How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos

What people said

crtasm · 2023-04 · Strong recommendation

More people need to see interviews such as those in the People Make Games video "How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos" - skip to 15mins for them. [VIDEO]

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crtasm · 2025-12 · Recommendation

Their games and systems tie into huge gambling operations on 3rd party sites If you have 30mins for a video I recommend People Make Games' documentary on it [VIDEO]

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pityJuke · 2025-02 · Recommendation

> Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without spending it? Critically, Valve allows you to trade items. This results in a couple of downstream effects: 1. Items have real-world value because they can be traded for money outside of Steam. Multiple sites exist for people to convert items into real-world money (certain rare items have been sold for >$1m [0]). 2. As these items have value, they can serve as a surrogate for money in casinos, or for sports betting. 3. This can even lead to money laundering [1]. As such, skins should be considered money, but the sites running these services don't. Therefore, it is trivial for a child to walk into a game store, buy Steam credit, use that credit to buy skins, and then spend that money on literal gambling (as very few sites have KYC). I know because I've actively partaken in it as a child. Even cryptocurrency is harder: most legitimate exchanges attempt to do identity validation. Some video resources that might be useful: - Coffeezilla: [LINK] - People Make Games: [VIDEO] [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK]

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