(credit: Image courtesy of Valve)

Valve Software is facing potential legal trouble in the form of two recent lawsuits, both of which revolve around the company’s games being connected to third-party gambling sites. While the game maker and Steam store operator did not offer a public response when the suits were filed, Valve has finally gone on the record to denounce the gambling issues that have arisen—yet at the same time did not announce definitive action against the third-party sites in question.

Those sites, which include Florida-based CSGOLotto, traffic mostly in the “skins” (meaning, cosmetic items) that can either be earned or purchased for small, non-refundable fees in the game Counter Strike: Global Offensive. These can be traded to the gambling sites via Steam Marketplace features, at which point they essentially become poker chips for those sites’ gambling features. In some cases, those skins can then be cashed out for real money.

A Wednesday statement written by Valve’s Erik Johnson said that the game maker does not directly profit from these gambling sites’ actions: “We have no business relationships with any of these sites. We have never received any revenue from them. And Steam does not have a system for turning in-game items into real world currency.” Johnson then explained that the gambling sites work by creating and maintaining their own Steam accounts, through which they conduct virtual item trading on a massive scale.