Final claim in CS:GO skin gambling lawsuit dismissed because plaintiffs never actually used Steam
On January 7, a US federal court dismissed one last claim against Valve in a years-old lawsuit over CS:GO skin gambling. The case was part of a series of 2016 lawsuits that accused Valve of facilitating unregulated gambling on third-party websites where people could wager CS:GO skins, some of which sell for more than $1,000 on the Steam Marketplace. All of those suits have now been dismissed.
Back in 2016, stories about teens blowing through their parents' credit card limits to buy keys for CS:GO weapon cases so they could gamble skins on black market websites hit mainstream news. «Virtual weapons are turning teen gamers into serious gamblers,» Forbes reported. Valve received some harsh words from the Washington State Gambling Commission at the time, but in the end, Gabe Newell and company seem to have avoided any lasting legal damage from the controversy.
In part, that's because one of the allegations—the one that was just dismissed—relied on the claim that the plaintiffs were deceived by Valve despite never having used Steam or played any of its games. The court was not convinced.
The suit in question was brought by parents who said they discovered that their kids were spending the money they gave them on CS:GO weapon cases and then wagering skins on gambling sites. It claimed that Valve «facilitated» illegal online gambling through third-party websites like CSGO Lounge and that it misled the public about the sort of business it was running. Over the course of several years, the claims were whittled down by the court until there were none left.
The first blow to the case was something we've scrolled past in every terms of service document we've ever signed: arbitration. The Steam Subscriber Agreement says that if
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