I used to work at Valve -- on the CS:GO team, no less -- although I left nearly a decade ago. I don't know what prompted this change but I have some suspicions. Even when I was there and the loot box system was new to CS:GO, there were concerns that a lot of trading was happening outside of the marketplace. The trading happened elsewhere because you can't have more than $300 in your Steam wallet (more than this would trigger some banking regulations that Valve wanted to avoid), so anything more valuable than that had to happen on 3rd party sites.
We didn't want this for three reasons: we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops; and finally because 3rd party trading ended up creating a lot of scams and therefore angry players.
At the time, we didn't see any way around it: we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other, and despite omniscience and omnipotence in the game and Marketplace, we weren't confident that we could rejigger the drop rates and rarities to lower the maximum perceived value of the fanciest knife to be under the $300 limit.
I suspect that the CS:GO team finally decided to do something about it and chose this. If the team is anything like I left it, they probably modeled this extensively (we had data on nearly every game ever played in CS:GO and complete Marketplace data), and discussed the change with the TF2 and DOTA teams, who also have to deal with this, and decided that the short-term fury of a small fraction of the playerbase was worth it. I wonder if TF2 and DOTA are having similar problems and, if so, whether this change will be rolled out for those games, too.
Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective.
> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;
My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.
Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.
> My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
Yes. The Valve philosophy on the cosmetics marketplace (we called it "the economy") is that you distribute random rewards to players and they can trade and sell and discover the value of those goods for themselves. Obviously, this was done to make money for Valve but, in theory, it's also good for the players. It allows people who have things they don't want to sell them to people who want them. And all this buying and selling happens between Steam wallets (and there is no off-ramp) so at the end of the day, it's all just profit for Valve.
But above all we wanted people to play CS:GO because it was a fun game. We didn't want to turn it into some kind of grim pachinko parlor, with players grinding out matches just to get random loot box drops. So you have to balance the potentially real dollar random rewards so that they're a fun surprise but not economically attractive enough to become a job.
It’s just a weird side effect that’s surprisingly difficult to prevent - online games have had gold farmers for pretty much as long as there have been online games with gold.
I’ve run into idle bot accounts several times while playing and it’s infuriating. Mainly in the arms race mode.
Players can leave and join that mode at any time. So the bots will constantly be joining and leaving. if the bots manage to become 50% of the game they will vote kick all the remaining players. I’ve had several in progress matches interrupted because a few of the actual players bailed and the bots managed to take over the lobby.
Runescape tried this back in 2007 along with completely disabling PvP; it was a very unpopular change for the vast majority of players who were not buying items.
I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.
The grand exchange (auction house) and the trade restrictions that landed at the same time pretty much killed the game for me.
Prior to the G.E., RuneScape had a thriving, complex economy. Players made money transporting goods from harvesting areas, either on behalf of someone or by paying independents for their goods so the independents could avoid going back to town. Players made money buying and selling goods - geographic arbitrage was very much a thing, as well as across time, and also across servers. People made money turning cheaply available goods into more expensive goods.
When the G.E. landed, it basically killed most of the economy. Harvesting stuff could still be profitable, and players could still make money transporting goods from harvesting areas to the nearest bank so people grinding levels wouldn't have to leave, but basically everything else became irrelevant. There's no point in selling anything anywhere yourself when you could take it to the G.E. and get a sale with no effort.
Less of an issue but still sad, the trading restrictions also killed the generosity of veteran players. 'drop parties', where a rich player leads a group around town dropping valuable items, died off as valuable items would no longer appear in the ground for others. Gifting people stuff was no longer possible if it exceeded (fairly low) thresholds. Very sad.
How is that any different? It would be fine if schools banned children from bringing cash to school. If there were a multibillion dollar bullying and gambling market going on at the school, I'd demand it.
My issue with that is that the kids are losing something because someone else is doing something. Very similar to one kid being disorderly in class and everyone losing the recess.
Imagine being a kid in that room and being annoyed by the kid being disorderly, because you want to learn. Now you lost your rights because of that kid. You never did what he was doing, you never contributed to the disorder he caused, if anything you were also victimized by it. And then the power figure in this equation goes and chops away your rights along with his. First lesson in unfairness where the wet grass is burnt alongside the dry grass, because to the powers that be, the rights and allowances you had are mere acceptable collateral damage. Suppressing dissent was more important than protecting what is yours.
Are these schools in Stalin's soviet union? One kid causes disorder so all kids must be purged to make sure there won't be another naughty child in the future?
Believe it or not, teachers (your sao-called "power figures" here) are generally not a bunch of untrained dumbshits unable to think of kids with more granularity than as the entire collective group making up a class. They have the skills and training to identify the sources of disruptions along with ample resources available for correcting them without calling forth damnation and hellfire on everything in a 5 mile radius. Hammers are awesome, but it's not all that hard to grab a scalpel when a situation calls for a scalpel.
With trading. Market price is not only price. With skins there are lot of preferences. Starting for weapons they apply, not all people use same guns as much. And they might prefer one style of skin over an other skin.
If you are not in to extract most possible value, you might trade a more expensive skin for weapon you do not use in style you do not use for less expensive one for weapon you use more in style you really like.
This sounded odd to me as well. Most lootbox games today has no trading at all - you can pay to unlock items for your own account, and that's it. I suspect the more accurate way to explain it is Valve successfully prevented authority interventions than this being more consumer friendly.
I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1]
Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
It is also smoothing players' frustration and shopping-spree habits in order to obtain a rare item. If you have the ability to trade N rare items for another rare item then you quite surely may obtain any cosmetic item you want for a much lower investment (less boxes to open). The 'grey market' will adapt to this new value.
That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
[1] EDIT: and probably a preemptive protection for any future legal threat (as some countries tend to prohibit money gambling in games)
I waded through some Tik Tok comment threads on this change and it was so eye-opening: there are a shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items, thinking it was a retirement portfolio. I fear the crypto era has lead to even further diminished financial literacy at large… Blessed be compound interest and financial regulation.
It's been years now, but I used to be involved in the trading market for Team Fortress 2. There were people who did TF2 trading as a full-time job, exploiting arbitrage between markets and holding items that were expected to increase in value (and sometimes using bots to farm items).
The Mann vs. Machine update in 2012 added a new game mode that would give players loot as a reward for completing missions. Players who didn't care about the trading market (i.e. the vast majority) would look up trading sites after a gaming session to offload their stuff fast without caring much about the value. People who described themselves as "quickbuyers" would aim for the people who wanted quick and simple transactions and then sell the item elsewhere for a markup. I did this for a while and averaged $5-10 of profit per day, usually 20-30 cents per transaction. Someone treating it as a full-time job could probably have made a lot more, like $20+ per day.
That was pretty good money if you a) were a kid with no living expenses, or b) lived in a developing country where the money went farther. I was in group A. Any time I wanted to buy a Steam game, I'd put up my quickbuyer listing on the trading sites and save up the money. But I suspected at the time that most people in the scene were in group B. If I were Valve I'd struggle to pull the trigger on a major change to the in-game economy knowing that it would affect the livelihood of a nontrivial number of people in countries like Venezuela, and maybe that's the reason they seem to have hesitated for so long.
> shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items
If you meant children, with access to parents credit cards, who are addicted to gambling, you’d be more accurate. Children gambling is a huge problem in CS, which created this economy. The players know it, the influencers know it, Valve knows it and pretty much anyone who’s played CS in the recent years knows it. This implosion does nothing more than reset the system for Valve so that they can continue to make money.
How much of the CS player base is actually kids? Maybe wrongly, my view of CS is that it's a legacy game with an audience in their 30s or 40s. And that kids are mostly gambling with roblox or fornite.
CS2 is very much alive. If you look at the pro scene, most players are in the 19-25 range (some outliers are older and younger) which makes sense since it’s much easier to become a pro after 18 than before. But that also implies a healthy pipeline of young players. Obviously the exact breakdown is difficult to estimate, but I’d be inclined to think fewer people in 30s and 40s would have time for CS than in their teens and 20s. I could be wrong.
From mid-2018, CS2 has trended upward at +150,000 players/year. Starting at 500-600,000 that lasted from ~2015 to 2018 with mostly flat rate, after Covid, CS2 has been linearly upward pretty much constantly. The 24hr peak recently was 1,550,265 logged in.
One week variance is maybe ~700,000 during low timeframes, and 1,500,000 during peak hours pretty much every single day. Tends to peak yearly in May, with low tides in May and Nov-Dec usually, although last Dec was relatively up. 2020 and 2023 were both large years, 2025's looking similar.
On the player age question, the best data I was able to find on a quick search was https://www.hltv.org/
Total search over the full range returns 955 entries. Breakdowns by age look like its a pretty heavily 19-24 playerbase. 25-30's also pretty significant. Almost 77% of the player base between them.
On the other hand I am not sure that most people would be playing the same game for 20+ years - I played CS religiously during my school years, but at some point, even if you keep playing games, you just want something else
I have had friends in the 90s and 00s "invest" in Beanie Babies and Legos and make a ton of money... for a while... and then get wiped out. This is not a new thing.
Yeah, I was trying to think about that when I wrote my comment. I do think there’s at the very least a scale change between the proliferation of unregulated “markets” these days (crypto, cs skins, Pokémon cards, I’m sure others) and the “your beanie babies will be worth a fortune some day” of the past. Perhaps what’s more surprising, though, is how consumer behavior leads these markets to now actually move up and to the right for remarkably long. My sense is you were always in fact delusional to think your beanie babies would hold value, but perhaps people are not entirely crazy looking at the charts of skin prices over X years and expecting it to continue. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the collectors and too charitable to our contemporaries…
It's hilarious to US CS items/weapons as a retirement portfolio when you could get pretty damn good and government protected monopoly by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up. These are now being used by actual retirement funds.
Trump banned bump stocks because he thought they were too close to machine guns.
Ron Paul and maybe Massie are about the only politicians of my lifetime that held any real power that I can think of that would even entertain deregulating machine guns.
Incidentally, the longer forced reset triggers stay legal, the more real machines will have their value growth slow and, almost certainly, eventually tumble. The only reason this hasn't happened yet is because most people aren't yet familiar with them and many of the people who are just kind of assume that once they really go mainstream the government will put a stop to it, meaning "real" machine guns maintain their special status and therefore their special price. If FRTs stay legal for a long time and survive public scrutiny, then confidence in their future will grow and they will then eat much of the market demand for machine guns.
Of course, some machine guns would always remain valuable for their desirability as antiques, as long as people remain interested in them. That presumption of future demand for your collection might be a relatively safe bet for cool old guns in America, but it's still a bet.
They could likely get away with banning the FRT and bump stock through amending the definition of the machine gun in congress, just not the executive branch.
The ruling on those had nothing to do with overruling any part of the NFA. Only correctly identifying that FRT and bump stocks do not shoot automatically more than one shot by a single function of the trigger, which is what congress said would be the things allowed to be called machine guns.
> NFA for machine guns will never be overruled, never.
2 things make me question this. Never is a long time. People who claim to know the indefinite future, generally don't. These things being understood, forgive me if I don't take your word for it. Nobody should.
Most American conservatives and Trumpists believe most if not all of those things from my experience, and a lot of what's on that site now reflects official American government policy. The only surprise I see there is at least implied pro-Ukraine sentiment.
I would sleep perfectly soundly if it relied on politicians not wanting the plebs they subjugate to have easier access to machine guns, which is what keeps their value up.
As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated.
The risk is arguably lower than many single stocks, many of which are bought in retirement portfolio.
NFA firearms have an artificially high value because of the exact set of legal restrictions that the government has put in place: loose enough to not crater legal demand, yet tight enough to restrict legal supply. This market is tied to within US borders.
The government can destroy the assumptions behind this market with a stroke of the pen.
The government can destroy the assumptions on which many businesses are built, that are held as stocks in an investment portfolio. Move the goalposts to relation to international markets, and I will likely find how it applies to some other asset commonly found in investment portfolios, like perhaps the current values of some tax preparation companies.
Your original assertion was "...by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up"
Later you said lower risk than many individual stocks. Maybe, maybe not depending on how we define things. But I do think it's quite possible for the price to go down.
I think you may have to check the text again? The 5th amendment says you get due process, and requires compensation if something is taken for “public use”.
Passing a law which you can challenge in court that says “machine guns are illegal now, turn them in so we can melt them down for scrap” is not public use.
You can pretty clearly see this isn’t the case. Prior to the reversal of the bump stock ban, owners of bump stocks were required to surrender or destroy them.
That's because the state argued they were unregistered machine guns, thus never legally held property. It is not at all comparable to legal, stamped machine guns then being made illegal.
The EO couldn't have forced an uncompensated surrender of a registered bump stock, were it one existed before the Hughes Amendment.
The case law I’m seeing does not seem to provide that level of certainty.
There’s plenty of flexibility in the case law for what counts as “public use”, but nearly all of it is about individual cases where the government takes a specific person’s specific property, or damages it in some way. There doesn’t appear to be much case law at all for the guardrails if the government declares an object to be illegal to possess writ large for safety purposes and requires owners to destroy or surrender those objects.
I’m not saying there’s no path where the courts would require compensation, but for the level of certainty you’re claiming, I’d expect there to be a more clear line you can draw to existing cases.
It's wild to claim with certainty "clearly see that's not the case" then just claim you're just uncertain here.
My initial claim in any case was that the constitution requires the compensation, not that there is 0% chance the government would violate the constitution.
I’m saying: I am certain the constitution does not guarantee payment in this situation. I am not certain a court couldn’t find a way to connect the takings clause and expand current case law to apply to a case like you’re describing in the future.
None of the above has anything to do with the government violating the constitution.
I mean, I think they’ve proven over the last century that the single thing they’re good at is protecting the regular payment of dividends (and of course buybacks more recently)… One might not be entirely mistaken to compare expecting much more than that from the modern state to expecting Valve to protect your skin investments.
That anyone would use a game cosmetic as a retirement portfolio is so unbelievable it has to be trolling, right? I think we might just be witnessing the grief process unfold…
It's not trolling. People living paycheck to paycheck, without much in the way of financial literacy, are big consumers of "made to be collectible" widgets because they're desperate for appreciating assets and don't know how to do better when they struggle to save up a few hundred dollars (in no small part, because of their gambling addictions.)
Funko pops, baseball cards, knife skins, it's all used this way.
It's not always instructive to assume people making seemingly bad financial decisions are acting irrationally.
People living paycheck to paycheck due to child support orders, alimony, or other judgements taking a giant cut of their paycheck are likely buying collectibles instead of on-paper stocks or commodities because they can actually keep those without the state being able to as easily take them.
Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money rather than making some irrational gambling decision.
I know enough people in this kind of circumstance, my own coworkers, who would be in much better financial shape if they stopped gambling. It's very common for them to one day complain that they can't afford lunch, and the next day to come in fuming because they just lost $500 because sportsball team lost.
> Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money"
I know these people personally, they aren't drug dealers.
Regular honest hard working people, who struggle to make ends meet in large part due to gambling addictions and related poor financial decisions. Financially the guys who gamble are even worse off than the alcoholics that don't; there's only so much money you can spend on shit beer a week. The gambling addicts lose far more money far faster. If they were all tossing dice and losing money to each other that wouldn't be nearly so bad, but the way of modern industrial gambling is that it's done through apps and run by far away corporations or even the government, who take their money and basically make it disappear from the community. There's no winning it back, everybody but the casino owners loses in the long run. I used to be libertarian on gambling but not after what I've seen. It hurts not only those who choose to gamble, but also their families and communities.
Yeah, I mean the stock market is made to either pay passive income if you have millions or to slowly accumulate value through compound interest—expecting anything else is just gambling. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, neither of the first two are particularly helpful even medium term — and it’s not… entirely irrational to go all in on option (C). I’d be really curious to actually know the scale of how many people became millionaires from crypto — I have no intuition for what order of magnitude it is. Regardless, there’s clearly a growing belief that the world is now full of such moonshots.
If you're referring to literal only scratch-offs, maybe. Gambling in general (the point I was addressing using the example), you couldn't be more wrong.
You said "buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets". Of course I was referring to literally that. If you want to say gambling in general, no, not even that is correct. It can only be done where you mostly play against a complice and the house takes a small fixed cut. Nothing to do with lottery shit, that didn't make any sense at all.
The fact lottery tickets were one of the less practical examples does nothing to dispel the point that gambling is a commonly used method of money laundering, which was my point. Your point on one specific form of gambling might be valid but completely unmoving against the principle.
There is no need to have an accomplice, someone could just bet $20 an improbable lottery every time they sell a "hit", eventually they would win big and then have legal taxed income washed and only have to explain how they came up with $20 to end up with thousands in earnings. Who cares if they lose 20,30,50% to the house and taxes when they are happy to pay that to stay out of prison and making high margins.
