I remember simpler times when Dota and CS:GO items existed to give our wizards fancy hats and our AWPs hideous paintjobs. Now they’re used as chips in unofficial gambling. They’ve sparked lawsuits accusing Valve of enabling illegal underage gambling and seen scandals over YouTubers being secretly paid to promote skin gambling sites – or even secretly owning the sites they promoted. Oh dear. What’s new in the world of skin gambling this week? Well, Valve started sending “cease and desist” letters and more players and YouTubers became implicated in shenanigans.

If this sounds dry, don’t worry: someone named Karl Quackenbush is involved.

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Phew, finally we get some new names in the Steam top 10 (previous weeks here’n’that), after the chokehold of the Steam Summer Sale is loosened. I did not expect that number 1, but I really> did not expect that number 10.

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Valve have announced they will start cracking down on websites which use Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site] weapon skins and Dota 2 items as chips for gambling. For years they’ve quietly tolerated them, but recent gambling scandals and lawsuits have given Valve and CS:GO a lot of nasty attention. They’ve had enough of it.

I always knew ‘skin gambling’ would be part of our dystopian future but, to be honest, I had thought it’d be fleshier.

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Not much moving, not much shaking in last week’s top ten best-sellers, as the after-effects of the Steam sale are still felt and, without many major new releases or breakout hits, there’s that creeping sense of PC games in 2016 returning to business as usual. HERE COMETH THE BRANDS. We do get one new entry though, and it’s a pretty one. … [visit site to read more]

No new indie millionaries this week: we’re still looking at the consequences of the Steam Summer Sale, so the weekly list of best-sellers is entirely devoid of new releases. Hordes of people who’d sat on the fence about 2015’s big games jumped on the discounts, and that means many familiar names. Of course, you discerning bunch went and bought all the games we recommended instead, didn’t you?

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[Update: Okay! So, gambling site CSGOLotto was blocked by an overzealous volunteer moderator rather than by high order from Valve, another community mod has explained, and the warning is now removed. However! Since this all kicked off, a YouTuber with almost half a million subscribers has admitted he was paid in valuable skins for undisclosed promotional videos faking big wins in a different weapon skin lottery. Ooh there’s a lot of shady business going on all right.]

Let’s skip to the takeaway message then we can fill in the details: never gamble with your imaginary guns if you’re not prepared to lose everything or be made to look like a mug. Okay, so! Valve do not endorse the sites which use Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site] weapon skins as a currency for gambling but they do at least mostly tolerate them. This week, however, they have taken the rare step of warning against one particular skin lottery after it was discovered that famous YouTubers who made videos praising it were the site’s owners.

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A shorter than usual weekly Steam best-sellers chart this week, primarily because almost everything is explained simply by the words “Steam Summer sale”, but partly because I’ve already spent a chunk of today compiling a big list of Sale recommendations to help our beloved readers’ purchasin’ decisions. You can have a pithy and/or explantory line about each game next week, promise. Meantime: these are the ten best-selling games on Steam last week. Expect next week’s to look wildly different, thanks to the ongoing and regularly changing sale. … [visit site to read more]

Like a man dancing to Belle & Sebastian, last week’s best-selling Steam games saw some shaking at the top but not a lot of movement below. IS YOUR FAVOURITE GAME HERE AND WHAT DOES IT SAY ABOUT YOU AS A PERSON IF IT’S NOT? … [visit site to read more]

I am genuinely surprised by which game sold best on Steam last week (previous weeks here, btw). PC gaming remains beautifully unpredictable, doesn’t it?

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The Counter-Strike: Global Offensive [official site] blog has announced the winners of the recent Polycount weapon finish contest. I don’t think we usually cover that side of things and I’m quite uncomfortable talking about guns with any level of excitement, but I liked the colour palette of the winning design so I decided to dig a bit deeper to see how the process works and how the designs develop. The theme was 70s and 80s science-fiction.

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