People Make Games
5 HN recommenders · recommended in 7 months, 2022–2025
36:24 · 425K views · Nov 7, 2022
People Make Games investigates the unregulated CS:GO skin gambling economy and Valve's role in it. It includes interviews with people who lost large sums and examines why Valve does not intervene.
HN recommends it as well-researched reporting on skin gambling, especially its effect on minors, in threads about gambling and Valve.
8 comments from Hacker News
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. this video
> 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: this video [0]: [LINK] [1]: [LINK]
> This is inane bullshit. It's a video game. I think you may be unaware of the extent to which players, including children, are engaging in real-money gambling at the periphery of video games. Here's some recent reporting on the topic. this video Tl;Dw there's a thriving, multibillion dollar gray market for gambling with cosmetic items in games, as well as a market for trading these items for real money. Together this creates stealth real money casinos.
For people interested in this topic, the "People Make Games" channel on YouTube have a couple of related videos with original research/interviews: * "How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos": < this video > * "Working at Valve: 'A Fearless Adventure' or 'Lord of the Flies'?": < [LINK] >
It's not even just loot boxes, but them letting people gamble with the items (which can be worth a lot of money!) on unregulated gambling sites that allow minors. It's insidious stuff. Good video on it: this video