In fact, watch videos of various change and counterfeit scammers, they quite often use the lottery tickets to launder their proceeds and as part of their crime.[]
There’s a difference between a physical baseball card and a digital weapon skin. One is permanent, the other is only real as long as the game it’s used in is operational. And we know games have a lifespan. It’s not like csgo/2 weapon skins exist on a chain somewhere… That’s the nuance I’m calling out. It’s not correct to equate a weapon skin to a baseball card even though they are a similar type of social phenomenon.
Collectables are a self-explanatory asset class. Children can appreciate and understand the desire for a holographic Charizard card. Series I savings bonds are harder to understand.
I saw an absolutely shocking number of posts from people clearly on minimum wage at best with 20k or so in CS skins, buying loot boxes every week, and no other investments. Obviously no way to verify the accuracy of such statements, but my sense is you would be horrified to know the scale of the market.
I might have shared your surprise a decade ago, but we live in a world where many people use something with even less utility (cryptocurrency) readily in their retirement portfolios.
At least those cosmetic items in video games actually do something.
They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.
Any market maker, such as Valve, is free to establish the rules of its own "reality".
I understand your analysis, and I certainly failed to mention that point, but making the overall value less attractive to speculators is not evidence of being "rotten to the core".
But is the game rated mature due to violence, or due to gambling? I might be okay with my kid playing a game just because it has violence, but that doesn't mean I'm wanting to sign them up for gambling, but I'm curious if the mature rating even covers that since it's more of a meta-game thing and not actually part of the "game" itself.
I think most countries have much stricter enforcement for gambling age limits, too. If you sell a kid a copy of GTA5 that's their parents problem, but if you allow kids into your casino it's your problem.
The problem is defining what falls under those laws. Companies sell trading card boxes with random contents. McDonalds had its Monopoly game. There are many more examples of things that are gambling with money, accessible to kids and still allowed in most countries.
Typically legal gambling has age limits by law, while the age recommendation for video games is just that, an recommendation. It isn't illegal for a 14 year old to play a game recommended to 18 year olds. Don't know how it works in the US specifically, at least how it works in other places.
I'm guessing the video games industry's attempt at self-regulating with PEGI and similar efforts actually paid off.
Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child.
If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That it’s a legitimate investment? The only people spending that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.
I was recently at a lan party for a friend's 40th birthday (something I don't think any of us had done since highschool or so!), most of them are way more into gaming than me and have been consistently since childhood. I was pretty shocked at one point when they went on a loot box binge and I witnessed them drop hundreds on loot boxes etc (I don't know what it's called, the keys or whatever). Definitely didn't seem like the first time. These are adults with children of their own. There is a demographic out there of people I wasn't aware of, not necessarily whales, that have a ton of disposable income for this fluff. And valve has their hooks in them for whatever reason.
I’ve watched grown adults with kids spend hundreds on baseball tickets and beer in one sitting, too. I’m not trying to invalidate your point. But also be careful about making value judgements (“valve has their hooks in them” reads as a negative sentiment to me). People spend money on entertainment and there are worse vices out there.
Grown adults blowing a couple hundred on some fun doesn't really seem that crazy to me. How is that much different than going out to the bar, sticking a benjamin in a slot machine, or buying some collectables?
I didn't downvote you (my account is low reputation) but your argument is weak: that some skins go for absurd amount of money says nothing of the rest of the ecosystem. There can both be children and drug dealers (ab)using the same "gaming" mechanics.
> If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking?
That you used a straw man. The $20k cosmetics weren't mentioned, and even if some buy these, the thing itself can still very well be targeted as gambling towards children.
"Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat."
They're mentioned right there in the article this is nominally meant to be a discussion thread about.
But the argument was "they're running an online casino directed at children", the fact that someone buys the result of the gambling for adult money / $20k doesn't mean it's not, and is basically irrelevant to that statement.
They take a 30% cut on Steam, i.e. on most PC games. They are printing money. They have an absurdly high profit-per-employee ratio. That's a failure of capitalism, called rent seeking.
having a high profit-per-employee is not the definition of rent seeking.
valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.
It's not "high", it's extremely high. They just have a few hundred employees while making several millions of profit per employee. More than Apple. They are printing money.
> valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users,
A 30% fee just for hosting the game is not valuable.
> and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.
The cost is substantial. It costs the developer 30%. That's a huge chunk of the total revenue. Hosting a game is very cheap, and could probably be done with less than a 3% fee. Often Valve will make more profit from a game than the developer itself. Sometimes the developer will lose money (after subtracting development cost) but Valve will still make a big profit with that game.
Their high profit is indicative of the high level of value they provide. They're far from the only store to buy/sell games in. Steam's users use Steam because they prefer it to the alternatives.
While I can't argue whether 30% is actually fair, I do believe you are disregarding some benefits steam brings which may seem trivial. The hosting of online-games and facilitation of sales is not their only service. One that has traceable value that immediately comes to mind is the illusion of a central authority for achievements.
I have personally purchased many titles a second time to register my feats with steam and anecdotally see similar sentiment among older gamers. Achievements feel worthless in isolation but provide fulfillment when socially recognized. These are sales being manifested solely through Steam's position.
Now, back to whether this social permanence is worth the 30% Steam is extracting, I do have my opinions. Steam is technically "rent-seeking" from a strict economic classification, but is this more-so a case of the lighthouse or the railroad?
its probably low compare what customers and game developers are willing to pay for it.
hosting a game and running a store nowdays is very easy, but still games launch on steam rather than building their own store or using a steam competitor. if the cost was too high, people would not be using the service
> Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players.
This is an outright falsehood. Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison.
By your definition, any monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". But it isn't. Just because something is useful, doesn't mean it can't be massively overpriced due to competition not working as it should. Proper market competition should ensure that no company can extract huge profit margins for trivial things. Like hosting games.
Epic, Steam's only serious competitor currently aside from maybe GoG, just had a bug in their launcher that had all Fortnite players have to redownload their entire 150~ GB game. The cost of hosting aside, the capabilities of these companies to host their own games pales in comparison to Valve, who hasn't had a single bug in downloading or updating any game in the decade and a half I have used their launcher.
Considering how alternative storefronts can't even get automatic updates to work consistently, the most basic functionality of a games storefront (more important than purchasing even, since if you can't get what you purchased, it's useless), it actually doesn't seem obvious to me that other providers can easily host their own games. Even putting aside everything else Valve uses their cut for (hosting a community forum for every game, hosting a mod DB for every game that wants it, metrics tracking, opt-in soft DRM, providing server hosting, maintaining Proton so your game works on Linux), the cut seems almost reasonable even just for hosting when nobody else is able to do it right.
I use steam to launch the games i get from epic and gog. Epic's launcher is so bad that i use their web store to manage inventory and often can't remember if i own a game on epic unless it's set to launch via steam.
It can be helpful to look at it less in terms of what it costs Valve to run their service and more in terms of what value developers get from Valve for the money.
I'm in the business and I've asked two different heads of large, very well-known AAA studios how they felt about Valve's percentage, and they basically told me the same thing: They had their teams do rigorous analyses of what it would cost them to 'replace' Valve for their games, and concluded it would cost roughly what they were already paying Valve. So they had no incentive to move off the platform. Look at how many publishers have come slinking back to Steam after trying to go solo -- there are good business reasons for that, and it isn't just about the stubborn fact of their huge social graph.
If it costs that much to replace Valve for your game, it's hard to argue that what they're charging isn't fair.
As others have pointed out, Valve does far more than just host. Shipping a multiplayer game and want comprehensive protection from DDoS attacks? Use Valve's datagram network for no additional fee. Don't want to host your own lobby servers? Use Valve's for no additional fee, they'll accommodate hundreds of thousands of players with no complaints. Want to sell your game in a zillion countries? Valve's got you, easy peasy. And discovery is a thing -- Valve sells a whooole lot of games just by putting them in the carousel in front of players. This is huge, huge value.
And as a player, I'm actually really happy, super happy, did I mention how incredibly happy I am with what they're doing with some of their cut: They saved gaming on Linux -- it's often better than Windows -- and I love my SteamDeck. So that cut is benefiting me directly as a consumer because they're spending it on initiatives I'm really passionate about.
Valve delivers a ton of value for the cost. If someone wants to try to do better, Valve's not stopping them, but I can tell you that as a player and a gamedev, none of the other options are remotely enticing to me. In my view, that's not Valve's problem to solve by cratering their own revenue.
> Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison.
Steam does far more than just host, and everyone who uses it knows this, so it's clear that you either have no idea what Steam does (in which case you should not be commenting) or you're actively lying about it.
Steam provides payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.
> By your definition, any Monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism".
This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions.
And yes, there is competition - the fact that you don't know this is yet another indicator that you're totally ignorant of anything relevant to the conversation. There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work.
Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.
> Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.
They seem to live in this bubble where steam is extremely bad or something.
Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.
I think valve is still decent but I prefer Gog-games more if I can be honest, valve has drm but I appreciate their customer service from what I know and the amount of good games it produced like portal and the steam marketplace is still a very nice thing imo.
I don't think steam is rent-seeking at all and I agree with your statement on it.
Now I still believe that CS-GO's lootboxes are still an issue tho, maybe I am not understanding the significance of change so much
Steam still does nothing to prevent gambling for children and people selling the skins on the other websites, I am not understanding how this change changes that, I read some other comment in here which said that you can have contracts which convert the rare to extremely rare Only in steam marketplace so maybe they stopped the other shady websites/the youtubers they sponsor by limiting their influence....
I don't understand :/ I still feel like Steam had turned a blind eye to child gambling for a long time and Coffeezilla had made a video about it which I can refer to.
> There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work.
The same is true for linux/Windows as well. You could say that windows has the market at work but the point becomes moot.
It isn't as if there aren't better options (GOG) but that its rather good enough
Like I said nothing is as good or as bad as it seems, my opinion on steam is barely good enough partially because of its previous responses on turning a blind eye to the whole situation but maybe this is changing with this thing they did right now but I am still not sure how.
Yes, of course, I'm not claiming that Steam is some utopic paradise or that GabeN is a saint or anything. Steam has problems too - most notably the huge skins gambling issue that you mention. I'm just specifically saying that out of all of its problems, "rent-seeking" is definitely not one of them.
> The same is true for linux/Windows as well. You could say that windows has the market at work but the point becomes moot.
Yes, there's additional detail that I didn't add - that, unlike Microsoft, which used (and continues to use) anticompetitive tactics like paying PC manufacturers to include Windows as the default option, Steam didn't do anything anticompetitive to become the most popular - they were just the best - and they haven't done anything to unfairly leverage their dominant market position. That doesn't strike me as a problem - and my point to the GP was specifically that they're the most popular because they're the best, not because they did scummy backroom deals to get there.
I agree that GOG is probably better. But Steam is "good enough", and modulo the gambling problem, isn't really "bad".
Yea I agree rent seeking is definitely not the problem, huge skins gambling is.
> modulo the gambling problem, isn't really "bad".
Can you please explain to me what you mean by this. I feel like valve enabled skins gambling which even underage people could do for a long time, so there is some truth about it and coffeezilla made a video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
I am just saying the ethics of the company isn't perfect when they enabled gambling for a long time, I am not sure if right now it can be fixed or how this steps that they did right now fixes that problem if I am being honest.
Other services do the same for arbitrary online shops, at much lower fees. In fact, Valve likely doesn't even run it's own payment processing, but merely integrates other services.
> cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility
The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game. Yet they charging 30% on hundreds or thousands of AAA games and other games.
> This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions.
You clearly stated that Steam is fine because it is useful. But anything sold by a monopoly can be useful while still being massively overpriced. Which proves that mere usefulness of something doesn't mean the price of it is justified. Which refutes your original usefulness argument.
> And yes, there is competition
Yes, but the fact that there is theoretically competition doesn't mean it is working. Large platforms like Steam benefit from network effects which come from their size alone. People will simply stay at Steam because that's already were their other games are, and because they don't see the massive 30% fee, that Valve is keeping, as some cost they have to pay. Any other platform faces a "chicken and egg" style uphill battle against these effects, even if they charge a substantially lower fee.
> Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying
Rather than hurling insults at me consider the simple question: If Steam was so fairly priced, wasn't charging excessive fees, how can it be that they have an extremely high profit margin? Realistically, that can only be because Valve's revenue from Steam vastly exceeds the costs of running and maintaining it.
> > cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility
> The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game
Then surely Epic, or Microsoft, or Sony could just easily create one. There being literally 0 such services means it's likely a bit more difficult than one AAA game :) So your argument is invalid.
It goes down to 20% when you have enough sales. Still high IMO. Marketplaces like steam, app store, etc, should charge based on services rendered rather than some arbitrary %.
I still prefer steam even if its more expensive than other marketplaces. They provide real value over just distribution, like their return policy.
> Other services do the same for arbitrary online shops, at much lower fees. In fact, Valve likely doesn't even run it's own payment processing, but merely integrates other services.
Irrelevant strawman argument. It doesn't matter that Valve doesn't run its own payment processing - it still provides an easier platform for use than going to Stripe and figuring out how to connect user purchase to game licenses.
> The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game. Yet they charging 30% on hundreds or thousands of AAA games and other games.
OK, so now you've both admitted that you were factually incorrect on your original assertion that the only value that Steam provided was hosting, and you've moved the goalposts from "Steam doesn't do anything except hosting" to "well those features aren't worth the cost", which is completely different.
So, we've completely disproved your original claim that Steam is "rent-seeking", because these features provide immense value to both developers and players.
And, that claim about "The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game"? Completely unfounded. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Multiplayer networking is hard, and you're claiming that ALL of the features that Steam provides are comparable to that of a single AAA game.
Also, funny that you mention "one single AAA game" - whose costs can go into the billions of dollars.
> You clearly stated that Steam is fine because it is useful.
Stop trying to justify your lying about my points, please. Admit that you acted dishonestly out of malice and we can move on to any actual points you might have.
> But anything sold by a monopoly can be useful while still being massively overpriced.
More goalpost-moving (you originally claimed that Steam was both "a failure of capitalism" and "rent-seeking" - these claims are completely different), that turns out to not even be relevant because Steam is a monopoly along no relevant dimension. There is nothing that prevents you from creating both a Steam account and an Epic Games account, or a developer from selling on both Steam and the EA store. You can even install non-Steam games on Valve's own hardware. You even concede that there is competition later in this very comment.
> Which proves that mere usefulness of something doesn't mean the price of it is justified. Which refutes your original usefulness argument.
No, it doesn't, because both your first point has no connection whatsoever to your second, and you neither proved that Steam was overpriced, nor actually refuted any of my points as stated in my comments - merely twisted and lied about them. Where do I say "useful" in my original comment?
> Large platforms like Steam benefit from network effects which come from their size alone. People will simply stay at Steam because that's already were their other games are, and because they don't see the massive 30% fee, that Valve is keeping, as some cost they have to pay. Any other platform faces a "chicken and egg" style uphill battle against these effects, even if they charge a substantially lower fee.
This is fallacious. There is no "stay at Steam" - as previously stated, there's zero mutual exclusion between Steam and other platforms on either the dev or the player side. And there's no "chicken and egg" uphill battle either, because Steam accounts don't cost money, and so unlike trying to start a new paid streaming platform where you can't attract users because there's no content, and you can't sign content deals because there's no users. This is an inaccurate, irrelevant, and dishonest analogy.
> Rather than hurling insults at me
You literally lied about my points. That's not an insult - that's a fact. Don't lie if you don't want someone to correctly describe when you're lying.
> consider the simple question: If Steam was so fairly priced, wasn't charging excessive fees, how can it be that they have an extremely high profit margin?
That's a twisted definition of "excessive". Your "excessive" is "Valve charges more than it costs them to provide services". Very few people in the real world (which includes me, most HN users, and most people who actually play games, given that you probably don't) actually operate on that model, and instead consider "excessive" to be either relative to value delivered to them, or to comparable alternatives. Almost nobody, when making a value decision about whether or not to buy a new phone consider the profit margins to the phone manufacturers - they only care about the value delivered to them, which is as it should be, because...
> Realistically, that can only be because Valve's revenue from Steam vastly exceeds the costs of running and maintaining it.
Valve does not have an obligation to price their services at cost, or close to cost. They're entirely entitled to price their services at the amount of value delivered to their customers, without any judgement whatsoever.
So, to summarize - we've objectively refuted your claims that Steam is "rent-seeking", pointed out several more dishonest rhetorical tricks and redefinitions of common words that you've used, including revealing that your claims of "Valve bad" are merely personal indignation that Valve makes more money than you think that they should, and confirmed that yes, you did lie about my earlier points.
IMO the phrase "legitimate investment" should be reserved for situations where you spend money something (e.g. kitchen equipment) that allows you to create new real-world value (e.g. food) which you can hopefully sell for a profit (it's still a legitimate investment if that fails). It should not be used for Ponzi schemes, gambling, outright fraud, or anything of the sort. Buying something and then hoping its price goes up before you sell it should not be called investing, but gambling - unless it fits in the category I just described.
