Why Is Social Responsibility Ignored in Esports?

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What is social responsibility in Esports you might ask? Well, it’s a great question, seeing as it’s something that for the most part has been ignored. With the exception of some streamers being involved in charity events, there is very little Esports organizations do to support those in need.

When you look at major sports teams (and it’s not even major sports teams, it’s most professional sports teams) you’ll see they take their social responsibility seriously. This doesn’t just mean to act appropriately like a role model, but to respect the area you operate in and not to expose people, particularly their younger fans, to anything inappropriate.

A quick google search offers up some fantastic examples of this.

In December 2015, parts of northern England were severely flooded and thousands of people’s houses and livelihoods were affected. What did Carlisle United Football Club do? You know, all those privileged footballers who are the highest paid people in the area? They visited as many people as they could to help them with their flooded homes.

You’d be hard pressed to find a semi-professional football club that doesn’t engage in some community based activities. Even players who only play part time and receive little or no salary visit children’s hospitals. Larger clubs might run fundraising campaigns to help the homeless or donate unused food and supplies to charity.

Or the most prosperous of them all, Chelsea FC: a company owned by a Russian Billionaire. They make a point of investing in local projects. They work with 493 schools, invested £4.9m into the community in terms of football facilities and gear which saw 910,000 underprivileged children spend some time off the streets and on the field.

Why did they do this? They don’t have to, but seeing as they’re incredibly influential entities, not only is it fantastic PR to help the community, to continue the Football clubs legacy with the locals, but it also gives back something to causes which those who support them may also support.

Esports has been growing at an alarming rate over the past couple of years. We now see some Esports players earning more than the Carlisle footballers. With this comes some responsibility. I’m confident that almost all players are portraying themselves as suitable role models. None of them have been flagged for inappropriate behaviour from what I can see, and thus far, everything is rosy. Most importantly, you don’t tune into players’ streams to watch them play on skin jackpot sites. We aren’t saying they couldn’t do more, but neither are we calling for them to start being overly charitable. They are being responsible – and that is all we as a community should expect of them.

Away from the players, we have the very real issue of skin betting constantly rearing its ugly head. This is a massive problem that keeps taking over young people’s lives, and nothing is actively being done to curb it. In this instance, the main issue with skin betting is that there is no age verification in place. Regulated betting websites have strict age verification, commonly known as “know your customer” which is a condition of their licensing. Breaching these regulations has severe penalties, including losing your license. On the other hand, skin betting sites do not check their customers’ ages, so children are able to bet.

CSGO Betting is here to educate as to the dangers of skin betting, and real money betting for that matter.

We however have major concerns about the biggest CSGO community website actively advertising skin jackpot sites with incredibly misleading wording.

Here is a print screen from January 24th, 2016. This banner has been on the site for as long as I can remember however.

I have three massive issues with this advert:

• Ad copy is everything when accompanied by enticing imagery. Your eye is drawn to the Dragon Lore and the copy “Need a Dragon Lore? Get it now” is more than enough to make anyone click it. You are then just taken straight to a skin jackpot website. There is no mention of how to get the Dragon Lore anywhere. In reality, one can only conclude you need to enter a jackpot at the same time as a Dragon Lore being in there in order to “get” one. So you’re essentially asking someone to gamble high value items in the hope to win a Dragon Lore, which may or may not be in the pot? You don’t see traditional betting advertising saying “Come and get your free money” – If they did they’d feel the full force of the Advertising Standards Authority.

• Why are HLTV.org pushing skin betting/jackpot sites? They know the problem is at a pandemic stage. Every 12 year old starting out with CSGO knows how in-game items are status symbols and introducing skin betting to a minor is a massive no. Not to mention how much of a taboo skin betting is currently and how it leads to people questioning the integrity of competition. We all know it can be dodgy, yet the likes of HLTV will continue to take from the hand that feeds them. Don’t blame them too much for that, but have some common sense. It just doesn’t look good.

• They also advertise EGB and Fanobet. EGB has been unable to show on request where they hold a gambling license. This needs to be displayed prominently on their website to show they adhere to localised gambling legislation. They don’t. Your money is not safe there. Fanobet makes it even clearer that skins are the same as any other currency, accepting bets with skins in matches on other sports, not just CounterStrike. I need not say why this is a terrible idea.

I can’t wait for skin betting to be outlawed and these business owners be held accountable for promoting underage, illegal gambling. It’s a disgrace.