The fight of the CS: GO publisher and Steam operator Valve against illegal skin sales sites goes into the next round. For years Valve has been trying to trade Counter-Strike: Global Offensive To prevent skins from mostly dubious third-party providers. Finally, the Steam Community Market is an official and safe alternative from Valve itself.

The trade in CS: GO skins should be limited to Steam

Valve announced today that it is the operator of the OPSkins.com Page have officially notified trading with CS: GO skins and any other content that is copyrighted by Valve. Valve relies on that Steam Subscriber Agreement, which all Steam users had to agree to.

The reason for the now escalating dispute is likely the introduction of the ExpressTrade Features of OPSkins. With the new functionality, OPSkins provides a new, faster and cheaper method to trade CS: GO items.

That probably broke the barrel and just a few hours after the feature was released, a Valve attorney wrote the cease and desist letter.

Here is the official release from Valve:

For the last two years, Valve has enforced our Steam Subscriber Agreement terms as described in this post.

In March 2018, we applied a seven-day trade cooldown to CS: GO trades, to fight fraud and misuse of Steam Accounts.

On June 6, OPSkins launched ExpressTrade, which uses Valve intellectual property and violates our Steam Subscriber Agreement, and is already being used by other businesses to avoid Valve policies.

Today we messaged OPSkins to cease using Valve intellectual property. We also notified them that we will lock OPSkins Steam Accounts by June 21st, 2018.

Message sent to OPSkins:

Request to cease and desist via Twitter

If you are wondering why Valve is sending a legally binding document such as a cease and desist request via Twitter Message sends, apparently there is no postal address or business email address from OPSkins and so this route was chosen. Unthinkable on German websites, but there is really no imprint of the provider.

The meanwhile published answer by OPSkins, offers little tangible evidence, only assurances that players' money is safe and that there is no real cause for concern.

At this point we would like to emphasize that Valve is clearly the Blocking of all accounts linked to OPSkins from June 21st. Everyone with credit on the site should see that they can withdraw it as soon as possible.