People find value in acquiring things they want. For example if someone wants to have a one letter username on X, there is value for there to be willing to sell one.
Damn you’re trying to tell me that people will abandon all morality just to make billions of dollars? Who would of thought that something like that could be possible.
I honestly don't understand the logic behind policies like this. As a kid, my friends and I loved to buy Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a few years, and while I think most adults thought it was pretty silly, I don't recall anyone ever claiming that this was somehow equivalent to gambling for children despite it basically the same mechanism as loot boxes; most booster packs were essentially not worth the value once opened because with the exception of a few specific rare cards in each set, the cards were not very valuable even to a collector or player of the game.
I could see an argument that there's an issue with closed ecosystems where value of an item can be changed after someone has obtained it due to control by a centralized provider, but that's completely different concern to the idea of gambling being harmful.
As a kid I viewed MtG, baseball cards, etc as gambling and often heard them referred to as such.
The loot box issue is in part how easy it is to take this stuff to excess. My 8 year old niece racked up ~1,500$ worth of charges in a game when AT&T messed up permissions after a cellphone upgrade. It’s shockingly easy for people to blow arbitrary money on this stuff as the industry is optimized to be predatory as whales make up the bulk of profits.
So I suspect physical stores being really skeptical if an 8 year old showed up to buy a grand of Pokémon cards likely tampered the backlash.
It absolutely was and is gambling, and plenty of people complain about it. I've always thought it was disgusting to make a living off of pay-to-play games targeted at children. Morally somewhere around the level of being a pimp.
I don't even like it when targeted at adults, but we allow adults to do far worse when it comes to gambling. A lot of our hollow economies depend on it. But you really have to be a moral sewer to pay your rent from kids hoping to open the right bag to hopefully energize their often very narrow, often very autistic social lives. At best you're a carnie.
Trades happening off market is also due to valve not having a way to cash out. If you sell your $20,000 item on the steam marketplace that's a lot of games you can buy, but they won't send you money.
FWIW, people were purchasing Steam Decks with the "Steam Money", then reselling the console for cash.
Its still not "cashing out", but I'm sure some made some decent money. I would assume you could sell game keys to those less-than-reputable sites as well? Dunno
Agreed overall though, these are just extensions of "happening off-market"
No one claimed that. The point was that Valve controls the API and can cut access to said API to the gambling sites. This is not like sports betting, where the gambling sites don't need any integration with the actual sport : if Valve wants, they can seriously affect the abity of the sites to function.
Yes, they provide the API that those sites need to function. That doesn't mean the API is exclusively for those sites. Just that Valve is the one enabling those sites, they're not completely independent.
Nonsense argument. They provide an api that players use, that can also be used by boys to perform trades. Maybe the problem you have with this is that they can do trades.
I really don't get what you're confused about. Yes, the existence of the API is good and useful. What Valve should do, if they really cared about stopping CS or TF2 gambling, is to limit access to this API for the gambling sites. The API should ONLY be accessible to individual players. That means IP restrictions, client agent sniffing, bot behavior analysis, etc - not trivial, and not foolproof, but also not exactly rocket science.
It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.
Read up on the story, look at the influencers promoting it and the ecosystem that grew around it. Valve is willfully running a casino for underage and have bypassed local laws that protect against this using technicalities. It's frightening.
The Armory and the new terminal shows they are moving way from loot boxes into a kind of "proof of work" economy, in which price is driven up by grinding and limited availability.
My personal theory is that it's related to their planned launch of their new VR headset soon, and want people to be able to buy it using the Steam Store - so deflating the market means there's reduced buying power on the market, reducing ways in which people can get money 'out' of Steam by buying hardware with Steam-bux and selling for real currency.
> That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
It was a multi-billion dollar market, which blew my mind. Good on valve for bursting the bubble, but it sounds like it should have happened much sooner.
> Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
All the change valve did was make 5 rare items to give a chance/give a extremely rare item
Earlier, that wasn't the case and were locked behind only lootboxes with extremly rare chances i guess.
So this mechanic was already there from 1000 uncommon -> 10 common -> 1(mythic?) -> rare but now it spread to even extremely rare.
The price drop happened because the extremely rare aren't as rare because now it increased the supply as more people created their rares into extremely rares and sold it on the market and more supply, less price, thus the price wipe out and the loss.
Also skins are just cosmetics, they have no in game advantage
I just searched and you get some skin when you level up but the point I am trying to tell you is that if someone actually plays the game for a long time, they get involved in its community and naturally people would flex their skin etc and they would want to get skins to feel cool as well
So its more like people playing -> wants skin / creates money. Instead of wanting money -> people playing games
But maybe someone could be playing/grinding for the skins but I genuinely don't think this is why steam did it.
Steam did it to show the regulatory power they have in game that they can wipe billions. They are creating their in game store which takes prices from online marketplace so they might tighten the regulations on it in such a way that instead of going to random websites or other parties, steam / valve will try to instead be the middleman and try to capture even more %'s of the trade
Another neat point is that if someone wants a skin in the community, they basically got cheaper now 30-40% so it becomes more affordable imo for the people playing but still
I think valve wouldn't have predicted the losses to be of billions of dollar in terms of wipeout since they had mentioned it as a small change and it wasn't even their twitter update note iirc
I think that a lot of people especially chinese people invested into it and it was a bubble in formation and then people got panicked after this news and the panic made other people panic and thus the insane billions of $ of losses.
This doesn't explain though "why now?". All of these reasons would make sense, but they've been in legal disputes before in the 13 years since the game came out. And why would they suddenly care about players' frustration? The skins economy isn't wildly different now than previously.
Well, I don't know their motives, but if we were talking just about legal issues, at least in the EU we're seeing stricter laws about loot boxes this year (and I'm all in about that).
I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.
Remember back in the day when we just downloaded skin packs from some random Geocities website with obnoxious red text on black background and after going through the install.txt written in broken English/Italian, lo and behold your AK47 now had a proper arctic camo skin and it was so much cooler?
What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
Steam is still a business, but of all the gaming industry, Gaben is one of the highlights, steam try hard to be extremely pro consumer. Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, requiring publisher and developers to explicitly state the AI generated content thats in the game to name just 2.
> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game,
Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously), and (much) weaker than GOGs refund: 1 month after purchase, no playtime restriction.
I believe they explicitly called out the equivalent for physical stores and european consumer protection in general when they announced the policy and lack of restrictions. Which is an indirect call out at Steam, which hasn't cared in the slightest and continues to have a worse policy.
I don't know if this has changed since the last time I bought shrink-wrapped software at a retail store, but the return policy on games and software was always that they couldn't be returned once opened, at least at the bigbox retailers in the US. I'm sure stores occasionally made exceptions, but I very clearly remember buying a copy of Oblivion and not being able to install it due to minimum specs and the store not accepting a return. I just had to hang onto the copy until I built a new PC.
This is probably a US vs Europe difference in consumer protections though.
Standard policy is I think mostly the same, but in Europe there's been arguments that those policies don't follow the actual consumer protection laws, which is a whole thing that I don't think really resolved one way or another.
It varies with country but I believe a number of protection laws specify normal use/testing a product is allowed, so you can open boxes and test functionality (norwegian law does this for sure). Excepting videogames from this is arbitrary, the argument from consumer protection agencies goes.
I believe in practice a number of games did get refunded when threatened with formal complaints along these lines, but that's far from a guaranteed thing.
Anyway, GOG decided to go with the generous interpretation (and the one all kinds of electronic goods except games and CDs/DVDs have), which is nicer for everyone, really
> Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously)
Huh, we have different laws and physical stores. Here, no store will take your game back if you opened the box. Maybe that changed, but in the past any game opened couldn't be returned because you could have either copied the disk, or copied to key and activated it.
I believe there were some pushes to get rid of opened box = no refund policies as being against standard 14-day returns in Norway, because the law explicitly says the consumer may (paraphrase) "reasonably test the use of a product" which allows you to open the box on other goods. But keys being consumable puts them in another category of goods (like food, which obviously can't be returned after "use"), so that doesn't apply.
2 hour return policy can already be a problem for a very short indie game. There was one which you could beat in 2 hours and refund and people did that.
GOG gets away with their policy because only people who believe in GOG ideallogy go there, and they won't refund a good game. If steam did that, abuse would skyrocket.
And in my country, unless explicitly stated otherwise, most physical goods can't be returned if they are used.
In some sense, GOGs entire existence is testing the hypothesis that it's impossible to run a consumer friendly digital store due to abuse.
If you took the common sense publisher view then no DRM = everything you make is instantly pirated and the whole store fails instantly. But GOG is a viable storefront, so that's demonstrably wrong.
The evidence is no better for Steam's refund policy than it was for DRM being necessary.
It’s far easier to just pirate (nearly all?) GOG games. Like there are torrents with big chunks of their entire store on them, and I’ve seen allusions to an unofficial “store” that just has all(?) their games on it for free. I doubt many people are abusing the refund system because going through those steps is more work than piracy.
sadly they don't do regional pricing at all, so steam price is almost half the GoG and maybe even lower. But yeah if you can buy GoG, it's better due to no DRM
While those statements are true, it is much easier to be pro-consumer when you are running a few morally dubious casinos and marketplaces to keep the bottom line healthy. Would Steam have grown into a position where it can comfortably act like this without the cash cows in the background? We'll never know.
The general market is so distorted that being seen as anti-large corporate behaviours on some policies is seen as enough to be considered pro-consumer.
The game is rated as 'Mature 17+', and Steam has an age confirmation page before accessing the store page of the game. Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids?
I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.
It's not that simple. The real problem is that Valve allows items to be sold in markets outside of Valve's control which allows third party gambling websites to operate. And you guessed right, they basically don't care about your age. Valve of course knows this but won't do anything, because they make profits off all transactions happening in third party markets. Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos. Coffeezilla did an in-depth piece on this: https://youtu.be/q58dLWjRTBE
> Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos
I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
(Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
I think gambling came in more in later waves. The first wave of popularity (mostly StarCraft, LoL and fighting games) tended more towards funding from sponsors, and not gambling ones (red bull, monster energy, gaming peripheral makers, the game devs themselves, mobile games).
I don’t know much about lol or fighting games but the starcraft pro scene exploded after a gambling/match fixing scandal back in 2010! The first wave absolutely had this problem
> I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
I worked in online gambling for about 10 years in the UK. I found how charities and local/national government worked far worse and I was far more frustrated with their attitudes.
e.g. I found an SQL Injection vulnerability with dynamic SQL in a large UK charity (I won't say which one). I reported this to my boss. He kinda just shrugged his shoulders. Similar attitudes were present in local government. The gambling industry was the complete opposite and took security very seriously.
What bothered me the most about charities and government was that on the outside they were giving the impression of having a virtuous purpose. Whereas the gambling sites didn't, it was simply "Try to win some cash".
As a former addict (alcohol), I don't have much sympathy for people that blame the companies for the problems of addicts. The problem ultimately lies with the individual. I was the one that choose to drink. The brewary, the bar, or the off-license never forced the drink down my throat. People choose to go to the casino, in the same way they choose to go to the bar.
> The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
Many of the classic videos games were made to relieve you of change in Arcades. Nearby to where I live there are still classic seaside arcade. They still have machines similar to Sega Rally and Time Crisis there. Video gaming and quasi-gambling have been intertwined since the birth of the industry.
> The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
This is all professional sports (even going back to long ago as the Roman Empire). There is nothing special about professional video gaming.
The industry saw that people were interested in watching matches between highly skilled people. Any form of entertainment/news/sports is bankrolled by advertising and/or gambling.
Many of these large events came out of more grass roots events like large lan parties. These were pretty big in the late 90s to early 2000s.
> (Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
Gambling tends to attract the more profit orientated which roughly aligns with what is considered "right wing" (at least in the US). I found the industry to be pretty apolitical as a whole. Many of the C-suite and above seemed to be actually relatively left-wing at least in some view points. It was odd when the top executives were far at least on somethings far more to the left than I was.
Should 17-year-olds be gambling? They're still in high school, the high-tech excuse of blaming the parents while pocketing billions of dollars is odious and convincing a jury to slap these companies with tobacco industry levels of damage remains feasible.
You can make a non-toxic, high quality free to play game, e.g. Beyond All Reason. Of course there will be no marketing budget for that game so most people won't know it's there.
Ideally kids wouldn't be participating in real world transactions at all, and I'd love to see the numbers of how many were actually kids who directly went to gamble I stead of being pushed into it by streamers which is where I see it constantly.
> Now, thanks to a recent update from Valve, the latter is in a downward spiral, having lost 25% of its value — or $1.75 billion — overnight
The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
The thing is Valve is clearly aware of the fact that it’s getting kids addicted to gambling. They have the data. It’s extremely ubiquitous. This has been an ongoing issue for a while and Valve has rightly been criticized for willfully getting kids addicted.
Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids. But that doesn’t give Valve a free pass, particularly when they used dark patterns to appeal to children.
> Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids.
How? Individual parents can't fight off predatory corporations entrenched in mainstream culture going after their kids. They need to make a go at Valve.
edit: Rereading, I guess that was kinda the point you were making?
I agree we should go after companies clearly engaging in profit-above-all, making societies and future generations worse from the start. Make them hurt, make them bleed bad, take tens % of their global revenue (not profit, thats easy to game).
But - parents are responsible too, more than anybody else. Gaming is generally bad for kids, physically and mentally. Come on, everybody who cares knows that for past 2 decades. Screens generally fuck up kids properly, the younger and more interactive the worse the result. Kids need tons of physical fun and tons of continuous social interaction in larger groups, doesnt matter what some echo chambers claim, 'digital skills' are not something your kid can anyhow miss on.
Its supremely easier to fuck off kids, leave me alone, my adult life is oh so hard already, here play some more, give me some break. Adults being glued to phones hard themselves. Results are what they are. Its called universally bad parenting, by psychologists and various experts for a reason. No sympathies for parents there, but I feel sorry for all those kids whose potential is squished into various anxieties and abysmal social behavior.
Talking all this and much more as parent of 2 small ones, luckily for them environment we are in is firmly agreeing with all above.
When you say easier to simply earn, I understand it as you think they do this to benefit their playerbase / users.
Yes, it says that they want a bigger cut of the sales when those items are sold.
Not sad this hits the trading sites as that will also likely mean fewer will get scammed as they will stay in valves market, but saying valve is doing this for the users is crap, they do it for the profits, and maybe to stay under the radar of additional lawsuits regarding gambling laws around the world.
> The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
Them letting it happen for literal decades while being highly aware of what they're doing says more about the ethos than this, in the grand scheme, tiny move.
Don't get me wrong, me as a person who does not participate in any kind of this gray-area gambling has basically a lot of net positives from Steam and Valve. But this doesn't make them a pro-consumer company.
They're still greedy capitalists, and it shows in many different perspectives. They may be "better" to consumers than the average, but still.
I see people doing this a lot in Deadlock, Valve's next game that's in pre-release stage now. There are all sorts weird and fun skins people play with through mods, some of them definitely not copyright-friendly.
I wonder how Valve will handle this once the game is ready to be released - will they just blanket ban the mods? (seems likely, and the community is even probably ready for it so will not be too pissed off at the move.) Or will their monetization route be something else this time, not "hats" like usual? (I'm hoping so, although I can't imagine what else it could be without being pay2win.)
All Source games, not just Deadlock, did and still somewhat do have a strong modding scene. The way it's handled now is that official Valve-hosted servers have a config option called sv_pure set that prevents most mod .vpk files from loading on connecting clients (though some things like custom HuDs are whitelisted by this system). Once Deadlock gets paid cosmetics you can expect sv_pure to be turned on for Valve servers, which 99% of the playerbase will exclusively play on.
What's the other 1%? For eg., in Dota 2, if I create a private lobby, would that allow the mod vpk files? Or only for local bot matches? Or some other more involved scenario?
Not sure about Dota specifically but for e.g. TF2 any non-Valve-server game had pure off by default. That does mean bot matches or private lobbies. You could hop into a community server and run your mods fine right now if you wanted.
'sv_pure' exists and says no for the official servers, sorry
Community servers are a thing, so is a worse experience. The well-maintained community days passed. We wanted curation and we got it: matchmaking and even our customization/spending.
Which is an easy technical problem to solve, but the liability of abuse when sharing user content with other users is not palatable.
It is also not impressive to others, not a status symbol, and that's actually the purpose of skins in the modern day. No one grinds 1000hrs of warframe for a skin just because they think it looks cool, they think it makes THEM look cool. They want people to be impressed that they had $2000 to spend on a knife, not that the knife skin was neat. The skin is an auxiliary component to the task.
This is what turned me off of Global Offensive, and CS2 I guess but it doesnt look like much(if anything) has changed between GO and CS2 compared to the changes made from 1.6 -> Source -> GO.
