The Guardian recently reported that South Australian Senator Nick Xenophon is making a push to have multiplayer first-person shooters like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive defined as gambling after recent controversies surrounding the game.
Xenophon points to the recent CS:GO gambling scandal, involving YouTube, Twitch and Valve’s Steam platform APIs, as reason enough to include games in the genre as ones needed to be legislated under the Interactive Gambling Act 2001.
Senator Xenophon called the games “insidious” and said they’re “morphing into full-on gambling, and that itself is incredibly misleading and deceptive”. Xenophon added that the Interactive Gambling Act 2001 was outdated.
“There are lots of unwitting parents out there who don’t realise their kids are being groomed to gamble this way,” he added. “This is the Wild West of online gambling that is actually targeting kids.”
A Brisbane teenager told the ABC that he’d lost around $1,800 AUD in CS:GO skin gambling.
Valve has taken steps to block third-party gambling sites from using its APIs, and streaming providers like Twitch have also cracked down on streams of this nature.
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