[funflame]

The game is rated as 'Mature 17+', and Steam has an age confirmation page before accessing the store page of the game. Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids?

I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.

[bertylicious]

It's not that simple. The real problem is that Valve allows items to be sold in markets outside of Valve's control which allows third party gambling websites to operate. And you guessed right, they basically don't care about your age. Valve of course knows this but won't do anything, because they make profits off all transactions happening in third party markets. Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos. Coffeezilla did an in-depth piece on this: https://youtu.be/q58dLWjRTBE

[walkabout]

> Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos

I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.

The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.

The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.

(Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)

[retsibsi]

> age confirmation page

You know this is meaningless.

> Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids?

An alternative would be not to run a gambling business. If that's too much to ask, then yeah, they probably should be required to exclude children.

> I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.

This implies that casinos (and liquor stores, and tobacconists, and so on) should be allowed to serve children.

[paradoxyl]

Should 17-year-olds be gambling? They're still in high school, the high-tech excuse of blaming the parents while pocketing billions of dollars is odious and convincing a jury to slap these companies with tobacco industry levels of damage remains feasible.

[Spacemolte]

Nope, just no. When you make billions you have another kind of responsibility, you can't just brush that off as a problem with parenting.

I'm willing to bet a lot of the young people struggling with gambing addictions started with loot boxes like the ones valve make a ton of money on.

[portaouflop]

Loot boxes in itself are the problem.

You can’t make a non-toxic free2play game.

People need to buy from stores like GoG and stop supporting f2p games at all.

Of course that’s never going to happen; an entire generation was raised on f2p