Looking back to ~2012/2013 and its seeming to be clear now that the introduction of weapon crates, the steam marketplace, and all of the other MTX in all of their(proprietary) competitve games may have been a good indication that these would be the last games Valve would develop in-house.
To be fair though and just to give a counter-example, the "clout chasers" with the $1000 knife skins is essentially the same as the bragging rights of a 4/5/6 digit steamID during 1.6 and CS:Source. Although flexing SteamID length was something I only really saw in the competitive scene and of course had a much smaller(unofficial) market.
Oh well, RIP Steam games, long live Steam software(their platform/Proton, etc) and hardware...minus the steam controller.
Where do people get this impression? It's not trivial to build user comments on a web page let alone a proper chat app but people think it's easy to share game assets for some reason.
It's really not that crazy. You log onto a server, the server communicates your skins to the other clients. Counter strike itself literally did this in the 2000s, it was removed. Modders for other games working for free figured it out. Games used to automatically download maps and skins in a bunch of Valve games as well as other games.
I would also consider building comments into a webpage pretty trivial, it was like the second thing I did when teaching myself web applications years ago.
I bet it's harder in modern frameworks than it used to be, but that doesn't make it a hard problem, we just surrounded an easy problem with more difficult but unrelated problems.
Making it cheaper reduces the status symbol aspect, since that's mostly about signalling wealth. But maybe not the rarity/exclusivity signals for items made artificially rare or hard to get.
That's sad. I remember a time before sv_pure. Sure, people installed transparent wall textures, but there was also a lot of cool customization to be done. And it was just your game, before streaming.
I was thinking of your description of the situation before sv_pure. What you wrote sounded like "sure some people completely destroyed the game but you got to see some cool skins". Skins can't make up for wallhacks, and wallhacks won't let you enjoy the skins. It wasn't a tenable situation.
Well, both. I wish less servers had enabled sv_pure in extra strict mode, but it was a solution to the wallhacking and extra loud footsteps. It was also the start of the decline of being able to run your own mods.
This provides a continuous revenue stream that allows maintenance and improvement of the game without affecting gameplay. It's entirely cosmetic. Don't participate in it if you don't want to. I played with stock skins majority of the time till a friend gifted me an AWP Redline after staying at my place. It was cool but to someone who just wants to enjoy the game it hardly matters. Besides you can go to various private servers and play with whatever skins.
> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
Isn't most of this trading done on 3rd party services though? I mean sure, Valve is indirectly responsible for allowing trading of rewards like this, but they don't control the market values themselves and only profit indirectly from it.
Which does make me wonder about their other popular collectible game, TF2 - they don't update it, like, ever, but it's still popular and they can potentially make huge amounts of money from it. But they can from the Half-Life franchise too.
TL;DR I don't really understand Valve, but it doesn't really matter because they're swimming in money regardless.
That era was nice but it has a different problem. People will pearl clutch about kids getting exposed to someone's custom skin making their character nude, or putting curse words on the side of a gun or whatever.
Most of the scarcity in artificial economies like CS is (just as with trading card games) manufactured and vulnerable.
Seeing what happens with a rug-pull in a billion dollar artificial economy like this is a valuable lesson for anyone watching.
If/when the huge Satoshi bitcoin stash gets traded in, we'll see similar outcomes there too.
I'd say that's true: if you have one skin, there's virtually zero production cost to making more copies of said skin.
It's not that different for many things in the real world, I suppose (eg: if you sell way above cost, then your cost is also arguably zero), but I'd say it's magnified in the digital world (or even with NFTs).
I got really into Lorcana last year, spent $40 on a particular rare card I needed for a deck. Out of curiosity I bought some cards for $3 each from Aliexpress, and got myself a jewelers loupe.
The cards were literally indistinguishable even with the loupe. I quit buying cards after that. It’s a suckers game if I can’t tell the difference between a $50 and a $3 card even when I know one is fake. Sure enough, a few months later the prices have absolutely cratered for the cards.
The only ones they couldn’t copy exactly seemed to be the “enchanted” cards, which sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Isn't most of our technology based on technologies invented to maximize killing in world war 2, or alternatively as a way to maximize monetization in sleazy ways?
World War 2 took at most about a decade (depending on who you ask). The history of development of our technology is much, much longer. I doubt 'most of our technology' is based on anything that happened in WW2.
It's just that technologies are all connected, so if you want to make them look bad you can do so. Is fixation of nitrogen into ammonia something that improved billions of lives through fertilizer, or something that enabled manufacture of many millions of tons of explosives? It's both.
Sure, no question about that. I'm just objecting to connecting everything to WW2. There were plenty of other wars before and after and even at the same time.
Actually, no. Even a perfect quantum computer can only attack a key if its public key has already been revealed on-chain, which is only the case for a small amount of coin. The other QC attacks rely on cracking a private key after it was broadcast, and before the transactions make it into a block.
Technically, "abandoned wallets" is not something that exists, all you have are "unspent outputs" of transactions. For QC attacks to work the public key to a private key has to be revealed, for modern addresses that only happens when you spend coins, not when you send them somewhere.
I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them.
Interesting. So as long as your wallet has only received Bitcoin, it's untouchable but the moment you transfer any of it, it's at risk of being emptied. The only way to protect any of the funds is to simply move it to another new wallet. We would be in a situation where any wallets (with known keys) can only be sold off in their entirety to prevent theft. However, who is going to want to buy any Bitcoin if the potential buyer's market decreases with each user exiting the market? The inherent value immediately drops to zero because each successive sale would be less than what it was purchased for. Kind of a Schrodinger's wallet, do you really own any Bitcoin if you can never withdraw from it?
The attack when sending a transaction has a time constraints. It will take many any years to go from being able to crack private keys in years/month to doing it in minutes.
In a scenario where you have a powerful enough quantum computer and are able to break the encryption you can access any wallet (I.e. the system would be done, and the value would be zero).
It's a dumb analysis of the situation that ignores what would actually happen:
A new wallet cert would be created that uses more bits. Enough that a brute force even with a quantum CPU would take too long. Then you transfer the funds to the new wallet. Abandoned wallets might be claimed during this transition but overall the deflationary trend of btc won't really be effected long term.
I think having Trump whisper in your ear before the next Truth Social post is the least effort way to win at Crypto. Inventing a viable quantum computer seems like way too much effort for the bros.
The purpose of the update is certainly not to reduce the cost of these items, but to better position Valve to earn this revenue steam, as opposed to third party scalpers. Looks like it's working.
They don't care about the resell value since they don't earn a commission on those sales.
The point is that, for as long as items can be transferred in game, they are always convertible to cash in the real world. Inserting artificial friction inside the game to increase scarcity, such as limiting convertibility of items, will drive those trades away from the game economy and into the third party ecosystem where the dollar rules supreme as the super-convertible means of exchange. So you have an induced scarcity that in effect drives third party profits.
By increasing in-game convertibility, the trades are directed to other in game assets that are a just a proxy for loot boxes, i.e money in Valve's accounts. So prices crashing in the third party market signal that players have a cheaper and more direct route to acquire them - give the money to Valve - which also generates the supply of new rare items as those loot boxes are opened.
It's a smart economic move.
Buy that doesn't mean the prices will stay low, since they can always control the overall scarcity, or add new, rarer and more exclusive items. The total amount of money they extract from "kids" is ultimately linked to their ability and willingness to pay.
Glad to chat with someone who understands in-game economies. I agree, but for a different reason. I don't think Valve cares about the economics that much. I think it's more of a product strategy move.
They have been threatened numerous times with lawsuits over the gambling aspects of the IAP. This moves completely de-risks that. As you said, it's not going to affect profits very directly. It will however make the speculative market collapse, and keep players engaged within the game's economy.
Not it, Valve. Valve designed and implemented the system. Gabe Newell, founder and own of Valve, is one of the people responsible for introducing gambling to children. Children who grow up and develop a gambling addiction.
Just because they made some good things doesn't mean we can't call them out on literally their biggest, ongoing, evil.
Yes, let’s blame the f2p game dev when there are literally streamers pumping fake platforms, doing fake wins, marketing gambling sites at kids. Valve did that
It's Valve that created the loot box mechanics (i.e. gambling). That's the foundation on what everything is built. And even without the adjacent ecosystem, it's still Valve that's exploiting children by introducing gambling to them.
I have no skin the game, literally or figuratively (buying some 2d sprites for a virtual weapon is childish and pathetic from grown up man point of view and kids should spend 0 time in such game... either buy a real gun, get into ie paintball for the kick of the hunt or find something else that feels amazing and doesnt involve sitting on your introvert ass, worsening isolation and mental issues), but - your argument is very weak whataboutism, and ignoring who introduced it all, to weakest members of society to prey on addictivity of it all.
Pathetic all around, imagine I am giving you a minus I cant give, and expecting better from you next time.
A few months ago, I realised CS:2 is more than 60GB and still barely worked on my M1 Pro Mac. I tried with these three: Whisky, Sikarigur, and even CrossOver trial. A friend suggested I should try some kind of partitioning and install Windows on that. I definitely will never try that.
CS:1.6 (which is what I still would want to play) is history unless I clasp my nose with my toes and then hang upside down from a ceiling fan and request someone to switch it on and then pray it works and keeps working. It doesn't; it crashes with flamboyance. There are some browser options, but that's another story altogether, and that too if I can find enough players there, let alone with good pings.
I finally realised that the only computer game I ever loved playing and played really a lot— albeit with gaps worth years in between after college— is just gone for me, and there's no coming back.
I guess now I am too old for all this, and maybe that's the point. Possibly someone who is on the older side will not buy these skins and whatnot; the company's focus is rightly not on us at all.
(PS. I always felt distracted with those skins; even in those younger and much younger days)
CS 1.6 ran just fine for me just now on NixOS. Literally just clicked install in Steam and ran it. Aren't Macs incapable of running most games? Get a $150-200 n150 mini PC and install Linux and it should run most things before like 2010 (and probably later) at 4k 60 fps while sipping like 10 W and running completely silently.
Thing is I don’t buy devices more than I absolutely need so that’s just a phone and a laptop. I will try this with NixOS because I have never tried NixOS in the first place. Brew has been enough so never tried anything else and also a lot of FOSS tools I use on my mac pro treat Brew as some kind of standard so that’s there.
FYI NixOS is more of a power user distribution (the draw is it's driven by declarative configuration management). Something like Bazzite is more targeted for e.g. gamers and may be more appropriate if you want a more off the shelf experience (I don't have experience with it but see it discussed a lot). If you only have a mac you might not have much luck though.
The n150 mini PC suggestion is because they really punch above their weight for being so cheap if you otherwise don't have usable hardware and want to play older/less demanding games anyway. They also make for extremely snappy workstations (on Linux. They come with Windows 11 which is super laggy). And they're like 2 inches * 2 inches * 1 inch, so tiny. If you're doing anything other than AI or something like video editing, they're a fantastic value.
Same here. I play the game happily. I would prefer to switch back to the good old "This games costs 50 $" which will also harm cheating. Maintain it and release sometimes an upgrade for a fair sum, keep the old one playable.
It shall not be a marketplace for gambling and cheaters.
The quickest way to end it would be to ban gifting skins. You'd be allowed to buy and sell skins in the Valve marketplace where market caps could be in place but no more private sales. Of course you could privately buy an account that has possession of the skins you want but that would add substantial obstacles to the private market.
I doubt it's going to change anything, this manipulated market will adapt and continue to extract money from kids. The cynic in me could even say that this change was pushed by Valve to take a bigger cut of the skin market (most trades are supervised by 3d parties). Coffeezilla investigated one of the many casino sites, there's a lot more to it.
I wish I knew what happened in the past few years, because steam was supposed to ban csgo gambling and trading sites, but you can see their names plastered all over twitch every day.
Society raises children, it's not fair to expect parents to police everything their child does. I agree often parents should be more responsible and not always take the easy way out.
But expecting them to individually fight billion dollar corporations that deliberately court children with damaging addictive services is asking too much.
It’s hard to express how frustrating it is to try to allow kids access to tech and the Web (it’s kind of important that they have at least some access! And isn’t a bunch of this allegedly for super-charging learning and exploration of the world?) while basically every platform and vendor (of most any kind) except Apple’s and Nintendo’s stuff is somewhere between mediocre and annoying, and utter shit on this front (even, and in some ways especially, open source operating systems) and none of these goddamn things coordinate or communicate with one another (and of course SSO, basically a necessity for even starting to tackle that kind of problem, is an “enterprise” feature for almost every vendor)
Then we’re told this is all our fault. Meanwhile schools send home devices that don’t lock or at least disable Web access at night, and I can’t admin those to fix that dumbfuck oversight. To point out just one of many ways we get undermined. This is a whole bunch of stress and work that simply did not used to exist for parents and I absolutely get why a lot just stop trying.
You can monitor and restrict Steam usage with parental controls. This is no more unfeasible than WiFi and device time limits, and last I checked, children don't carry a credit card. What's the mystery here? An 8 year old is not accruing bitcoin to buy skins.
Meanwhile you have users here that will tell you that refusing to give their kids smartphone or even any video game is not that hard, but it seems needsly restrictive.
AFAIK you don't need a credit card linked to the account, you can get in-store credit from selling the guaranteed drop items from playing a few matches, this is enough to get you started trading.
It's literally "The first hit is free". The sketchy gambling sites spot you bonus skins and stuff for the same reason. It doesn't matter, they don't actually have to ever pay out, so they can just give you fake money to get you addicted.
Unless they're using their own money with the blessing of their parents, this remains in the realm of tin-foil-hat paranoia. There's no reason to believe we're in child gambling crisis because of fake money.
This is good news. It seems some parts of the gaming industry are starting to recover.
I contend that games like Team Fortress 2 were also ruined by the F2P loot box crap. It's not that they took anything away, but it attracted a certain kind of customer that is very unappealing to the prior base. The "hats" made me walk away from TF2. No one on average seemed serious about the core gameplay anymore. Taking away that up front cost to play cheapened the experience for the existing paying customers. It's like going from shopping at Whole Foods to Walmart.
Robinhood is your go-to application if you want to gamble legally and efficiently without (as much) fear of a single actor ruining your day.
> Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat.
How many whales are buying an in-game cosmetic for $20K for their own use?
How much of this is day-trading? How much is investing? How much is fabricated by trading platforms? How much is money laundering? How much is a criminal payments channel?
I thought the same. Surely the number of people buying a 20k knife so it looks good when they play must be extremely low. The bulk have to be speculators.
This is true and it is also why a large portion of the playerbase likes this change. It makes many of these knives much more affordable for people that actually play the game.
The number is probably nonzero but those are the whales, the kids of the super rich who have millions to blow on trivial shit. The rest will be in it for trading, for the potential that either another trader will buy their stuff for more (in the hopes that it will appreciate more) or one of those whales will.
But it's probably mostly money laundering, I wouldn't be surprised if the crypto market is tightly integrated in it too. Buy using crypto, sell using fiat, ???, cash.
1) My childhood which coincided with peak of unregulated lootbox-skin markets (around 2013-2015). And I and my CS-playing peers had a happy childhood because of… skins gambling.
Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys. Some exceptionaly lucky or with natural born trading skills were earning serious money — from quater to multiple salaries of an adult.
Maybe because casino-tourism in Belarus made people here slightly less prone to gambling, or maybe parents were not used to gift their children micro-transactions — e-sports betting, gambling and trading was financed mostly via in-game drops, returns from these bets and trades, and of course, sometimes, pocket money (which, on average were like 3$ per week).
That said, in modern times where micro-transactions are so common that you are ok with giving your kid V-bucks as birthday gift, I want say that anti child gambling narrative is a good thing.
2) At that time, and afaik it is true even today — you could use skins as a virtual currency to pay for a real things. It was proto-cryptocurrency/NFT in terms of being KYC and AML free.
This is really big market. There are aritcles on NYT about real life terrorists buying real guns for skins.
But without US-centric sensationalism, I beleive you can still pay for VPN or ChatGPT in very sanctioned Russia in CS skins. This can be also done with crypto (and mostly done now), but crypto has learning curve and you already playing CS.
Reading this makes me sad at how different my generation was compared to the new ones.
I remember when Counterstrike 1.3 came out and everybody at my school were talking about it and playing it. We would line up at computer labs before lunch started, pay a toonie and entire room would crackle with in-game radio comms, AK47 and HE going off with a room full of people side by side excitedly shouting for an hour until lunch was over.
When classes finished we would head back to the lab again and we would play endless round of de_dust 1 & 2, de_rats, fy_iceworld and the occasional as_oilrig and the rush of being the VIP and experiencing my first headshot.
Sometimes the admin running the labs would add fun mods like no gravity and weird stuff....
It was such a memorable and social fun time and it runs in complete contrast to the everything-gambling culture that has taken foothold....
