I wasn’t saying the exchange for money happens on Valve’s servers, but it’s Valve who oversees everyone’s inventory. You could hack the game and run a third party account server and give yourself all the knives but they would not be recognized by Valve and thus worthless, unless you convince exchanges that your server is trustworthy and has assets behind it.
Ah, in terms of the Steam inventory API, it’s completely unregulated. All purchases are steam platform only, but trades between players are unmonitored (with the exception of requiring both sides to authenticate the trade).
I wasn’t saying the exchange for money happens on Valve’s servers, but it’s Valve who oversees everyone’s inventory. You could hack the game and run a third party account server and give yourself all the knives but they would not be recognized by Valve and thus worthless, unless you convince exchanges that your server is trustworthy and has assets behind it.
Ah, in terms of the Steam inventory API, it’s completely unregulated. All purchases are steam platform only, but trades between players are unmonitored (with the exception of requiring both sides to authenticate the trade).