this post was submitted on 08 Jan 2025
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It uses their API to trade and sell the skins. They are in total control of what happens with them. There are many ways they could stop them, but they don't want to because it makes them money. They want to be seen acting like they're trying to stop them, but without actually doing anything impactful.
They could also easily do some analysis of trades and see which accounts are owned by the gambling sites and ban them, and nuke their inventory. They have full access to the data of who traded what when with whom. With some statistical modeling and maybe some fake trades, it'd be easy to figure out. They won't even try.
I'm not sure they'd want the legal hassle.
As long as Steam allows skins trading these sites will exist. I can't see them removing this feature from their community because of activity off their platform.
Locking a trading account and nuking the inventory just means that one site will shut down - the operator will likely just set up a new one and a while bunch of users will be angry at Valve.
If enough money is at stake Valve might even find themselves sued by the site operators. "Tortious Interference" is what it's called here.
If consenting adults enter into agreements outside of Steam, what business is it of Valve's to interfere?
Legal hassle? How would there be legal hassle? There's nothing requiring them to allow this to happen. In fact, it's against the terms of service.
You're just making up excuses for why they should do nothing, when it's easily within their power to stop it. They did a lot of work using machine learning to detect hackers in CS. That same thing could trivially detect accounts mass-trading and link them to gambling sites, then block them. If these companies lose enough money, they'd stop popping up.
Most players don't participate in this, so the vast majority wouldn't care, and likely would praise them for it.