The skins market became a de facto stock market with extremely low volume (and therefore more manipulation). Someone eventually lost money, not necessarily the first link in the chain.
yeah CS skins is one of the biggest markets of digital-only-aesthetic-items before NFT came around (and now probably still bigger than NFTs). The main thing with NFTs was that there's no "central database", CS skins solely lives in Valve's database.
making a butterfly knife for Valve isn't hard (in the past Steam Customer Service duplicated items lost in scams). It's hard for the players because they have to "gamble" for it through paying keys to open cases.
Can you explain the shadow banking / conversion angle? All I found was that selling knives was used to get a discount on steam balance thanks to price arbitrage.
> "Selling Knives" (挂刀) refers to the technique of buying in-game items from 3rd-party (Chinese) trading sites like NetEase BUFF, C5, IGXE, and UUYP, and then selling them on the Steam Market to obtain a discounted Steam Wallet balance by capitalizing on price differences.
I'm surprised the price difference did not disappear if people make that trade.
China notoriously has intense capital controls. It's difficult for ordinary Chinese citizens to take capital out of the country. CS2 items can be bought and sold in both USD and RMB, and can be transferred between Chinese and international accounts. It's not about Steam wallet balances.
Interesting. I'm curious though, assuming I am Chinese and I trade knives for USD - where would I be able to receive USD to evade capital control? Surely not my bank account or Steam wallet. Or is it for people with bank account in both countries? But in that case crypto could be more convenient? I'm puzzled
Yes you would need to receive in a foreign USD bank account outside of China, the whole goal is to get the capital out of China and into a foreign account. Cryptocurrency transactions/exchanges are illegal in China so that's definitely not convenient! Meanwhile you can buy CS2 items with any ordinary payment method.
Remember the 15% transaction fee on the Steam market? That's why the price difference hasn't disappeared. Players can avoid this fee through gifting and off-platform transactions.
And all of this is just Chinese players trying to buy games cheaper—after all, what else can Steam wallet funds be used for?
Some comments claim this is a way for Chinese people to evade financial regulations, but that's complete nonsense. The Steam market's capacity is entirely insufficient to meet the demand. They could easily choose to legally exchange currency using the foreign exchange quotas of relatives and friends, engage in cross-border wash trading through underground banks, or use fake trade and fake investment schemes.
I feel watches and cars are different. You cant magically "print" 10000000 Bentley's so supply will be constrained and they are expensive to make. I feel the luxury is more tangible than just being rare.
A lot of real economies are based on fake constraints. Or the constraint is a closely held secret that's pretty arbitrary and not based on any grand amount of skill or effort.
> Doesn’t really tie in to actual markets involving physical item.
- A designer brand has admitted to destroying its own products. Coach confirmed that it purposely ripped up bags that were returned to its stores, even if the bags were still in good condition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/58846711
Monopolies and cartels are also well known for creating fake scarcity. Fake scarcity is bad for the economy and for consumers, only a few profit from fake scarcity at the cost of everybody else.
only to the extent that they are both artificial. The totality of USD _represents_ the totality of all resources that exist under the control of the USA (ala, the people, gov't, companies etc, as well as any natural resources).
The counterstrike skins don't represent such real life physical resources.
You're forgetting the other side of the equation, demand. The reason they have value is the level of demand versus supply. The item has to have some real world value, even if that's just being able to show off.
They're are plenty of things in very short supply, bit no one wants them.
Not really, but it's actually kinda like currency. Imagine if a government suddenly devalued all $500 bills into $100 bills, but every other denomination remained the same.
That’s not really what happens though. What happened was that 500$ bills where so rare in circulation that collectors started paying upwards of 20 100$ to get them. Valve went “yes the 500$ are too rare, we need to fix supply so we’ll start exchanging 5 100$ bills for one 500$ bill”
This had catastrophic impact on people hoarding 500$ expecting their exchange value to remain at the elevated levels.
Not really the same is it. You are confusing a stock and a flow. Currency is exchanged for something material you have to give up.
Government may indeed issue more currency, and does do so every day, but it is in exchange for something the private sector has that it wants for the public service. That isn’t a problem as tax is a percentage and operates as a geometric series - meaning that whatever government issues it gets back exactly the same - unless somebody along the way saves it.
There has to be something available to buy in a currency for it to be issued. As we see in the game.
The Steam Deck has essentially enabled money laundering through Steam. Before the Deck, if you sold skins on the marketplace you could only use your Steam credit to buy games on the platform, or you had to do a shady 3rd party Paypal exchange. Now, you can use your Steam credits to buy a device with value that you can resell IRL.
Before that, you could also buy the Index VR set, which probably aren't as liquid as a Steam Deck. I won a Dota chest that could only be acquired by watching tournament games in-person, and after letting it appreciate for two years it nearly covered the cost of an Index. I was thankful because I had no idea what to do with hundreds of dollars in Steam credit.
I think most people are fine with the “shady” selling sites when it comes to laundering. I sold my CS inventory a week ago (lucky me!) and I had no problems with getting the cash. Reselling steam decks feels very inefficient
If you are in that business the question isn't really if it's against the rules or not, but if it's possible. You can use your in-game currency that you've gotten through whatever means to get a physical product that you can then resell for cash.
Valve employs an army of economists (notably Yanis Varoufakis as alumn) to make these decisions. It was certainly purposeful and will balance itself out.
this is what I think. The change is that 10 of the highest-level weapon textures can be traded for a knife texture: the result is that the supply of knife textures goes up, but the supply of high-level weapon textures goes down significantly more.
It's not so much a depreciation of knife textures, as a distribution of this value down the chain of item rarities.
The broader impact is that it creates a lot of uncertainty around valuations in the market. This is probably the most impactful (on valuations) policy change made by Valve in the history of the market. Now there is an increased fear that more similar such changes may be coming down the pipeline.
Yanis Varoufakis is now writing and warning us about digital feudalism, seemingly based on his learnings at his Valve tenure.
Valve, as a digital feudalist, generates funds, practically for free, from both transactions of items and the lootboxes. It operates the markets on which digital goods are traded, taxes all sales occurring on these platforms.
You might want to search him, though. As far as "highest levels of economic decision making" goes, he's not a bad choice - not uncontroversial, perhaps, but definitely qualified for it.
> Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat.
> Now, that Butterfly Knife mentioned above? It's going for around $12,000, as people are essentially dumping their stock, with 15 sold over the past 16 hours at the time of this writing.
Why on earth would anyone think an item in a video game is a good store of real-world value? Who are the people buying these items right now for $12k? How the heck did we get here?
CS is wild. I used to play and have like 40+ cases from free post-match drops. Because those cases are no longer supplied, the prices have been creeping up and to the right for years now; from $0.40 to $20+. I don't even know why people still buy these, but I will basically never have to pay for a Steam game again.
I had to check but I barely played CS:GO. I have a 5 year veteran coin, untradeable, that's it lol. I also have a $0.03 gun for Payday 2, lol.
Nearly 300 "trading cards" but they're all valued between $0.03 and $0.10 at best. Weirdly enough, even the randomest games still get some trading volume. I seriously doubt people are buying cards from random games to complete collections in those volumes, and fully expect it to be bot driven and / or some kind of scam. But I assume Valve gets a percentage for every transaction so they don't really care.
"The GOAT of expensive skins in CS2 is the Karambit Case Hardened in the "Blue Gem" pattern. While the original is costly, one Factory-New variant with pattern 387 reached a staggering $1.5 million! The rarity comes down to its blue pattern, which is incredibly rare on a Karambit."
It's like that with any investment, cash out or wait for it to go up?
I mean I could've bought more or kept my Tesla stock and earn more as it became a trillion dollar company, but I had lost faith in it by then and took my gains.
Each instance of a CS skin is assigned a random amount of wear between 0 and 1, so two copies of the same skin can be worth more or less money depending on their condition. To be clear the value is fixed, actually using a skin won't make it dirtier. Factory New is the highest tier with a wear value between 0 and 0.07.
The game itself only distinguishes between those ranges of values, but it's possible to query the exact number via an API so I think traders will even price that in (e.g. Factory New 0.02 is worth more than Factory New 0.06).
I briefly looked into this, there was a freelance job of making proxy bots to scrape the steam page for prices, the number mentioned here is even crazier than what I saw eg. $12K for something vs. $2K for a Karambit knife skin.
I didn't get far with the project, was harder than I thought as the proxys you can rent were blocked at least the few I tried at the time.
The problem was the rate of checking it was I can't remember hundreds of times a second to provide a "real time" ticker.
Building a business off of another’s business is risky. There is a non zero chance that the original business will take steps to manipulate, change, alter, or outright control the outcome. That’s what Valve did.
Tomorrow Valve could decide that the value of crates is too high so they drop the price of crates to a penny a piece. What would that do to this 3rd party market? Poof.
I doubt they will touch crates. There are hundreds to hundreds of thousands of transactions on each type each day. And they take their cut on each of those.
One example I checked was about 0.20 going to Valve on each sold on market. And they sold 280 thousand of them in last 24 hours. So 56 thousand in single day by minimal effort.
I think this is smart move. Basically any item with price higher than 1800 is useless for Valve. As that item can not be transacted on Steam's marketplace. As such forcing prices lower than this means more transactions can happen there and Valve gets to take their 15% cut on each of them.
Actually with CS stuff there's scarcity too, but since it's digital it's easy to change. Same with designer bags (nothing stopping them from churning out more, but they choose not to do that). Not so with vintage items though, since they're no longer made.
But a lot of Stuff is made with future vintage in mind, e.g. every Ferrari or other high end sports car will only appreciate in value.
They are both about signaling wealth and status. What I don’t understand about the digital items is that the people who own them are often anonymous so why signal? Signaling wealth and status IRL can also carry other benefits that don’t seem to carry over digitally.
I know people that spend gazillions on vintage sneakers. They will literally go and buy some rare designer second hand pair of Nikes or whatever with some scarce design that they only produced a few off. Personally, I wouldn't be that eager to stick my feet into somebody's well worn sneakers. But apparently that's beside the point. Nike actually on purpose feeds that market by coming up with new limited edition designs. These people have enough shoes. They don't buy them because they need another pair of shoes.
The value of money used to be based on gold. Gold has very limited practical value. It actually kind of sucks as a metal because it's not that hard compared to e.g. iron. The main value proposition is that it's pretty and shiny. But people that buy gold don't tend to even look at it. They just store it in a vault. Or worse, they get a digital receipt that proves they own the gold without ever seeing or handling it. The main value of that is that, if you wanted, you could make pretty and shiny things out of the gold bars. And because those pretty and shiny things are valuable, gold is valuable. And therefore people invest in gold. Not to make those things but to be able to sell it to others that might do those things. Of course the vast majority of people buying and selling gold has zero interest in doing that. Most gold ever mined is locked in a vault in bar form and will never be used for anything else than as an intrinsic token of value.
There are a lot of things that have no value beyond subjective esthetics and the group thinking around that. My home country the Netherlands produced a lot of fancy paintings in the seventeenth century. Those are worth a lot now. They are extremely nice according to some. People visit museums to go see them. They are worth tens/hundreds of millions in some cases.
Objectively, most people that visit museums wouldn't be able to tell apart the original from a good replica. And reproducing these things with high fidelity digitally isn't all that hard either. You can find high quality scans of almost any painting for free on the internet. And you would get most of the appreciation/emotion looking at those as you would get by looking at the originals. Of course, most people aren't that into this stuff in any case. But we appreciate these things because other people tell us they are valuable and we take their word for it. The original paintings keep their value mainly because such people keep reassuring us how rare and amazing these things are. That tends to get embarrassing/awkward with forgeries in museums where experts literally have failed to tell the difference.
The value of things whether digital or real is based on social mechanisms for appreciating things. Some things simply are valuable because people agree for whatever irrational reasons that they have value. And then some people buy these things at the market rate because they enjoy having them. Whether that's original art on the wall, some rare sneakers, or a cool skin for a game character that you engage with for many hours while playing the game. The dynamic between the willingness of people to separate with their cash and scarcity is what creates the value.
NFTs are weird mainly because they are digital receipts for something (anything) that has value. They are no different than a paper certificate of authenticity for a painting. It all boils down to the trust people have in the impressive looking stamps/signatures on the paper, or the blockchain shenanigans used to ensure authenticity for the NFT. Of course a lot of NFTs are silly. But in game worlds, ownership of skin is kind of limited as you can't really resell them easily or prove authenticity. Which is something that NFTs addresses. Which is why NFTs became popular in games.
The value of game skins is as irrational as second hand sneakers are or the appreciation for shiny metals. Or gems. Or paintings. But as long as people buy those, they have value.
this is not a gender specific issue. You can easily look at the watch-market, luxury car market etc... to see the same issue play out. In cars it's even worse when you have something like the Lamborghini Urus compared to the Audi RSQ8 which are very close to being the actual same car.
It's complicated. Many "loot" systems in games fall somewhere between pure gambling (roulette, lottery) and a skill/effort based component.
E.g. in popular MMOs "mobs" have loot tables, usually dropping worthless stuff on kill, but with a 0.0001% chance of "awsome". You can kill these 5/sec when geared up. Is this "gambling"?
You can also buy "gold" for real dollars to buy those items of the "auction house" from people that have grinded the farm.
It depends on the game; notably, FFXIV does not allow trading most of the drops you get from the boss fights, so anyone that has a rare mount from one of those "earned" them themselves.
Of course, there's also a market for characters - there's bot / player farms of people leveling characters and acquiring these rarities which then get sold to whales. I don't believe it's a particularly big market though.
There is also a market for leveled characters, as people don't want to spend the time to do so themselves, but they (and I'm sure all other MMOs too nowadays) offer a paid for level boost that takes you to the current max level - 10, at a price point that directly competes with bots.
One issue XIV still has is gold farming and selling bots, they don't offer a means to directly buy gold. Closest thing is buying pure white/black dyes for real money, which can be sold in-game. I suspect it's a PR tradeoff, that is, "boo at people just buying gold".
Of course, XIV has a bit of an inflation issue I think, not enough money sinks. They'll add a new mount that costs 7.5 million in an expansion which will remove some money from the economy, but I don't think it's enough.
Poker is also skill based and also gambling. The concept that gaming lootboxes isn’t gambling because there’s some tangential element of skill involvement is just a strange way trying to protect something that is obviously gambling. It’s not complicated. The only complicated element is that these business grew large enough to get lobby orgs influencing politicians before the law got effectively enforced. You won’t ever see a casino with kids running rampant getting away with a shrug and “how are we going to enforce age restrictions” yet gaming companies get away with this all the time.
Make a regulation that if you have RMT in your game then you have to prefix the official title accordingly, i.e. "RMT: ${my_game_name}". It appears that Valve has made a change that is good for the game, but bad for the merchants. Gambling mechanics in a game are fun, but actual gambling needs to be very explicitly flagged as such and come with a lot more restrictions. I'll surely defend a person's right to gamble, but I find it insidious how culturally acceptable actual gambling has become.
I get why they wanted to do this, but I don't get why they made it this way, I mean yeah it makes a bit money in short term, but creates terrible problems long term.
First of all having 3 billions less in economy means we are 3 billions closer to recession. Worth keeping in mind that games are not essential.
Second thing is trust, without it whole steam can implode. Whole business is based on infinite purchases.
Third thing is people may do harm to themselves and this usually brings eye of Sauron.
People holding virtual cosmetic items that nominally had some value as collectables doesn't mean the whole thing was actually worth that much to society. If everybody tried to cash out their collection they would have soon found there was nothing close to 3 billion in value. The prices of these things were inflated by gamblers using them for speculation. And generally speaking, anything that teaches gamblers a lesson is good for society in the long run.
As for it collapsing Steam; not a chance. They didn't take away anybody's games, and that's what Steam is for to the overwhelmingly majority of users. The gambling addicts are a small minority and generally an annoyance to everybody else.
Short Answer: The whys can just be boiled down to gambling, weird investing, flexing wealth, sports fandom stuff, or wanting to invest in your hobby.
Long Answer:
It is a bit of a perfect storm, and you'll get a lot of mixed answers to this, however these are the reasons I see roughly in order of their impact.
1. Skins are the vehicle for gambling (you bet them instead of $). The loot boxes definitely get people hooked, but the skin gambling arena is a whole different beast.
2. Valve, whether by luck or skill, created a perfect system of scarcity. I can elaborate a lot on how this is done. The rarity of the skins is one thing, but the float system giving each drop a mostly unique appearance causes a 2nd tier of scarcity that adds a lot of value. They hired a bigwig Greek economist to develop this system.
3. The market has been stable-ish for long enough that some people view it as a legitimate safe investment. I have heard this is very popular in China, but I really don't know how this behavior is spread out globally. I have a friend with over $100k in the market (well, he did before this).
4. Almost everyone I know who plays seriously has at least invested a small amount in the game. I play with roughly the same 8 people, and 7 of us all spent $1-2k on the game, with inventories ranging from $1-5k.
My impression (?) was that he (Yanis Varoufakis) was more involved in the overall design of the Steam Community Market than the CS:GO skins system, but this is what the other commenter was referring to:
This is what I'd like to know as well. $20k - $12k at "dumping stock" prices! - for a digital item for a video game is just incomprehensible to me.
