Twitch bans CS:GO skin gambling sponsorships

Finally, Twitch has decided to put an end to gambling streams related to CS:GO skins. These streams had been plaguing the platform for a long time and were only getting worse, simply because they are highly effective.

No doubt, this move is going to impact a lot of CS:GO streamers because it’s estimated that three-quarters of the most popular ones are sponsored in part by skin gambling sites.

Why skin gambling is a problem

It’s no secret that Valve makes ridiculous amounts of money from selling cases. But these cases wouldn’t be as popular as they are today if the skin market didn’t exist or if the process of purchasing skins did not involve the gambling element.

It’s enough to look at what Riot Games does. If you want to own a skin, you buy it. End of story. When you need to throw the dice so to speak, the situation becomes a lot more complicated. And when you also combine that mechanism with a skin trading market where speculation is rampant, that compounds the problem 100-fold.

CS:GO is played by around 20 million people around the globe, many of whom are minors. For these people, the excitement of opening a case in an attempt to find a rare skin that might be worth hundreds of dollars is real. They don’t realize that the odds are overwhelmingly against them.

I WAS ABOUT TO TAKE A MILLION DOLLAR SPONSOR AND RETIRE 😭 https://t.co/0v7C7bIzSc

— ohnePixel (@ohnePixel) August 2, 2023

Skin gambling websites and those who promote them give people the impression that they could really open a knife skin or some gloves if they try hard enough, when in reality, they’d have to spend thousands of dollars in most cases to find their first Exceedingly Rare item, which will likely be worth somewhere around $500.

Such items have a drop chance of 1/400 and many of them are crappy. But people still feel attracted to opening cases, spending between $3 and $10 per case in most cases. This is obviously good for Valve. With tens of millions of weapon cases getting opened each month, they don’t even need to sell you the game to make a huge profit.

To be fair, the company does put the money to good use. Counter-Strike 2 is about to be launched and Dota 2 is constantly being refined. This wouldn’t be possible without investing huge amounts of money. But it’s still unpleasant to know that much of that money comes from people essentially gambling.

Header: Valve Corporation