OPSkins finds themselves in the crosshairs of Valve legal team.
Back in March 2018 Valve started a seven-day cooldown period for skins trading. According to the developers of CSGO, this was to combat fraud and misuse of Steam Accounts. Just a few days ago, a website called OPSkins launched a service that they call ExpressTrade which uses Steam bots to facilitate what they call “free and instant trades among friends.”
Unfortunately for OPSkins, Valve has contacted the website to essentially give them a cease and desist order from using intellectual property of Valve that they say violates the Steam Subscriber agreement. In the letter, Valve asks the company to remove all intellectual property in the Express Trade feature and in the promotion of the site. It asks that OPSkins cease use of said property by June 21st, 2018.
OPSkins has issued a statement to their patrons in which they claim Valve’s effort is to drive traffic to its own Steam Community Market. Whatever the case, it sounds like the company is going to comply with Valve’s demands. “While Valve says that the reason is Express Trade, we expect that this is yet another effort from Valve to drive sales to Steam Community Market. ExpressTrade is a non-commercial use of Steam bots since it is free. It is designed to benefit the community by allowing free and instant trades among friends.”
The company claims that customer money is safe with OPSkins and that they aren’t going anywhere despite Valve’s shutdown of the fledgling service. Valve, on the other hand, warns that they will disable OPSkins Steam accounts associated with trade on Steam by the June 21st date and that all customer obligations should be resolved prior to that date.
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