But clearly it's happening, so I'd like to understand better the venn diagram of people who have $20k completely disposable and people who are so highly motivated by their appearance in a video game. My assumptions are obviously wrong.
There is a number of wealthy individuals who whale on video games. Thats at least a part of the venn diagram. Having money doesn't remove your vanity.
But the skins are also used as a money substitute for gambling and as an intermediate item to exchange money between currencies. The skins "just happened" to be a stable enough store of value to create secondary markets.
Because in this case the value can change overnight, and Valve doesn't otherwise have control over the market (value) of the items.
Expensive clothes aren't much more expensive to produce than cheaper ones, but it is known that brands like Louis Vuitton will destroy old stock rather than put it on sale. Some products are intrinsically valuable though, because production can't scale as well - some cars (although a brand can do a new design and mass produce it), watches, semiconductor manufacturing, etc are constrained due to their complexity.
$20,000 for a fake knife!? And I buy an item, a real one, and find later there was a cheaper price by few bucks somewhere else and I feel like an idiot.. crazy!
Yeah for a digital item with easy trading it's more like buying a stock vs a physical item which instantly depreciates. Basically holding $20k in an alternative form vs spending $20k.
That's hyperbolic. You had high profile celebrities advertising NFTs, and stuff valued at millions, that's a whole other scale.
Skins have their place when they're modestly priced, as they also have quite a modest impact. But the whole gambling, artificial restrictions and trading is quite suspicious indeed.
NFTs failed because organized crime didn't latch onto it like they did CS knives. Only half-joking, the other half is stuff like grey market money conversion as mentioned in another thread.
I think the previous commenter meant real-life economies, not in-game ones so much. Although with any MMO or any multiplayer game with trading for that matter, there will be a grey market of trading items, gold, or characters for real money, and a bot market to go with it.
It seems more like a market strategy than an economic collapse. Afterall they control the skin market, and this will lead more players to buy very expensive skins (cheaper than the day before yesterday, but still quite pricey). Also, not all skins went down in price, the red ones from collections with gold skins even increased in value.
This is exactly why my family never hoarded tens of thousands of dollars worth of arcade tokens back in the 1980s. Creating a secondary cash market for tokens wouldn't have changed my parents' minds about that.
You trade up. I have a friend who has thousands of dollars worth of CS items, he has never spent a single cent on any of them - you play, you gain some items, you sell them which adds money to your steam account, you use that to buy something else you think might be worth something in the future.
They are. But most of the time they are spending $2 here and there, which is much easier to convince your parents to borrow a credit card for. After all parents are already spending millions(billions?) of dollars on roblox, what's a few dollars for yet another online game. Kids aren't the ones buying $20k skins, but kids are definitely an important part of this economy.
Counter Strike has weekly drops, you get a case and some random skin. Usually those are not worth much themselves, except maybe for the case. People then sell these weekly drops on the community market and get Steam balance. Sell enough to afford a key (+case).
In other cases kids might have access to their parents payment methods, or they can buy prepaid cards from places like gas stations. I used to do this to buy games when I was younger and my parents wouldn't buy games for me.
Valve doesn't prevent anyone from opening cases. There is no KYC.
There's a lot of assumptions in your comment, such as that people under 18 don't have their own money, that their parents monitor it, that it should be a secret, etc. And maybe that only under 18's spend money in video games, but I haven't read the article in detail, don't know if it's mentioned.
How is that wild? Currency values are controlled by governments and international market forces, virtual knives by the publisher and trading platforms. Valve can collapse the whole market with one proverbial press of a button, you'd need to be an autocrat to do that in real life and even then it wouldn't be easy.
I asked friends who play why would Valve do this. Answers were divided to:
1. Valve wants to avoid regulatory scrutiny over loot boxes
2. Valve wants to limit prices; the Steam marketplace only allows items up to 2500 usd to be traded. By averaging out the item prices (knives drop, covert-class increases) they are able to indirectly limit the usefulness and harmful side effects (money laundering, decentralized liquidity) of 3rd party trading sites
I mean a lot of games entire point/gameplay is economy like Eve online.... There is such a thing as a fun pro player version of this.... But real life money incentive makes it gross or scammy.
Thought this might be a hilarious sign of the bubble popping (a run on cs skins) but nope:
> Following Valve's Oct. 22 update to Counter-Strike, the second-highest-tier, Covert (Red), can now be traded up and turned into Knives and Gloves. Essentially, this means that a previously extremely rare and highly sought-after cosmetic is going to be much more obtainable for those who increasingly want it, reducing the value of Knives and Gloves on the open marketplace.
Regulation also means that children are excluded, debt is not allowed, and all chips can be settled for cash when the player leaves the property. Even the comps are regulated. The majority of casinos in the US are Indian casinos. When they aren't and are taxed by the government those funds are usually used to improve and fund the local area giving the local citizens the ability to decide, through legislation, if it should be continued or outlawed.
Finally, Steam pays taxes in the US, so the government is already "getting a cut." Games of chance are not moral. Unregulated games of chance are flatly evil.
Any ranked matchmaking game is designed to addict you by the prospect of being ranked as elite. They have a number of insidious methods to keep your ranking low, some are even patented by the game companies themselves!
For example, if someone is getting too high, it’s nothing to pair that person with a known deserter for 1-3 games to drastically slow their progress.
No, just the promises of going pro. The conversion rate for high school athletes to the NFL or NBA is less than a hundredth of a percent combined. There are kids skipping classes and destroying their bodies thinking they’re going to go pro when they’re not.
Wasted is a rather strong word and yes, the whole argument is a slippery slope _but_ I can imagine sports that are less about glorifying deadly violence in a very realistic manner - the loot box and real money part is just the bitter cherry on top.
Glorify? This seems way too serious a take on a game that young males play because of a common, innate fascination with guns and soldiers. 99.9999% of them do not turn into manic killers who just love to kill and glorify it.
> because of a common, innate fascination with guns
Your brain after 200+ years of american propaganda... it's innate in the sense that you're bathed in it from birth through movies and games, and that a good chunk of your economy relies on producing weapons and using them.
Yet most computer games employ firearms and the targets are other humans, rarely (but of course not never) you hunt and gather food for survival. Don't get me wrong, I played my fair share of games from the earliest 8bit machines in the eighties to modern day shooters but in my opinion glorification comes unintended and killing is a cheap game mechanic, and has always been: here, in backwater European country, middle of nowhere, we have zero domestic gun violence, maybe even 0.0001% is just too much.
And yet the US does have a serious problem with (mostly) young males turning into manic killers.
I'm reminded of that scene in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine where he's asking a concerned adult where the violence comes from, and the concerned adult looks sad and confused and says he doesn't know, even though he's standing in front of a nuclear-tipped missile being assembled at the local nuclear-tipped missile plant.
Financialisation is indirect personal violence instead of physical violence. The US doesn't have a problem with that at any scale, as long as the right kinds of people are doing it.
I don't know, reading? Building something? Exploring the natural world? Sports?
Not to say that all video games are unsubstantive. But the substance in exploring virtual world comes from its uniqueness, not playing de_dust2 for 1000 hours. No other form of entertainment or art is analogous to video games in terms of the maximum time you can spend on it with totally depreciating returns.
No. If you play 1000 hours of a sport, you will at least be stronger, more coordinated, more agile. But the downsides are more about repetitive strain injury and the possibility of screwing up your joints.
Different benefits and downsides.
Of course, a lot of guys are suckered into sports-related gambling these days too.
Playing football or lacrosse is more "real" than working a desk job. For thousands of years, humans had to hunt and make tools and relied on their wits and strength to survive. Survival in the modern day is mostly a question of obedience.
I think the purpose of exploring virtual worlds like quake or counter-strike or something should not be to escape the real world but rather to experience a new kind of physicality. The purpose of playing games should be to engage in a deeper world which is more "real" than the tame one we are ordinarily subjected to.
It's why I am not opposed to video games. I opposed to overplaying video games because you ruin them, they become mundane and predictable.
How about 1000 hours of chess? Or 1000 hours of warhammer? Or D&D?
One may say you make social bonds playing them, but that stands true for video game as well. Speaking for myself, I definitely spent more than 1000 hours on summoner's rift; 15 years later me and my league friends still playing LOL together and chat about all kind of things on a daily basis.
Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.
FYI, this is already the case in some countries. In Belgium or Netherland, it's straight up banned, and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)
>and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)
That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.
And in France specifically, the first case you open is guaranteed to not be a good item. So it's essentially the same system but with an additional $2,50 entry fee
I propose any company that flagrantly violates the intent of a ruling like that is sent to a special judge who operates in the same manner - bring forth a penalty while explicitly looking for every violation and arcane loophole to punish the company with.
To save people opening the link...in France it would be a judge not a prosecutor. France has an Inquisitorial rather than the Adversarial legal system the UK and US have. Put simply, a judge doesn't merely decide between the two cases presented to them, they try and establish the facts
Edit: I said 'UK' where I should have said 'England and Wales'. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legal systems, although I believe both have Adversarial systems they are different in some ways. The US system could, however, be seen as a continuation of the English system.
I'll bet apple fan boys will agree to this statement for Valve or any other company, but when it comes to apple having to open up their walled garden in EU and then using every dirty trick in the book to make it impossible, oh boy...
I'd say it's designed to diminish the pyschological draw somewhat.
Gambling is addictive precisely because that "the next one could be the one" element. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a big impact on sales.
That said i think it's still better to just ban it.
As someone who moved to the UK I find it crazy that 2p machines exist. You put 2p in, and hope to get more out. It's literally child gambling. Where I come from we had arcades with tickets for stuff, but to me that's a whole different level to money in -> money out.
I still enjoy them though, but I enjoy gambling responsibly!
While it won't be true for all kids, personally I felt coin pushers taught me an important lesson about the drawbacks of gambling at a young age - it's obvious even to many children how rigged the penny pusher is. My own son had similar thoughts after a quick try of one too.
And close to 0% of children have credit cards to buy these virtual lootboxes. These mechanisms prey on getting children to beg their parents to spend money.
In practice a parent can easily forego allowing their children to make unsupervised purchases linked to the parent's card! That seems absolutely crazy.
You can have a debit card in the UK as a fairly young child. I think I got one at 12? I don’t know if there’s specific restrictions on buying in-game currency with them? I don’t know how they’d know though.
The first thing I did when I got a debit card was buy the 18 rated GTA Vice City!
Yes, and I never ran around with cash. Supposing I did get a cash gift before my teens, it would just sit in the "bank" i.e. a box in the dresser. Of course there were no gift cards or any of that crap back then, which is what you'd expect to receive today. I mean, as an adult now, what are you likely to receive: a gift card from a relative, or cash?
There's zero reason for a child to carry cash for no purpose. At any rate their lives are so structured usually that this notion that they're going to run to some store to convert it to prepaid cards is far-fetched to begin with.
I see a failure of parenting that some don't want to give credence. I'm not sure why.
So we should be locking kids out of the entire cash economy instead of just banning gambling microtransactions in games?
Btw. here they might need cash to take the bus home. And yes, people here let kids do that alone. Maybe because we live in a civilized society, who knows.
So we're against checking IDs cause privacy but we also want to limit kids from accessing certain parts of the internet because gambling/porn? Have a cake and eat a cake?
Yeah I used to be for it on grounds of liberty but having seen a little of the actual industry it’s just purely corrosive, evil shit. It should be fought.
I’d maybe be OK with some kind of well-thought-through thing that still allowed friendly poker matches or sports brackets between people who actually know each other, but got the big money out of it. Maybe just ban corporations from having anything to do with it so limited-liability and serious investment is taken off the table? Something along those lines? But it’s also bad enough that I’d definitely vote for an outright ban if it came up. Complete switch-around for me on this topic, from where I was on it for years.
No casino gambling. Casino gambling is not gambling. It's putting $1.00 into a machine and getting $0.80 back, but the exact refund amount after every dollar put in is arbitrary. There's absolutely no risk to the casino, the casino is not gambling. The only gambling being done is by individual bettors, and they have an expected massive loss.
I don't care very much if people gamble with each other, and expect $1 back for every $1 they put in.* But casino games and lootboxes are specifically designed for consistent losses to the house. It's simply another tax, but on the addicted, desperate, and/or innumerate. The weakest people at their weakest moments; and if we're not protecting them, the government has no purpose.
* I actually think that it is good for people who have the same wealth levels to gamble with each other, as long as the outcomes are largely random. The problem is with vigs, and with pots that get too large to cover against a house that can endlessly extend itself.
Yeah, I think you nailed it. A ban on playing against "the house" would do it. Taking a fixed amount from each pot (as at poker tables) for play among patrons would still be allowed, but slot machines wouldn't. Your solution's much better than a full ban because it wouldn't drive as much illegal betting (a problem no only because it circumvents the law, but because for gambling in particular but for any black market, really, it tends to become connected with other criminal activity)
Enforce 18+ age rating and mandate platform parental controls. If the parents decide to let their child pay for adult content freely that's unfortunate and on them.
Going stricter isn't effective, ID check will become tools for whatever ulterior motives they have.
CS:GO is already rated 18+, and Steam already has parental controls. That has done essentially nothing to prevent it as children sometimes lie about how old they are and don't have their parents set up parental accounts to oversee themselves.
There's something funny about how some countries try to enforce this and how Valve "solved" it, which I think demonstrates how silly "there ought to be a law!" thinking can get.
I believe for some regions, Valve just shows you what's in the "lootbox" (case, whatever), and you have to pay to acquire it before you're shown the next one.
This isn't to say I don't fully agree that this kind of thing is probably predatory and probably unhealthy. But I find most discourse on the topic starts and ends at the shoreline with a version of "there ought to be a law..."
they can buy pokemon cards. To be honest, I don't think CS:GO or TF2 or the like are pro-gambling. You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.
Look at the "meta-"game mechanics: you play a few games, you get a guaranteed case drop. This circa $3 case could contain anything, a $0.2 skin or a rare $2500 knife. When you open it a casino-like wheel goes over all the items and selects one randomly. There are hundreds of YT/twitch channels that open cases all day long and their target audience is children. It's gambling, and it's gambling for children.
I'm honestly really not a fan of the collectable trading card type of games (MtG, Pokemon TCG, yu-gi-oh etc). You have to pay to have a chance of getting a good card, which makes the whole thing pay to win. It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you, without having to pay more for having specific cards that you want to complete your ideal deck.
I personally often go to the huge bins of "shit tier" cards that my local game stores have, because I like to have some pretty cards (I often use them as bookmarks), but I don't play the game itself, so the actual mechanical value of the cards is meaningless to me
EDIT: I feel the same way about things like Warhammer. I don't know about other games, but in Warhammer at least there is a limit on how powerful an overall army can be, so sure it may not look as visually good, but just having tokens that say "squad of soldiers" or "mega death tank of doom" should be perfectly acceptable too
> It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you
Unless you play Pokemon TCG or MTG competitively at a national/international level, proxy cards are mostly accepted in the community.
More and more people recognise Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) have money in their eyes in the card games. Pokemon cards are becoming more full-art because that's what sells for crazy markups on third party websites, and MTG are doing crossovers with whoever will sign them a license. They're both playing a risk by moving from old time players (many of whom are now leaving the hobbies) for the sake of some nostalgic "investors".
I just wish I had a local shop with a shitbin. The shops around me just sell packs (when not out of stock) and they're all marked up beyond MSRP. I just want to play the game. I don't care about art, holographic patterns and the like.
On the other hand, whenever people open packs just looking for collectable cards, they flood the market with job lots of regular cards at dirt cheap prices. I managed to get a joblot of 2500+ Pokemon TCG cards for around £20 (lots of duplicates, all regular).
I would like to see a ban on allowing children to play machines like the Wizard of Oz ones, where you drop the coin on a shelf in the hopes it'll push off other coins or cards you need to collect. It sounds like a skill game, and I liked them when I first saw them. But then I saw how people play them with vacant faces, like slot machines. They're casino games, not arcade.
They're an institution in the UK. They're in the arcades at every seaside town, and every kid plays them. Now that I have kids I actually think they're brilliant; for £2 each they taught mine everything they need to know about gambling.
- You sometimes win a bit along the way, but eventually you lose everything.
- The jackpot prizes are only there to lure you in, and you never win them. Towards the middle of the shelf are things like £20 notes. We noticed that one of them was getting quite near the edge, and might actually become winnable, but then the following morning its position had been reset to the back of the shelf.
- It's still fun as long as you're just playing with money you don't mind losing, and not expecting to come out ahead.
They even learned something about company scrip, from the tickets that come out of the machines and the ridiculous exchange rate between tickets and the actual rewards at the prize shop.
I asked my son on the way home if he'd put all his Christmas money and savings into the machine if I let him, and the answer was hell no - maybe a pound, but he didn't want to lose all of his money. Valuable lessons all round.
Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism.
Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.
If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.
I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.
Pinball and video games I think are something that can be allowed. Even if the model is slightly predatory in this age. At least you only win game time.
Other types of partly fake skill games surely should be banned from kids. Like crane games where there is some hidden variable. And well anything in same category.
Gambling mechanics is everywhere nowadays, especially in mobile games. It's almost like an industry standard. I think the only solution is to ban all in-game purchases completely.
Correction. $0 in value. Skins do not exist and are worth exactly $0. If you spend money on skins, they are worth… $0. It’s all a large scale grift money incinerator where the only winner is Valve.
+ whatever pleasure you derive from it, ig. I can understand loot box addiction, but paying $20,000 for valve character dress up? Not even like a Peter Griffin player model or something, but a slightly different looking knife? Madness
I find it fascinating how the "HN Hivemind" (and yes, I know not a real thing, but the trends seem pretty consistent) is so opposed to kids playing with lootboxes, but also very angry at governments trying to impose age verification.
Some people are opposed to kids gambling (or gambling in general) - an understandable sentiment even if i dont agree.
Some people are skeptical of the gov't and the implications of proper identification on the web (which is required for age verification). Whether you are pro or anti gambling doesn't make or change this skepticism.
I think the HN hive mind is more opposed to the concept of loot boxes in general. We don't need to go much beyond that. It follows that a puddle of industrial waste would cause trouble if it began to flow downstream.
I used to work at Valve -- on the CS:GO team, no less -- although I left nearly a decade ago. I don't know what prompted this change but I have some suspicions. Even when I was there and the loot box system was new to CS:GO, there were concerns that a lot of trading was happening outside of the marketplace. The trading happened elsewhere because you can't have more than $300 in your Steam wallet (more than this would trigger some banking regulations that Valve wanted to avoid), so anything more valuable than that had to happen on 3rd party sites.
We didn't want this for three reasons: we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops; and finally because 3rd party trading ended up creating a lot of scams and therefore angry players.
At the time, we didn't see any way around it: we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other, and despite omniscience and omnipotence in the game and Marketplace, we weren't confident that we could rejigger the drop rates and rarities to lower the maximum perceived value of the fanciest knife to be under the $300 limit.
I suspect that the CS:GO team finally decided to do something about it and chose this. If the team is anything like I left it, they probably modeled this extensively (we had data on nearly every game ever played in CS:GO and complete Marketplace data), and discussed the change with the TF2 and DOTA teams, who also have to deal with this, and decided that the short-term fury of a small fraction of the playerbase was worth it. I wonder if TF2 and DOTA are having similar problems and, if so, whether this change will be rolled out for those games, too.
Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective.
> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;
My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.
Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.
> My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
Yes. The Valve philosophy on the cosmetics marketplace (we called it "the economy") is that you distribute random rewards to players and they can trade and sell and discover the value of those goods for themselves. Obviously, this was done to make money for Valve but, in theory, it's also good for the players. It allows people who have things they don't want to sell them to people who want them. And all this buying and selling happens between Steam wallets (and there is no off-ramp) so at the end of the day, it's all just profit for Valve.
But above all we wanted people to play CS:GO because it was a fun game. We didn't want to turn it into some kind of grim pachinko parlor, with players grinding out matches just to get random loot box drops. So you have to balance the potentially real dollar random rewards so that they're a fun surprise but not economically attractive enough to become a job.
> players grinding out matches just to get random loot box drops
I mean... what you have is people operating rooms full of computers running automated bots to farm drops (and presumably accounts to sell later) [0].
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3yS6_WDb6w
Right, but they didn’t want that to happen.
It’s just a weird side effect that’s surprisingly difficult to prevent - online games have had gold farmers for pretty much as long as there have been online games with gold.
Coffeezilla makes an interesting series of videos about casinos in the csgo community and also makes a video against Valve themselves.
Worth a watch imo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
I’ve run into idle bot accounts several times while playing and it’s infuriating. Mainly in the arms race mode. Players can leave and join that mode at any time. So the bots will constantly be joining and leaving. if the bots manage to become 50% of the game they will vote kick all the remaining players. I’ve had several in progress matches interrupted because a few of the actual players bailed and the bots managed to take over the lobby.
>we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other
Why not remove trade and use an auction system with a limit? Or not allowing trades under market price?
Runescape tried this back in 2007 along with completely disabling PvP; it was a very unpopular change for the vast majority of players who were not buying items.
I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.
The grand exchange (auction house) and the trade restrictions that landed at the same time pretty much killed the game for me.
Prior to the G.E., RuneScape had a thriving, complex economy. Players made money transporting goods from harvesting areas, either on behalf of someone or by paying independents for their goods so the independents could avoid going back to town. Players made money buying and selling goods - geographic arbitrage was very much a thing, as well as across time, and also across servers. People made money turning cheaply available goods into more expensive goods.
When the G.E. landed, it basically killed most of the economy. Harvesting stuff could still be profitable, and players could still make money transporting goods from harvesting areas to the nearest bank so people grinding levels wouldn't have to leave, but basically everything else became irrelevant. There's no point in selling anything anywhere yourself when you could take it to the G.E. and get a sale with no effort.
Less of an issue but still sad, the trading restrictions also killed the generosity of veteran players. 'drop parties', where a rich player leads a group around town dropping valuable items, died off as valuable items would no longer appear in the ground for others. Gifting people stuff was no longer possible if it exceeded (fairly low) thresholds. Very sad.
"geographic arbitrage was very much a thing"
You must like a albion online, its also like that
Eve online also comes to mind
Because people literally want to give gifts to each other sometimes. A friend I met playing CS get each other a skin every year for Christmas.
Gambling for kids so we can gift skins?
You're almost purposefully missing the point.
A better analogy would be to say kids are banned from bringing cash to school because that makes bullies take their money and kids gamble and bet.
How is that any different? It would be fine if schools banned children from bringing cash to school. If there were a multibillion dollar bullying and gambling market going on at the school, I'd demand it.
My issue with that is that the kids are losing something because someone else is doing something. Very similar to one kid being disorderly in class and everyone losing the recess.
Imagine being a kid in that room and being annoyed by the kid being disorderly, because you want to learn. Now you lost your rights because of that kid. You never did what he was doing, you never contributed to the disorder he caused, if anything you were also victimized by it. And then the power figure in this equation goes and chops away your rights along with his. First lesson in unfairness where the wet grass is burnt alongside the dry grass, because to the powers that be, the rights and allowances you had are mere acceptable collateral damage. Suppressing dissent was more important than protecting what is yours.
Are these schools in Stalin's soviet union? One kid causes disorder so all kids must be purged to make sure there won't be another naughty child in the future?
Believe it or not, teachers (your sao-called "power figures" here) are generally not a bunch of untrained dumbshits unable to think of kids with more granularity than as the entire collective group making up a class. They have the skills and training to identify the sources of disruptions along with ample resources available for correcting them without calling forth damnation and hellfire on everything in a 5 mile radius. Hammers are awesome, but it's not all that hard to grab a scalpel when a situation calls for a scalpel.
I had some great teachers, and some not so great ones. It didn't even take being in Stalin's Soviet Union to experience the whole spectrum.
Even the good ones at times resorted to those kind of measures. But it seems we agree that collective punishment is unfair.
Or just skipping the predatory gambling crap entirely and selling the skins directly like every other live service PvP shooter these days
With trading. Market price is not only price. With skins there are lot of preferences. Starting for weapons they apply, not all people use same guns as much. And they might prefer one style of skin over an other skin.
If you are not in to extract most possible value, you might trade a more expensive skin for weapon you do not use in style you do not use for less expensive one for weapon you use more in style you really like.
This sounded odd to me as well. Most lootbox games today has no trading at all - you can pay to unlock items for your own account, and that's it. I suspect the more accurate way to explain it is Valve successfully prevented authority interventions than this being more consumer friendly.
I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the CS2 rollout (2 years and counting) and the number of bugs, poor performance, and issues?
I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1]
Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
It is also smoothing players' frustration and shopping-spree habits in order to obtain a rare item. If you have the ability to trade N rare items for another rare item then you quite surely may obtain any cosmetic item you want for a much lower investment (less boxes to open). The 'grey market' will adapt to this new value.
That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
[1] EDIT: and probably a preemptive protection for any future legal threat (as some countries tend to prohibit money gambling in games)
I waded through some Tik Tok comment threads on this change and it was so eye-opening: there are a shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items, thinking it was a retirement portfolio. I fear the crypto era has lead to even further diminished financial literacy at large… Blessed be compound interest and financial regulation.
It's been years now, but I used to be involved in the trading market for Team Fortress 2. There were people who did TF2 trading as a full-time job, exploiting arbitrage between markets and holding items that were expected to increase in value (and sometimes using bots to farm items).
The Mann vs. Machine update in 2012 added a new game mode that would give players loot as a reward for completing missions. Players who didn't care about the trading market (i.e. the vast majority) would look up trading sites after a gaming session to offload their stuff fast without caring much about the value. People who described themselves as "quickbuyers" would aim for the people who wanted quick and simple transactions and then sell the item elsewhere for a markup. I did this for a while and averaged $5-10 of profit per day, usually 20-30 cents per transaction. Someone treating it as a full-time job could probably have made a lot more, like $20+ per day.
That was pretty good money if you a) were a kid with no living expenses, or b) lived in a developing country where the money went farther. I was in group A. Any time I wanted to buy a Steam game, I'd put up my quickbuyer listing on the trading sites and save up the money. But I suspected at the time that most people in the scene were in group B. If I were Valve I'd struggle to pull the trigger on a major change to the in-game economy knowing that it would affect the livelihood of a nontrivial number of people in countries like Venezuela, and maybe that's the reason they seem to have hesitated for so long.
> shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items
If you meant children, with access to parents credit cards, who are addicted to gambling, you’d be more accurate. Children gambling is a huge problem in CS, which created this economy. The players know it, the influencers know it, Valve knows it and pretty much anyone who’s played CS in the recent years knows it. This implosion does nothing more than reset the system for Valve so that they can continue to make money.
How much of the CS player base is actually kids? Maybe wrongly, my view of CS is that it's a legacy game with an audience in their 30s or 40s. And that kids are mostly gambling with roblox or fornite.
CS2 is very much alive. If you look at the pro scene, most players are in the 19-25 range (some outliers are older and younger) which makes sense since it’s much easier to become a pro after 18 than before. But that also implies a healthy pipeline of young players. Obviously the exact breakdown is difficult to estimate, but I’d be inclined to think fewer people in 30s and 40s would have time for CS than in their teens and 20s. I could be wrong.
Very much alive. https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/#12y
From mid-2018, CS2 has trended upward at +150,000 players/year. Starting at 500-600,000 that lasted from ~2015 to 2018 with mostly flat rate, after Covid, CS2 has been linearly upward pretty much constantly. The 24hr peak recently was 1,550,265 logged in.
One week variance is maybe ~700,000 during low timeframes, and 1,500,000 during peak hours pretty much every single day. Tends to peak yearly in May, with low tides in May and Nov-Dec usually, although last Dec was relatively up. 2020 and 2023 were both large years, 2025's looking similar.
On the player age question, the best data I was able to find on a quick search was https://www.hltv.org/
Total search over the full range returns 955 entries. Breakdowns by age look like its a pretty heavily 19-24 playerbase. 25-30's also pretty significant. Almost 77% of the player base between them.
Probably trends really hardcore, since the people listed average 360 (+-140) maps, and 7800 (+-3000) rounds.On the other hand I am not sure that most people would be playing the same game for 20+ years - I played CS religiously during my school years, but at some point, even if you keep playing games, you just want something else
No way. Look at what's happened in the past. Full on adults were investing in comic books and beanie babies.
I have had friends in the 90s and 00s "invest" in Beanie Babies and Legos and make a ton of money... for a while... and then get wiped out. This is not a new thing.
Yeah, I was trying to think about that when I wrote my comment. I do think there’s at the very least a scale change between the proliferation of unregulated “markets” these days (crypto, cs skins, Pokémon cards, I’m sure others) and the “your beanie babies will be worth a fortune some day” of the past. Perhaps what’s more surprising, though, is how consumer behavior leads these markets to now actually move up and to the right for remarkably long. My sense is you were always in fact delusional to think your beanie babies would hold value, but perhaps people are not entirely crazy looking at the charts of skin prices over X years and expecting it to continue. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the collectors and too charitable to our contemporaries…
People love to gamble and delude themselves into thinking bad outcomes are only for someone else.
It's hilarious to US CS items/weapons as a retirement portfolio when you could get pretty damn good and government protected monopoly by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up. These are now being used by actual retirement funds.
http://machinegunpriceguide.com/html/german_subguns_0.html
That market could crash overnight with a single SCOTUS ruling against the NFA.
NFA for machine guns will never be overruled, never. The odds of Hughes amendment being ruled against, are one iota above nil.
Yea yea, you could have said that about any number of things the current administration did - so far.
Trump banned bump stocks because he thought they were too close to machine guns.
Ron Paul and maybe Massie are about the only politicians of my lifetime that held any real power that I can think of that would even entertain deregulating machine guns.
And the supreme court ruled against the bump stock ban.
Which is also why the Forced Reset Trigger was not banned - they didn't think they could.
Incidentally, the longer forced reset triggers stay legal, the more real machines will have their value growth slow and, almost certainly, eventually tumble. The only reason this hasn't happened yet is because most people aren't yet familiar with them and many of the people who are just kind of assume that once they really go mainstream the government will put a stop to it, meaning "real" machine guns maintain their special status and therefore their special price. If FRTs stay legal for a long time and survive public scrutiny, then confidence in their future will grow and they will then eat much of the market demand for machine guns.
Of course, some machine guns would always remain valuable for their desirability as antiques, as long as people remain interested in them. That presumption of future demand for your collection might be a relatively safe bet for cool old guns in America, but it's still a bet.
They could likely get away with banning the FRT and bump stock through amending the definition of the machine gun in congress, just not the executive branch.
The ruling on those had nothing to do with overruling any part of the NFA. Only correctly identifying that FRT and bump stocks do not shoot automatically more than one shot by a single function of the trigger, which is what congress said would be the things allowed to be called machine guns.
> NFA for machine guns will never be overruled, never.
2 things make me question this. Never is a long time. People who claim to know the indefinite future, generally don't. These things being understood, forgive me if I don't take your word for it. Nobody should.
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But something like legislation preventing further transfers, etc, could also happen.
Link to the retirement fund?
I’m surprised to hear that bit, there are way too many lawsuits flying around right now in the gun the world to consider that kind of risk.
Then again perhaps the fund managers taking on fees are the real point.
There is no profit without risk
Wow the home page on that website is a real piece of work. It's amazing to me that someone can honestly believe all those things.
Yea, kinda hard to believe the numbers when the website appears to be run by someone bordering on time cube levels of delusion
Most American conservatives and Trumpists believe most if not all of those things from my experience, and a lot of what's on that site now reflects official American government policy. The only surprise I see there is at least implied pro-Ukraine sentiment.
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Relying on the sanity and/or consistency of government policy would keep me up at night.
I would sleep perfectly soundly if it relied on politicians not wanting the plebs they subjugate to have easier access to machine guns, which is what keeps their value up.
As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated.
The risk is arguably lower than many single stocks, many of which are bought in retirement portfolio.
> As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated.
There's plenty of ways to not confiscate them but impair their value.
Further restrictions on transfer, restrictions on use, disadvantaged tax treatment, requirements for storage, security, insurance, bonding, etc.
The government has imposed most of those on gold at various times yet it continues to be a component of many investor portfolios.
There's an international market in gold.
NFA firearms have an artificially high value because of the exact set of legal restrictions that the government has put in place: loose enough to not crater legal demand, yet tight enough to restrict legal supply. This market is tied to within US borders.
The government can destroy the assumptions behind this market with a stroke of the pen.
The government can destroy the assumptions on which many businesses are built, that are held as stocks in an investment portfolio. Move the goalposts to relation to international markets, and I will likely find how it applies to some other asset commonly found in investment portfolios, like perhaps the current values of some tax preparation companies.
Your original assertion was "...by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up"
Later you said lower risk than many individual stocks. Maybe, maybe not depending on how we define things. But I do think it's quite possible for the price to go down.
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> As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated.
Where is that in the constitution?
5th amendment
I think you may have to check the text again? The 5th amendment says you get due process, and requires compensation if something is taken for “public use”.
Passing a law which you can challenge in court that says “machine guns are illegal now, turn them in so we can melt them down for scrap” is not public use.
Taking it for the public smelting furnace for the state to melt down under the auspices of public safety is a public use.
You can pretty clearly see this isn’t the case. Prior to the reversal of the bump stock ban, owners of bump stocks were required to surrender or destroy them.
That's because the state argued they were unregistered machine guns, thus never legally held property. It is not at all comparable to legal, stamped machine guns then being made illegal.
