Playing your favorite game does not only include gameplay. Appearance is equally important. Thus the emergence of skins in certain games has attracted many gamers and allowed them to customize their characters to gain a unique appearance.
Although it can be really fun to model your character based on your personal taste and unique looks, skin purchases have become a topic of scrutiny and controversy.
Unique and expensive skins for various games are causing players to spend more of their time and money. But the emergence of skin gambling is what people are even more concerned about. Instead of betting with the help of regulated operator, for example, gamers try to incorporate betting into gaming in different ways!
What is Skin Gambling?
First of all, skin gambling is a completely new phenomenon that has arisen with the emergence of eSports betting. Players who acquire skins while playing games can now use them to bet on popular eSports events. This is most popular in games like CS:GO where the skin craze originates from.
To put it simply, people use skins for weapons, knives, and gear and place outright bets on CS:GO matches to win more skins. Skins can cost quite a pretty penny and players who win a lot may incur a much heftier sum of money than they would by playing the game constantly.
Is Skin Gambling Dangerous?
Although many people don’t relate skin gambling to a traditional form of sports betting, a lot would disagree. In fact, in order to get skins, you have to invest time or money. You still have to place a bet on an event in hopes to get more skins, which you can later use to incur other skins or more revenue for yourself.
As you can see, it does sound suspiciously close to gambling.
Many parents are concerned that skin gambling is a gateway that may lead to other forms of real gambling. Young gamers may be influenced by this phenomenon which might tip them over to start doing this in a much more serious way and cause them to develop addictive habits.
Skin Gambling Controversy
Where there is money involved there is always going to be controversy. Back in 2016, two YouTubers devised a secret CS:GO gambling site where they pretended to win large amounts of money on. Additionally, one CS:GO team lost a match on purpose just to win skins amounting to thousands of dollars.
Match-fixing has also crept its way into gaming as you can see as some professional players began to thin more on the financial side and less on gaming itself.
To Conclude
Gaming is supposed to be fun and relaxing. We all started playing games because we enjoy it. Then we started sharing it with our friends and began playing together. Which eventually led to teams and eSports events.
However, video game companies and developers will never stop exploiting gamers for making in-game purchases. We can live with that. However, allowing it to be affected by gambling and taking things too far is absolutely not good. Skin gambling is a problem that we all have to take seriously and think long and hard before we decide to do it.