Valve warns 23 gambling sites as Twitch bans popular streamer

After finally making its stance clear and coming out against gambling sites like CS:GO Lotto last week, Valve has issued a cease-and-desist letter to 23 Counter-Strike gambling sites that have been using Steam to conduct business in violation of Steam's user agreement. As noted by Kotaku, Valve is demanding that these gambling sites change their practices within 10 days or the company will "pursue all available remedies including without limitation terminating your accounts."

One of the more popular Counter-Strike gambling sites, CS:GO Big, already announced that it would be disabling deposits and temporarily shutting down. Meanwhile, some others, like CSGO500 are planning to make changes in order to continue but in accordance with Valve's terms. "Our main goal here at CSGO500 is to provide an enjoyable service for our users that is both legitimate and interactive," said CSGO500 on its site. "This will continue to be our goal, as we plan on adjusting to the upcoming limitations set by Valve. We assure our users that an alternative is already being worked on, one that will comply with Steam's Terms of Service."

At the same time that Valve has begun cracking down on gambling sites, Twitch (which already made changes to its terms of service as well) has now banned James "PhantomL0rd" Varga, one of its most popular Counter-Strike gambling streamers with 1.3 million followers; that made him the seventh biggest streamer on Twitch, but his channel was closed after he was accused of rigging Counter-Strike: Global Offensive gambling rolls on-stream, Eurogamer noted.