Valve is cracking the whip on Counter Strike: Go Gambling


You may have heard about the rather shady dealings recently surrounding some CS:GO betting websites – in particular, CS:GO Lotto. The owners of this site turned out to be the famous YouTubers ProSyndicate and TmarTn. The controversy arose from the fact these people used CS:GO Lotto in their videos, showing them betting on skins and items along with winning them, but without letting anyone know they actually owned the site.

Once that information was uncovered, their fans (and the rest of the internet) were in uproar about how shady and immoral such a practice was. More in-depth details can be found in original coverage of the situation here, but in short, people were very unhappy about it.

Parents in particular decried the fact these YouTubers had thousands of young and easily influenced fans who, through their videos, they encouraged to gamble money for items. Gambling pretty much everywhere is restricted to those considered adults by the law (i.e usually 18 and older).

To encourage children of 13 and 14 to gamble with (most probably) their parents’ hard earned money in the first place is more than frowned upon. And to do it to make yourself a f#@k ton of money while leading others to believe you have nothing to do with the process? You can easily see why people are more than a little annoyed about it.

Source: Youtuber Fluffybro Jr.
Source: Youtuber Fluffybro Jr.

In response to all this, Valve has come out to say that it will be stopping sites from gambling on Steam games immediately. An official statement on their site can be found here. Along with this, the statement released to a number of (possibly all) CS:GO gambling sites can be found below.

The list includes such popular sites as csgowild.com and csgobattle.com, including the infamous csgolotto.com

Source: Reddit User BadD0ge
Source: Reddit User BadD0ge

It’s a good thing to see that Valve has officially decided to crackdown on these types of sites. As their statement says, the option of trading sites outside of the game benefits everyone trying to improve their game experience.

Gambling sites like CS:GO Lotto dirty that idea by purely milking people’s hard earned money for the chance of getting something that they want, usually by taking advantage of the naivety of the young players paying for it.

Hopefully, this will be the last we’ll see of these types of sites affecting games on Steam, and better systems for people to interact and share game items with will take their place.