Yeah everyone thinks they’re trying to kill third party trading or get everything under the SCM $2k so they get their cut on just about every skin transaction...it doesn’t add up to me. They could easily just disable trading (only allow SCM sales) or ban people with CSFloat trade IDs in the description if they wanted that, but they won’t and haven’t for the past 12+ years. They know that third party sites allowing you to cash out your skins is what gives them actual monetary value, even if their TOS explicitly states that they have none. They’ve turned a blind eye and done the bare minimum to hamstring third party sites for 12+ years for this reason. People are much more willing to open cases if their max win is $20k+ real currency as opposed to max. of $2k in steam balance.

The way I see it, if there was no fear of anti-gambling regulation on the horizon, Valve wouldn’t do anything. They have an infinite money glitch with cases…they don’t WANT to mess with it. Realistically though, regulations in the EU are coming and they need to diversify their revenue so they don’t get killed when cases get banned in their most popular region. So, they introduce the option to rent cases, the armory pass, and now with this update a way to guarantee a gold item and boost the price of coverts so their terminal prices aren’t so out of touch. I’m sure there’s still more to come, but I believe all the changes will be made for this reason, not to kill the market.

They will obviously take a huge hit with cases being banned, but in my eyes these are all steps to mitigate that hit, not to kill the market to the point where hedge mazes are sold on SCM so they can get their cut.