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Friday, October 28, 2016

A Quick Update About Skins Gambling


Last night I made a brief appearance on the Open Comms Show and apparently made some comments in regards to skins gambling I should develop into a full post or two. Some of my comments resulted from my real world belief that established interests lobby for government regulation in order to secure their economic position. One just has to watch the news for how taxi cab companies lobby against Uber and Lyft for examples. Similar regulatory efforts backed by the hotel industry are underway against AirBnB. In EVE, we call this Malcanis' Law.

Where skins gambling, the category of operation that EVE casinos fell into, is concerned, the established real world interests are the brick-and-mortar casinos. If large amounts of money are wagered outside the casinos, the gambling interests have an interest in getting a piece of the action.

Skins gambling, almost if not totally unregulated up until this summer, is such an activity. Up until the legal actions swirling around Valve, one of the leading experts in the field, Chris Grove of Narus Advisors, estimated to grow to become a $20 billion industry in the year 2020. Indeed, one site, CSGOLounge, handled $1 billion in bets in 2016 before Valve began issuing cease-and-desist letters in August. To give some perspective on the amount, in 2014 gambling casinos and other gambling activities run by native Americans generated $26.8 billion. So $20 billion is a lot.

I'm currently in Las Vegas attending the CCP event in Planet Hollywood, so I don't have a lot of time or access to my locally stored reference materials to flesh out the subject with the word count it deserves. Just know that, like EVE itself, a lot of action is occurring below the surface.

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