One of the main questions Valve's response poses is how this will affect the popularity of not only CS:GO but Dota 2 as well. There are several betting sites which use the OpenID API to gain information about each user's items--the main benefit of this is to dodge any legal issues with gambling actual currency at ages under 18. There are plenty of kids betting on sites like csgolounge with skins instead of cash. Additionally, this is what made these sites so lucrative to knowledgeable betters as the odds were heavily based upon the amount of bets were placed on each team.

Essentially if you had a popular team competing against a relatively unknown team, casual betters (most of the time children) would bet their skins on the fan favorite. If you were actually knowledgeable about each team, their players, and their backgrounds you could make easy cash by playing the odds. By taking down these sites, Valve has restricted the online betting systems to legal gambling and probably decrease the amount of activity their games see--I'm convinced a large portion of viewers were only watching matches for betting purposes.

I wonder if this will harm the communities or make for smaller and healthier (less exploitative) communities in the long run...