Valve Corporation and Twitch to ban online gambling

Valve and Twitch officially started a stand against casinos and online betting sites which use Steam resources, especially OpenID API. From today, Valve corporation sends warning emails to the owners of such services.

Perhaps, the decision was taken under the pressure of multiple threads to sue Valve for illegal gambling business. One of the prosecutors claimed that Valve sustains and facilitates illegal gambling games, allowing thousands of users to connect their personal Steam accounts  to other sites and use skins as a currency for making bets.

This night, Erik Johnson, Valve corporation representative,  officially commented this situation. He claimed that illegal gambling via Stream accounts has been an urgent problem for a long time.  He also told that corporation does not cooperate with these sites and does not receive any income from these sources.

Valve official statement:

“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 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.”

Twitch administrators also supported Valve corporation. From now it is prohibited for streamers to gamble on casino-featured websites and applications while streaming. According to Twitch, it violates terms of usage, stated by the third party.