The Counter-Strike community has been under heavy fire after many stories of YouTubers promoting illegal gambling, not disclosing sponsorships to viewers, and other shady acts. It has gotten so bad that lawsuits have been filed against Valve and the YouTubers in question.
Today, it has been revealed that Valve is taking action against nearly two dozen websites that allow Steam users to gamble on the popular PC FPS game with cease and desist letters that require all sites to shut down before Valve takes further legal issue.
The statement from Valve sent to the 23 affected sites reads as follows: "We are aware that you are operating one of the gambling sites listed below. You are using Steam accounts to conduct this business. Your use of Steam is subject to the terms of the Steam Subscriber Agreement (“SSA”). Under the SSA Steam and Steam services are licensed for persona, non-commercial use only. Your commercial use of Steam accounts is unlicensed and in violation of the SSA. You should immediately cease and desist further use of your Steam accounts for any commercial purposes. If you fail to do this within ten (10) days Valve will pursue all available remedies including without limitation terminating your accounts.” You can view the affected sites in an image from the cease and desist later below.
The statement was made public by CS:GO gambling site CS:GO Big's official Twitter account and said that they would be "temporarily" shutting down the site and all users should stop using the site and pull all items off the site. It's unclear how temporary this will be as Valve seems to want to make this issue go away permanently.
The rise against the CS:GO gambling community has been growing ever since the controversy started this month. Services like Twitch have made it against the rules to stream any form of gambling and have started dishing out bans to those that don't follow the rules. It's safe to say the gambling portion of CS:GO will be gone very soon as the major sites are being told to take their sites down.
It'll be interesting to see the player drop-off over these next few weeks with players having no way to make tons of money off the game anymore. Could this potentially hurt CS:GO? It's entirely possible. We will keep you updated in the coming weeks as the story continues to develop.
[Kotaku]
