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Armes virtuels et paris réels chez les gamers

Comment Counter strike, auquel nous avons tous joué, est devenu le centre d’attention non plus des joueurs mais des parieurs avec une monnaie bien étrange : la skin.

The boom in pro video gaming is fueled by $2.3 billion in online bets

La mécanique est d’acheter des textures pour les armes du jeu et de parier avec sur les résultats des matchs pro de CS:GO. Le tout sans contrôle ou taxe pour une masse de 2,3 Milliards de dollars en 2015.

“Nothing about Counter-Strike is about the game anymore,” says Moritz Maurer, head of e-sports integrity at gambling watchdog SportIM. “It’s all about betting and winning.”

Le tout avec un niveau d’abstraction et de niche tel qu’il a évité jusqu’ici une attention légale.

When it introduced the skins, Valve said in an announcement that the online arms bazaar would let Counter-Strike players “experience all the thrills of black-market weapons trafficking without any of the hanging around in darkened warehouses getting knifed to death.” It was supposed to be a joke. But the reference to black markets was prescient.

Reasonable people can debate whether competitive video gaming is a sport, but it has at least one thing in common with football, basketball, and soccer: People like to bet on the outcome. For CS:GO, the introduction of skins led to a thriving gambling market. People buy skins for cash, then use the skins to place online bets on pro CS:GO matches. Because there’s a liquid market to convert each gun or knife back into cash, laying a bet in skins is essentially the same as betting with real money.

Source : Virtual Weapons Are Turning Teen Gamers Into Serious Gamblers – Bloomberg