Quote Originally Posted by oskar View Post
"And what legal limit is that? They offer things to buy? And some people buy them?"
CS:GO betting sites are very grey area. You can bet skins that have no monetary value outside the steam marketplace, you can upload cosmetic skins to the gambling site and they only pay out skins, so they neatly avoid any gambling laws, but there are other sites that allow you to bulk sell or buy skins in exchange for cash.
On the less obvious end of the spectrum there's item drop systems that are carbon copied from slot machines, but without any of the regulations involved with slot machines. So you don't know the odds, the odds are subject to change and they might do things like lower the odds the more you spend. Someone even dug up a patent by some game publisher that was a system to match worse players with much better players who had certain items to entice them to buy those.
So unless publishers ease up on that crap, which they're not going to, government agencies will start to see that as a place to make easy money, and then we're going to be nostalgic about the time it was just the FCC blasting us in the ass.
And also the whole tmartyn and prosyndicate thing, "forgetting" to disclose they owned the actual sites they were lootboxing on, then claiming amnesia, then apologizing