is certainly a no go for kids, and coinflips for hundreds/thousands of dollars is degenerate gambling, be it kids or adults.

You implied that if it had been google products that had been involved in the gambling, google would be responsible.

Yup, and people come and say "it's just video games", "video games are for kids", "companies are out to make profit".

I find it funny people threatning to call police because of the scams. Example: http://steamcommunity.com/groups/DuelSkins/discussions/0/357287935541801485/
Sorry, I can't feel bad for someone so dumb to give money to a complete stranger promissing you "wonderful" items in a video game.
My advice would be to not call police, unless you want to piss 'em.
And a black eye.

TmarTn apparently can't really decide what he wants to say, because he seems to keep posting tweets and then deleting them again shortly after.
Apparently, Valve is no longer involved.

4th of July so I expect a official response by Valve by the end of 2059.

Make it rain! I need a new shoes skin!

Lucky you I'm a good mood today, but I still want you to read.

"For CS:GO, the introduction of skins led to a thriving gambling market. People buy skins for cash, then use the skins to place online bets on pro CS:GO matches. Because there’s a liquid market to convert each gun or knife back into cash, laying a bet in skins is essentially the same as betting with real money."

"This kind of betting is far from mainstream, but plenty of people are figuring it out. By one estimate, more than 3 million people wagered $2.3 billion worth of skins on the outcome of e-sports matches in 2015. This, too, has contributed to Valve’s bottom line. The gambling sites run on software built by Valve, and whenever CS:GO skins are sold, the game maker collects 15 percent of the money."

"Unregulated gambling on sports is illegal almost everywhere in the world, and some lawyers say this qualifies. The highest levels of competition in pro gaming have already seen match fixing by people looking to profit from skins gambling. Valve has ferreted out cheaters at times, but it has not discouraged gambling on its games, nor made any attempt to prevent people from using its products as currency. The company did not respond to repeated requests for comment for this story."

"Buying and selling in-game stuff for real-world money has become a common feature of video games, and encouraging players to buy virtual merchandise has become a predominant business model for game companies. But Valve is unique in letting players transfer their virtual possessions to third-party sites, many of which offer gambling"

"These sites, while independently run, use Valve’s software and pay out in skins. Valve employees also communicate with CSGO Lounge and have given technical support to the site, said Courtney Timpson, a community administrator and spokesman for CSGO Lounge. The Valve logo is prominently displayed on the site, and in one post on its forum, a moderator addresses people—especially the “younger audience”—who feel that they have been scammed. “If something is wrong, don’t post on the forums; contact Valve/Steam,” the moderator writes."

Reddit investigators digging as per usual.

https://np.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/4r4nvj/deception_lies_and_csgo/d4ykp39

What you're quoting there is very misleading.

Yes, Valve gets 15% of skins 'sold' on the Steam Community Market. The quoted $2.3 billion worth of skins however do not all go through the Steam community market.

In fact, the market isn't involved at all on these betting sites. You trade the items to the sites bots (creating an 'inventory' there), then you bet the items against other people's items, and if you win, the bots trade you the items you won (or if you lost someone else gets them), all minus a percentage for the site I imagine.

Then, if people "sell" (or buy) these items for real world money that is a person trading the items to someone else (site or person), and getting or giving paypal or similar in return. Again a process where the Steam market is not involved.

The only time this involves the Steam market is if someone A) wants to purchase skins (with his Steam Wallet) so he has something to bet or B) Wants to sell skins he won so he can get Steam wallet to buy games or other virtual items.

Most of that 2.3 billion is skins circling around the betting sites getting rebid by people winning skins.

Aware and so it's the article:

"It’s not surprising that skins gambling has avoided legal scrutiny. Obscured by several layers of abstraction, the wagering is tucked away in a subculture that most mainstream legal authorities don’t know exists. Gaming lawyers say Valve could be legally vulnerable; on the other hand, this is a rapidly changing area of the law with little established precedent.

In a handful of cases, judges have ruled that activities carried out entirely with virtual goods within video games shouldn’t be considered gambling, because they have no connection to the real world. “Even in the Internet age, there is a crucial distinction between that which is pretend and that which is real and true,” U.S. District Judge James Bredar wrote in October, dismissing a suit against mobile gaming company Machine Zone. “The laws of California and Maryland do not trifle with play money.”

Like the companies that have successfully defended themselves in court, other prominent game makers, including Zynga, Riot, and Activision Blizzard, have been aggressive about keeping virtual currencies separate from real ones. Valve has not: Its software enables an explicit connection between in-game goods and off-line cash."

I'm guessing this is referring to this? Which isn't strictly speaking true. It allows transfers between accounts. Those third party sites merely use xx accounts that run bots on those accounts that can trade between players. The API is merely used to identify the players, it's in no way used to transfer items 'to the site'.

As such, what they're doing is no different than trading between players, except they automated their accounts to do that, and they log what gets transferred to their bots, who it 'belongs' to, and then show that as people's "inventory" on their website. But in reality it's just stored on a random Steam account that is being used by the site.

So basically, the only connection Steam has to those sites is that it allows them to use the Steam API to uniquely identify players. The trading between accounts etc is done completely outside of that and to Valve looks no different than if I were to start a trade between you and me. If we had both logged into a betting site before there's no way for Valve to know if we started a trade because we gambled on that site or not. (of course, if all their bots are called 'CSGO-lotto' or whatever it's a little more obvious.) edit: Slight correction, the trade wouldn't be between us, it would be between one of us and a bot, then bot to the other. So it would require somehow finding out which accounts are being used by that specific site)

Still, I think at best this would come down to some form of negligence and maybe a requirement to police the websites that use their API, which, considering the number of websites involved would probably quickly lead to it becoming a closed system which will be much harder for sites to get access to.