Exposed: Underage Gambling in Counter-Strike

Counter-Strike 2, an online multiplayer first-person shooter video game released in 2023, features items called ‘skins’ that alter the appearance of weapons. Valve Corporation, the developer and publisher of the Counter-Strike franchise and owner of Steam, facilitates community contributions to Counter-Strike through their Steam Workshop, where submissions are voted on by the community and eventually incorporated into the game. Steam users can trade these items, and third-party websites facilitate real-money sales and gambling, typically without any KYC, or ‘know your customer’ verification (“The Dark Side of Counter-Strike 2” 09:27), all of which has led to the complex issue of underage gambling in the Counter-Strike community, due primarily to Valve Corporation’s platform design and lack of gambling-specific regulation in the space. Such practises are evident in the involvement of esports organisations and media personalities, which raises questions about corporate responsibility and industry ethics.

Players of Counter-Strike acquire skins by opening cases. A case is essentially a virtual slot machine, which costs $2.50 to open, and flickers through various items in a collection before landing randomly on one item and rewarding it to the player who opened it. These skins have a real-world value that can range from a few cents to as much as $400,000 on various third-party digital marketplaces, as revealed by a Barron’s investigation by Nick Devor (“Teens and Young Adults Are Hooked”). Players can then use these skins to customize the appearance of weapons or character models in-game. Alternatively, they can trade the skins for in-game currency on Steam’s marketplace, or on third-party markets such as CS.MONEY or BUFF.MARKET, which allow users to trade skins for real cash or cryptocurrency. Players can then gamble these skins by visiting one of the numerous individual gambling websites, which have users deposit their skins into the website’s holding account and participate in games like slots, roulette, and coin flip (“The Dark Side of Counter-Strike 2” 01:05), or in some cases, can even bet on the outcomes of professional matches (“Counter-Strike Is One of the World’s Most Successful Videogames”). Each gambling website is unique in their implementation of gambling mechanics, though all are connected by Steam and its underlying application programming interface, or API, which allows them to pull information from and interact with the Steam ecosystem at scale, in turn enabling their large scale gambling operations to take deposits and execute bets.

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, the former entry in the franchise, released in 2012, garnered an impressive installation base of up to 342 million players worldwide, as tracked by the industry leader Gamalytic. Despite being replaced by Counter-Strike 2 in September 2023, the game’s popularity has endured, with gambling activities continuing unabated. Moreover, Counter-Strike has spawned an astonishing nearly two billion in-game items that are constantly bought, sold, and traded by players globally. And while Valve does not directly release sales figures for its loot boxes, a third-party estimate by CS2 Case Tracker says that players spent $980 million to open more than 400 million cases in 2023 alone (“2023 Year in Review”). These cases make up just one part of an estimated $14 billion industry around esports gambling, as explored in Timothy Geigner’s article on TechDirt. According to data platform Esports Charts, the recent Perfect World Major in Shanghai reached over 1.3 million concurrent viewers across Twitch and YouTube, which shows the rapid growth of this sector can largely be attributed to the increasing popularity of esports in regions such as China and Europe, where tournaments can reach hundreds of millions of viewers.

The introduction of marketplaces for buying, selling, and trading these skins has created a secondary economy. This marketplace allows players to engage in speculative trading, further enhancing the gambling aspect of the game. Players can potentially make a profit by trading skins, leading some individuals to treat these items as investments rather than mere game enhancements. Valve’s approach has raised ethical concerns regarding the impact on younger audiences who may not fully comprehend the financial risks involved. Nick Devor, in his Barron’s investigation, argues that these practices encourage addictive behaviors and expose players to potential financial harm (“Counter-Strike Is One of the World’s Most Successful Videogames”). Additionally, the unregulated nature of this market raises more questions about the transparency and fairness of Valve’s system, as well as its legal ramifications. Overall, the integration of loot boxes and a trading marketplace in Counter-Strike has sparked significant debate about consumer protection and the responsibility of game developers to safeguard their community from potentially harmful practices

