[mmt]

To be fair, it was a response to my accusation of legitimate exchange for real-world money, which, if any grey-market is involved, is technically not fully legitimate (according to, e.g. Steam).

There's also the argument that, because Steam makes an active effort to resist the grey-market exchnges, that gives them some kind of deniability or "legal protection". I believe that both you and I agree that it does not, at least not in any meanigful sense. I also doubt that was their motivation in the first place, rather than, for example, maximizing their own profit in selling the digital goods themselves.

> Steam isn't directly handing me a dollar for every Steam wallet dollar doesn't mean it is impossible.

I think this is actually the most important point. It's not that grey markets have to be involved to convert digital goods into real money. It's that Steam has legitimized everything but the very last step of converting their in-game currency into real currency (and take a cut along the way, from what I understand from other comments in the thread).

This is espeically true if they permit the exchange of real dollars into Steam dollars and merely prohibit the reverse exchange. There's no claiming "entertainment value only" and being taken seriously.