In what could prove a world first, an Australian politician is seeking to have games such as the hugely popular Counter-Strike series defined in law as gambling.
Nick Xenophon, the independent senator for South Australia, yesterday announced a bid to have multiplayer first-person shooter games defined as gambling in an update to the current Interactive Gambling Act of 2001.
“This is the Wild West of online gambling that is actually targeting kids,” Xenophon told Fairfax Media.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has become one of the world’s most successful first-person shooter games since introducing its “arm deal” update in August 2013, which allowed virtual weapons known as “skins” obtained in the game to be turned into real-world money.
The skins are assigned a value according to their rarity, but can fetch thousands, and can be bought and sold in the game developer’s own marketplace or third-party sites.
Skins can also be used like casino chips in online games of black jack and roulette.
The gaming research firm Eilers & Krejcik Gaming estimated in June that skin gambling had an annual turnover of as much as $9.74bn.
Of that figure, 25.8% – nearly $2bn – was on lottery-style jackpot games.
Nearly 14% or $1bn was spent on roulette and 5.6% or $414mn on flipping coins.
It also forecast that the market would continue to grow steadily.
The practice of skins gambling is understood to be widespread among young gamers, sparking concern among game developers and academics.
A Brisbane teenager told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that he had lost about $1,800 from gambling on skins after having stolen his father’s credit card.
He said he had been inspired by top players who had posted videos of their big wins to YouTube and the video-game streaming platform Twitch.