In recent years, some organisations have taken a stand by refusing sponsorships from gambling and gambling-related entities, including content hosting websites like Amazon-owned Twitch.tv and Google-owned YouTube. These platforms have banned gambling, gambling-related content, and sponsorships and advertising from gambling organisations, and prominent figures in the Counter-Strike community have taken bans for violating the revised terms of use on YouTube and Twitch (Ed Smith). This led directly to the rise of a new streaming platform, Kick.com, which is owned by online casino Stake, and created an exodus of content creators wishing to take exclusivity contracts with Kick. On this new platform, community members freely stream themselves gambling on Stake-owned gambling websites, as well as on various other Counter-Strike gambling websites like CSGORoll and CSGOEmpire (“The Dark Side of Counter-Strike 2” 01:05). Valve attempted to crack down on gambling organizations in 2016 by sending cease-and-desist letters to 23 prominent names in the Counter-Strike gambling scene (Timothy Lee). Valve’s efforts, however, proved futile when they later disregarded their own rules prohibiting commercial usage of Steam’s API for all Steam users (Kyle Orland). Eventually, the Washington State Gambling Commission got involved in 2016 when they ordered Valve to stop gambling websites from using their platform (“Washington State Gambling Commission orders Valve to stop skins gambling”), though both state and federal prosecutors declined to take up the case for what they called a “low likelihood of [successful] conviction” (Kyle Orland). This sparked outrage from Valve and from industry figures who felt the move was a significant overreach in the government’s authority.

The emergence of Counter-Strike 2 and its intricate ecosystem of skins, gambling, and trading has raised significant ethical concerns regarding the implications for players, particularly the younger demographic. The blend of gaming and gambling, facilitated primarily by the Steam API and Counter-Strike itself, has created a landscape where financial risks are often underestimated, leading to addictive behaviors and great potential for harm. While Valve and other platforms have attempted to regulate and restrict gambling-related activities, the efficacy of these measures remains in question, especially given the continued popularity of gambling within the Counter-Strike community. With the intensifying debate regarding consumer protection and corporate responsibility in the space, gambling activities continue largely unchecked as regulators and developers alike appear unwilling or unable to initiate any process aimed at curbing the problem or its causes, and although Valve has taken steps toward a solution in the past, they now appear unwilling to implement that solution to its fullest extent.

Coffeezilla. “The Dark Side of Counter-Strike 2.” YouTube, 2024/12/22. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v6jhjjVy5Ls

Coffeezilla. “Deception, Lies, and Valve.” YouTube, 2024/12/26. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y

Devor, Nick. “Counter-Strike Is One of the World’s Most Successful Videogames. How It Also Became a Gateway to Gambling.” Barron’s, 2024/02/23. https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/counter-strike-csgo-skins-gambling-gateway-videogames-b21ceef0

Devor, Nick. “‘It Ruined a Lot of Years of My Life.’ Teens and Young Adults Are Hooked on a Different Kind of Gambling.” Barron’s, 2024/12/09. https://www.barrons.com/amp/articles/counter-strike-skin-gambling-addiction-72078828

Geigner, Timothy. “Esports Milestone: Gambling On Esports Will Double To $14 Billion In 2020.” TechDirt, 2020/04/21. https://www.techdirt.com/2020/04/21/esports-milestone-gambling-esports-will-double-to-14-billion-2020/

Lee, Timothy. “Valve sends cease and desists to 23 CS:GO skin betting sites.” ESPN, 2016/07/20. https://www.espn.com/esports/story/_/id/17115903/valve-sends-cease-desists-23-csgo-skin-betting-sites

Orland, Kyle. “Valve refuses government request to cut off Steam skin trading.” Ars Technica, 2016/10/19. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2016/10/valve-pushes-back-against-government-threats-over-steam-skin-gambling/

Smith, Ed. “CSGO gambling sponsorships banned by Twitch, as Valve also cracks down.” PCGamesN, 2023/08/03. https://www.pcgamesn.com/counter-strike-global-offensive/csgo-twitch-gambling

“2023 Year in Review.” CS2 Case Tracker, 2024/01/20. https://csgocasetracker.com/blog/2023-Year-Review

“Counter-Strike 2 - Steam Stats.” Gamalytic, 2025/01/27. https://gamalytic.com/game/730

“Perfect World Shanghai Major 2024.” Esports Charts, 2024/12/15. https://escharts.com/tournaments/csgo/perfect-world-shanghai-major-2024

“Washington State Gambling Commission orders Valve to stop skins gambling.” Washington State Gambling Commission, 2016/10/05. https://wsgc.wa.gov/news/2016/washington-state-gambling-commission-orders-valve-stop-skins-gambling