And with skin sales. Remember that Valve charges a Tax on every item sale. Every time you sell an Item like a skin on the steam market, valve takes a cut. If they crackdown on the gambling it will impact their bottom line.

As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa super team.

Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that they could do more to protect against underage gambling.

I guess it will sounds like I being Valve advocate here, but it's just not only a bottom line. Valve simply dont have headcount to crackdown on many things and neither they have headcount to do lots of predatory stuff too.

Valve is under 400 people and wast majority of them do not work on Steam or specific game like CSGO. Likely each project support team is like 30-50 people at most.

To compare numbers for other companies in 2023-2024:

  * Epic Games - 4000
  * Nintendo - 7,724
  * Sony Interactive Entertainment - 12,700
  * Take-Two Interactive - 12,371
  * Electronic Arts - 13,700
  * Activision Blizzard - 17,000
  * Mircosoft Gaming - 20,100

Might be they do have to go to hire 100 more people to solve this problem and might be it's fully their fault, but expectations many people have of this certainly rich, but small company are not realistic.

Also looking at things like pirate sites, it would be never ending process. Close one and lock the their inventories and 3 will popup somewhere else. It is unlikely to be solvable issue.

Just because you cannot "solve" an issue, does not mean you should do nothing. By that logic valve should not implement VAC, because after all, cheaters will always find a way.

They play the anti-cheat game of cat and mouse, because if they do not, users will stop playing. No one wants to play with cheaters unless they are cheating.

They could definitely invest some resources into this. But they have no monetarily incentive thus they do nothing. I fully expect legal action or fear of it, will eventually make them do something.

They can definitely hire 2-5 people to do something, and at least try to crack down.

> As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products.

Counter strike cases are a gambling product. They cost money to buy, they cost money to open, and they reward with an item worth real money. This is indisputable, and arguing otherwise is either in bad faith or due to ignorance of the platform and surrounding ecosystem.

Valve wouldn’t be making over a billion dollars a year on case openings alone if the outcome of opening a case was worthless 100% of the time.

Yeah the 30% cut is insane, and its surprising to me that game publishers tolerate it under steam. But if you look at the PC games market, you can clearly be successful doing the "self publish" route like Minecraft did.

I think just means that valve has turned their DRM into a value-add for the consumer with cloud backups and item trading and such convenience features. And I say this as someone who uses GOG. You look at other competitors like Epic Games Store or EA or whatever and the user interface is bloated and slow, and it is just a pain to use.

Publishers have discovered that pc gamers prefer Steam over all other platforms. Basically all the big publishers are back on Steam or entering it. After trying to manage outside.

Which is true because people already have large Steam game libraries. I barely game anymore but I must have 3000 games in Steam.

Epic is gnawing at the lead, at least with me, as they give out a free game every week. I must have 300 games in Epic - I've even paid for a few.

Traditional publishers before Steam took even more - this is why companies tolerate it.

Minecraft is the exception that proves the rule. You really need to get lucky to make it big without being on Steam.

From what I gather about the game market, you need to get lucky to make it big being on Steam, too.