Valve to take action against betting and gambling sites who are using openID API.

There have been enormous number of betting sites available where anyone can go and bet in game items and make money.

But everything has it’s own dark side where people are getting addicted to betting and gambling. As the items used to gamble or bet are basically items from Valve which are ingame cosmetics. Since Valve have left an option to the community for exchanging items with their friends. It is now used as a way of betting and gambling on 3rd party sites.

A recent announcement from Valve states

In 2011, we added a feature to Steam that enabled users to trade in-game items as a way to make it easier for people to get the items they wanted in games featuring in-game economies.

Since then a number of gambling sites started leveraging the Steam trading system, and there’s been some false assumptions about our involvement with these sites. 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.

These sites have basically pieced together their operations in a two-part fashion. First, they are using the OpenID API as a way for users to prove ownership of their Steam accounts and items. 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). Second, they create automated Steam accounts that make the same web calls as individual Steam users.

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.

-Erik Johnson

Valve will soon be taking actions against the betting and gambling websites to improve the community which is moving towards gambling and betting. Since the community is full of youth’s and mainly aged between 15-27, it is important from valve’s point of view to put a stop to Gambling.

This action will also improve the professional gaming scene. As many of players are found betting against their own team and deliberately losing the game for the sake of winning the money attained from betting. This has always been an issue for the community and puts a bad reference to the viewers and newcomers. This action will also allow to decrease the amount of match fixing which have already been a thread to the competitive scene. Eventually, if valve decides to take an action against the current ongoing websites with regards to certain lawsuits. We can see a potential of gambling and betting websites to go down soon.

We here at Talkesport suggest people to withdraw their deposits from such websites as their deposits may be in danger.

Since Many of the websites have now stopped taking deposits and can go down soon. If the website goes down, Valve won’t be responsible for any of your losses since betting and gambling of Valve’s cosmetics are marked illegal by Valve.