It was more than two weeks ago, and the subsequent weeks have been taken up by all sorts of game announcements and some kind of poke-based mangos, so maybe you’ve forgotten about the lawsuit leveled at Valve regarding Steam-based gambling. Said lawsuit stated that Valve both knew of and benefited from a Counter-strike: Global Offensive gambling site for real-world money. This is no doubt a good part of the reason why Valve has issued a statement denying any connection to any and all gambling sites while simultaneously promising to shut them down. According to the statement itself:
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.
The announcement also explains the technical methodology used to facilitate these businesses and that Valve does not receive any profit from these sites. No word on how this will affect the lawsuit, but it looks like any hopes of gambling via Steam is going to be vanishing very soon. Good news for players, bad news for the gambling sites.
