With the speed at which news comes out in the gaming industry we sometimes miss important or news worthy things. Some of these things we want to talk about in a way that is both easy for you guys and allows us to get all the facts together as some of these stories develop quickly. Sometimes we also just cover topics that we find interesting and want to discuss.
CSGO Lotto Owners Settle FTC’s First-Ever Complaint
This bit of news is more of conclusion to an ongoing story “two social media influencers who are widely followed in the online gaming community, have settled Federal Trade Commission charges that they deceptively endorsed the online gambling service CSGO Lotto, while failing to disclose they jointly owned the company.” as the FTC puts in their official press release that you can read in its entirety here.
Wiggin’s thoughts on the subject: They ran the website CSGO Lotto and used Twtich and Youtube and other social media sites to show themselves winning large sums of money in the currency of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skins that are worth quite a bit of real world currency. They failed to disclose to anyone publicly that they owned the site unless you went and looked up the articles of incorporation paperwork. Nothing their main demographic would know how or bother to do. They profited from the exposure of their own site when other people would go to bet their in-game skins trying to replicate the videos uploaded to the internet of the owners winning large sums of money. One can be seen here.
Now the two this press release they are talking about are Trevor “TmarTn” Martin and Thomas “Syndicate” Cassell have gotten off scot free exploiting their position of influence and power to profit directly by lying and misleading to potential customers. I can’t emphasize this part enough that what they did would be 100% illegal if this was a regular online sports betting site. Not only do they fail to disclose that they own the site in any form until after they were exposed and went back and changed their video descriptions as has been clearly documented by H3H3 Production’s video.
What these two did was disingenuous and morally illegal yet the FTC failed to levy any actual ramifications against them for what they did and that part is the part that hurts the most. They should of been severely punished for their behavior and many including myself are left wondering happened to cause them not be punished.
L.A. Noire Coming to VR
I figured to end today on an interesting bit of news. Rockstar Games has announced that it is releasing a standalone VR game with seven cases from the original game for the HTC Vive.
They are also re-releasing L.A. Noire on PS4 and Xbox one. The full announcement can be found here.
Wiggin’s thoughts on the subject: While this seems neat at face value it kind of comes off as a cash grab from Rockstar in regards to re-releasing a game we already have again just with VR. It’s not even going to have new cases for players to figure out and enjoy, it will just have cases that many have already solved. I would of loved to see new cases developed for the VR experience but I realize that’s not realistic due to circumstances.
