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You Can't Gift ‘Counter-Strike’ on Steam Right Now, and Cheaters May Be to Blame

Valve claims players who receive Counter-Strike: Global Offensive as a gift don't stick around, but players suspect other reasons.
Image: Valve.

The Steam Summer Sale is in full swing, that magical event in PC gaming when piles of new games on the popular digital distribution platform get their prices slashes to numbers bargain bins might wince at. Normally it comes and goes without a hitch, and the wallets of players get thinner while those at Steam owner Valve get fatter. But this year, oddly enough, Valve's not making it so easy to buy multiple copies of one of its most popular games. More specifically, it's only letting players buy sale copies of its popular shooter Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for themselves rather than as gifts.

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It didn't take long for Valve's Ido Magal to post an explanation of sorts on Reddit.

"CS:GO will not be giftable during the sale," Magal wrote. "Our goal with sales is to grow the community and historically, during sales, the new users that stick around are mainly the ones that purchase copies for themselves."

Image: Valve.

"Oh, bullshit," the Steam community seemed to say collectively immediately afterward. The statement has a whiff of truth, but it's hard to buy into the idea that gifting won't help build the community of a game that's pulled in over 474,000 players today alone. For that matter, gifting has always been a great method of growing a game's community, particularly for one that's four years old like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Many community-based games, such as the massively multiplayer online role-playing game Final Fantasy XIV, actively encourage it. (A notable exception is Blizzard Entertainment, which has done little to make the gifting of its popular arena shooter Overwatch easy on the PC. But even it champions "recruit-a-friend" promotions for its famed MMO World of Warcraft.)

Perhaps Magal's listed reason is the real one. But the gaming community loves nothing so much as theorizing what's "really" going on behind the industry's curtains, and it only took a few minutes for rumors to start swirling within the same thread in the wake of Magal post. By far the most obvious one is the Valve is trying to head off third-party digital retailers like G2A, some of whom take advantage of the massive deals during the sale to grab game codes and then sell them at a lower price than retail after the sale ends on July 4. Considering CS:GO is available for 50 percent off on Steam right now—down from an economy-wrecking price of $14.99—that could make for some hefty profits later on even with a 25 percent discount.

But as CS:GO, which enjoys a healthy eSports community, was the only Valve game affected, I'm more inclined to buy into the other major theory being bandied about. Pathetic as it sounds, it's well known that some Counter-Strike players so dedicated to cheating that they stockpile game codes during sales like these so they can quickly bounce back into the game after whatever account they were using gets banned by Valve Anti-Cheat, Valve's built-in, zero-tolerance method for catching anyone not playing by the rules. This, sadly, is nothing new—PC Gamer was talking about the negative effect the practice had on the game back in 2014. Valve's action was thus likely meant to curb this recurring trend.

A harsh move, perhaps, but it's probably a right one for the times. We recently saw how players of Valve's Team Fortress 2 has managed to cheat for five years even with Valve Anti-Cheat looming over their shoulders, and they might still be cheating now had not a player passed along the cheat's source code to Valve itself. Elsewhere, the fear of cheating even hangs over eSports matches where players compete for money. There's always a chance, of course, that this isn't the real reason after all, but the fact that it seems so believable says much about how thoroughly cheating pollutes online gaming.