Valve Is Being Sued Over Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Gambling
According to Polygon, a Counter-Strike: Global Offensive player by the name of Michael John McLeod has filed a lawsuit against Valve for creating an environment in which an "illegal online gambling market" exists. McLeod alleges that Valve has known about the market and has even been "complicit" in insuring that such a market did come to exist.
Polygon included the following quote from a Bloomberg article published earlier this year that explains how such a market could exist.
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.
With that in mind, the key allegations are as follows.
In sum, Valve owns the league, sells the casino chips, and receives a piece of the casino’s income stream through foreign websites in order to maintain the charade that Valve is not promoting and profiting from online gambling, like a modern-day Captain Renault from Casablanca. That most of the people in the CS:GO gambling economy are teenagers and under 21 makes Valve’s and the other Defendants’ actions even more unconscionable.
You can find the entirety of the lawsuit embedded below.