The EO couldn't have forced an uncompensated surrender of a registered bump stock, were it one existed before the Hughes Amendment.
The case law I’m seeing does not seem to provide that level of certainty.
There’s plenty of flexibility in the case law for what counts as “public use”, but nearly all of it is about individual cases where the government takes a specific person’s specific property, or damages it in some way. There doesn’t appear to be much case law at all for the guardrails if the government declares an object to be illegal to possess writ large for safety purposes and requires owners to destroy or surrender those objects.
I’m not saying there’s no path where the courts would require compensation, but for the level of certainty you’re claiming, I’d expect there to be a more clear line you can draw to existing cases.
It's wild to claim with certainty "clearly see that's not the case" then just claim you're just uncertain here.
My initial claim in any case was that the constitution requires the compensation, not that there is 0% chance the government would violate the constitution.
I’m saying: I am certain the constitution does not guarantee payment in this situation. I am not certain a court couldn’t find a way to connect the takings clause and expand current case law to apply to a case like you’re describing in the future.
None of the above has anything to do with the government violating the constitution.
I mean, I think they’ve proven over the last century that the single thing they’re good at is protecting the regular payment of dividends (and of course buybacks more recently)… One might not be entirely mistaken to compare expecting much more than that from the modern state to expecting Valve to protect your skin investments.
That anyone would use a game cosmetic as a retirement portfolio is so unbelievable it has to be trolling, right? I think we might just be witnessing the grief process unfold…
It's not trolling. People living paycheck to paycheck, without much in the way of financial literacy, are big consumers of "made to be collectible" widgets because they're desperate for appreciating assets and don't know how to do better when they struggle to save up a few hundred dollars (in no small part, because of their gambling addictions.)
Funko pops, baseball cards, knife skins, it's all used this way.
It's not always instructive to assume people making seemingly bad financial decisions are acting irrationally.
People living paycheck to paycheck due to child support orders, alimony, or other judgements taking a giant cut of their paycheck are likely buying collectibles instead of on-paper stocks or commodities because they can actually keep those without the state being able to as easily take them.
Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money rather than making some irrational gambling decision.
I know enough people in this kind of circumstance, my own coworkers, who would be in much better financial shape if they stopped gambling. It's very common for them to one day complain that they can't afford lunch, and the next day to come in fuming because they just lost $500 because sportsball team lost.
> Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money"
I know these people personally, they aren't drug dealers.
What are they, then?
Regular honest hard working people, who struggle to make ends meet in large part due to gambling addictions and related poor financial decisions. Financially the guys who gamble are even worse off than the alcoholics that don't; there's only so much money you can spend on shit beer a week. The gambling addicts lose far more money far faster. If they were all tossing dice and losing money to each other that wouldn't be nearly so bad, but the way of modern industrial gambling is that it's done through apps and run by far away corporations or even the government, who take their money and basically make it disappear from the community. There's no winning it back, everybody but the casino owners loses in the long run. I used to be libertarian on gambling but not after what I've seen. It hurts not only those who choose to gamble, but also their families and communities.
Yeah, I mean the stock market is made to either pay passive income if you have millions or to slowly accumulate value through compound interest—expecting anything else is just gambling. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, neither of the first two are particularly helpful even medium term — and it’s not… entirely irrational to go all in on option (C). I’d be really curious to actually know the scale of how many people became millionaires from crypto — I have no intuition for what order of magnitude it is. Regardless, there’s clearly a growing belief that the world is now full of such moonshots.
Nobody launders money this way.
If you're referring to literal only scratch-offs, maybe. Gambling in general (the point I was addressing using the example), you couldn't be more wrong.
You said "buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets". Of course I was referring to literally that. If you want to say gambling in general, no, not even that is correct. It can only be done where you mostly play against a complice and the house takes a small fixed cut. Nothing to do with lottery shit, that didn't make any sense at all.
The fact lottery tickets were one of the less practical examples does nothing to dispel the point that gambling is a commonly used method of money laundering, which was my point. Your point on one specific form of gambling might be valid but completely unmoving against the principle.
There is no need to have an accomplice, someone could just bet $20 an improbable lottery every time they sell a "hit", eventually they would win big and then have legal taxed income washed and only have to explain how they came up with $20 to end up with thousands in earnings. Who cares if they lose 20,30,50% to the house and taxes when they are happy to pay that to stay out of prison and making high margins.
In fact, watch videos of various change and counterfeit scammers, they quite often use the lottery tickets to launder their proceeds and as part of their crime.[]
[] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKXmEkyl7Bw
You really seem to think that crime money is free, huh
There’s a difference between a physical baseball card and a digital weapon skin. One is permanent, the other is only real as long as the game it’s used in is operational. And we know games have a lifespan. It’s not like csgo/2 weapon skins exist on a chain somewhere… That’s the nuance I’m calling out. It’s not correct to equate a weapon skin to a baseball card even though they are a similar type of social phenomenon.
Collectables are a self-explanatory asset class. Children can appreciate and understand the desire for a holographic Charizard card. Series I savings bonds are harder to understand.
I saw an absolutely shocking number of posts from people clearly on minimum wage at best with 20k or so in CS skins, buying loot boxes every week, and no other investments. Obviously no way to verify the accuracy of such statements, but my sense is you would be horrified to know the scale of the market.
I might have shared your surprise a decade ago, but we live in a world where many people use something with even less utility (cryptocurrency) readily in their retirement portfolios.
At least those cosmetic items in video games actually do something.
RIP financial regulation. CFPB was hit early on but the dump coins were launched even before that
if anything, this re-inforces the crypto thesis: a centralized authority can destroy your life savings at a whim.
i should imagine a whole slew of vitalik buterins were just created.
"thinking it was a retirement portfolio"
before this update, they can prolly just do that lmao
its better performing than stocks and people literally made thousands of dollar from CS market
its as real as people buying BTC at the end of day
They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.
Any market maker, such as Valve, is free to establish the rules of its own "reality".
I understand your analysis, and I certainly failed to mention that point, but making the overall value less attractive to speculators is not evidence of being "rotten to the core".
They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.
The game does have a mature rating, so parents should be vetting their activity.
I would still contend and say the gambling aspect, with real money, is a net negative to the community.
But is the game rated mature due to violence, or due to gambling? I might be okay with my kid playing a game just because it has violence, but that doesn't mean I'm wanting to sign them up for gambling, but I'm curious if the mature rating even covers that since it's more of a meta-game thing and not actually part of the "game" itself.
It’s been rated M since the 90s, well before loot crates were a thing.
There's a big difference between 15 and 18 though...
I think most countries have much stricter enforcement for gambling age limits, too. If you sell a kid a copy of GTA5 that's their parents problem, but if you allow kids into your casino it's your problem.
The problem is defining what falls under those laws. Companies sell trading card boxes with random contents. McDonalds had its Monopoly game. There are many more examples of things that are gambling with money, accessible to kids and still allowed in most countries.
McDonalds Monopoly game was a sweepstakes, you could get game pieces for free by simply asking, which is why it doesn't fall afoul of gambling laws.
McDonald’s at least has AMOE and you don’t have to spend a cent to play. It’s certainly the less convenient path, purposely, though.
Typically legal gambling has age limits by law, while the age recommendation for video games is just that, an recommendation. It isn't illegal for a 14 year old to play a game recommended to 18 year olds. Don't know how it works in the US specifically, at least how it works in other places.
I'm guessing the video games industry's attempt at self-regulating with PEGI and similar efforts actually paid off.
Is there?
From an objective legal standpoint in some jurisdictions, the answer is clearly yes
By and large, yeah.
Found the 14-year-old.
You don't need to play the game to gamble.
How many kids do you have?
Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child.
If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That it’s a legitimate investment? The only people spending that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.
Kids buy a $2.50 case in the hope of winning a $20k cosmetic item
Then there are the third party gambling sites where you bet items on matches in the hopes of spinning up your cheap items into more expensive ones
> Kids buy a $2.50 case in the hope of winning a $20k cosmetic item
This part is already gambling. The 3rd party site is letting them gamble again.
I was recently at a lan party for a friend's 40th birthday (something I don't think any of us had done since highschool or so!), most of them are way more into gaming than me and have been consistently since childhood. I was pretty shocked at one point when they went on a loot box binge and I witnessed them drop hundreds on loot boxes etc (I don't know what it's called, the keys or whatever). Definitely didn't seem like the first time. These are adults with children of their own. There is a demographic out there of people I wasn't aware of, not necessarily whales, that have a ton of disposable income for this fluff. And valve has their hooks in them for whatever reason.
I’ve watched grown adults with kids spend hundreds on baseball tickets and beer in one sitting, too. I’m not trying to invalidate your point. But also be careful about making value judgements (“valve has their hooks in them” reads as a negative sentiment to me). People spend money on entertainment and there are worse vices out there.
Grown adults blowing a couple hundred on some fun doesn't really seem that crazy to me. How is that much different than going out to the bar, sticking a benjamin in a slot machine, or buying some collectables?
I mean, if you have the disposable income for it, more power to you. I think it’s a massive waste of money.
The only thing I ever spent money on was League of Legends skins/heroes, but those were always guaranteed.
My son keeps asking why I won’t buy robux for him, but those are an even bigger waste of money than some of these lootboxes xD
No, but they incentivize opening cases in order to obtain such valuable prizes, at $2.50 a pop. TF2 does this too, with Unusual rarity hats.
I didn't downvote you (my account is low reputation) but your argument is weak: that some skins go for absurd amount of money says nothing of the rest of the ecosystem. There can both be children and drug dealers (ab)using the same "gaming" mechanics.
I'd be curious to find out if the overlapping subset, "children that deal drugs," are more likely to do so.
> If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking?
That you used a straw man. The $20k cosmetics weren't mentioned, and even if some buy these, the thing itself can still very well be targeted as gambling towards children.
"Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat."
They're mentioned right there in the article this is nominally meant to be a discussion thread about.
But the argument was "they're running an online casino directed at children", the fact that someone buys the result of the gambling for adult money / $20k doesn't mean it's not, and is basically irrelevant to that statement.
Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off.
People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.
I think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.
They take a 30% cut on Steam, i.e. on most PC games. They are printing money. They have an absurdly high profit-per-employee ratio. That's a failure of capitalism, called rent seeking.
having a high profit-per-employee is not the definition of rent seeking.
valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.
It's not "high", it's extremely high. They just have a few hundred employees while making several millions of profit per employee. More than Apple. They are printing money.
> valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users,
A 30% fee just for hosting the game is not valuable.
> and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.
The cost is substantial. It costs the developer 30%. That's a huge chunk of the total revenue. Hosting a game is very cheap, and could probably be done with less than a 3% fee. Often Valve will make more profit from a game than the developer itself. Sometimes the developer will lose money (after subtracting development cost) but Valve will still make a big profit with that game.
Their high profit is indicative of the high level of value they provide. They're far from the only store to buy/sell games in. Steam's users use Steam because they prefer it to the alternatives.
While I can't argue whether 30% is actually fair, I do believe you are disregarding some benefits steam brings which may seem trivial. The hosting of online-games and facilitation of sales is not their only service. One that has traceable value that immediately comes to mind is the illusion of a central authority for achievements.
I have personally purchased many titles a second time to register my feats with steam and anecdotally see similar sentiment among older gamers. Achievements feel worthless in isolation but provide fulfillment when socially recognized. These are sales being manifested solely through Steam's position.
Now, back to whether this social permanence is worth the 30% Steam is extracting, I do have my opinions. Steam is technically "rent-seeking" from a strict economic classification, but is this more-so a case of the lighthouse or the railroad?
its probably low compare what customers and game developers are willing to pay for it.
hosting a game and running a store nowdays is very easy, but still games launch on steam rather than building their own store or using a steam competitor. if the cost was too high, people would not be using the service
This is an outright falsehood. "Rent-seeking" involves extracting value without providing any.
Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players.
Steam is a huge success of capitalism. Suggest not using words like "rent-seeking" without knowing what they mean.
Not to mention how much they did for Linux gaming.
> Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players.
This is an outright falsehood. Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison.
By your definition, any monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". But it isn't. Just because something is useful, doesn't mean it can't be massively overpriced due to competition not working as it should. Proper market competition should ensure that no company can extract huge profit margins for trivial things. Like hosting games.
Epic, Steam's only serious competitor currently aside from maybe GoG, just had a bug in their launcher that had all Fortnite players have to redownload their entire 150~ GB game. The cost of hosting aside, the capabilities of these companies to host their own games pales in comparison to Valve, who hasn't had a single bug in downloading or updating any game in the decade and a half I have used their launcher.
Considering how alternative storefronts can't even get automatic updates to work consistently, the most basic functionality of a games storefront (more important than purchasing even, since if you can't get what you purchased, it's useless), it actually doesn't seem obvious to me that other providers can easily host their own games. Even putting aside everything else Valve uses their cut for (hosting a community forum for every game, hosting a mod DB for every game that wants it, metrics tracking, opt-in soft DRM, providing server hosting, maintaining Proton so your game works on Linux), the cut seems almost reasonable even just for hosting when nobody else is able to do it right.
I use steam to launch the games i get from epic and gog. Epic's launcher is so bad that i use their web store to manage inventory and often can't remember if i own a game on epic unless it's set to launch via steam.
Steam doesn't control the global distribution of video games. Buyers and sellers are free to use another store, or none at all and buy directly.
Why don't they?
It can be helpful to look at it less in terms of what it costs Valve to run their service and more in terms of what value developers get from Valve for the money.
I'm in the business and I've asked two different heads of large, very well-known AAA studios how they felt about Valve's percentage, and they basically told me the same thing: They had their teams do rigorous analyses of what it would cost them to 'replace' Valve for their games, and concluded it would cost roughly what they were already paying Valve. So they had no incentive to move off the platform. Look at how many publishers have come slinking back to Steam after trying to go solo -- there are good business reasons for that, and it isn't just about the stubborn fact of their huge social graph.
If it costs that much to replace Valve for your game, it's hard to argue that what they're charging isn't fair.
As others have pointed out, Valve does far more than just host. Shipping a multiplayer game and want comprehensive protection from DDoS attacks? Use Valve's datagram network for no additional fee. Don't want to host your own lobby servers? Use Valve's for no additional fee, they'll accommodate hundreds of thousands of players with no complaints. Want to sell your game in a zillion countries? Valve's got you, easy peasy. And discovery is a thing -- Valve sells a whooole lot of games just by putting them in the carousel in front of players. This is huge, huge value.
And as a player, I'm actually really happy, super happy, did I mention how incredibly happy I am with what they're doing with some of their cut: They saved gaming on Linux -- it's often better than Windows -- and I love my SteamDeck. So that cut is benefiting me directly as a consumer because they're spending it on initiatives I'm really passionate about.
Valve delivers a ton of value for the cost. If someone wants to try to do better, Valve's not stopping them, but I can tell you that as a player and a gamedev, none of the other options are remotely enticing to me. In my view, that's not Valve's problem to solve by cratering their own revenue.
> Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison.
Steam does far more than just host, and everyone who uses it knows this, so it's clear that you either have no idea what Steam does (in which case you should not be commenting) or you're actively lying about it.
Steam provides payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.
> By your definition, any Monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism".
This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions.
And yes, there is competition - the fact that you don't know this is yet another indicator that you're totally ignorant of anything relevant to the conversation. There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work.
Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.
> Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.
They seem to live in this bubble where steam is extremely bad or something.
Nothing is as good or as bad as it seems.
I think valve is still decent but I prefer Gog-games more if I can be honest, valve has drm but I appreciate their customer service from what I know and the amount of good games it produced like portal and the steam marketplace is still a very nice thing imo.
I don't think steam is rent-seeking at all and I agree with your statement on it.
Now I still believe that CS-GO's lootboxes are still an issue tho, maybe I am not understanding the significance of change so much
Steam still does nothing to prevent gambling for children and people selling the skins on the other websites, I am not understanding how this change changes that, I read some other comment in here which said that you can have contracts which convert the rare to extremely rare Only in steam marketplace so maybe they stopped the other shady websites/the youtubers they sponsor by limiting their influence....
I don't understand :/ I still feel like Steam had turned a blind eye to child gambling for a long time and Coffeezilla had made a video about it which I can refer to.
> There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work.
The same is true for linux/Windows as well. You could say that windows has the market at work but the point becomes moot.
It isn't as if there aren't better options (GOG) but that its rather good enough
Like I said nothing is as good or as bad as it seems, my opinion on steam is barely good enough partially because of its previous responses on turning a blind eye to the whole situation but maybe this is changing with this thing they did right now but I am still not sure how.
Yes, of course, I'm not claiming that Steam is some utopic paradise or that GabeN is a saint or anything. Steam has problems too - most notably the huge skins gambling issue that you mention. I'm just specifically saying that out of all of its problems, "rent-seeking" is definitely not one of them.
> The same is true for linux/Windows as well. You could say that windows has the market at work but the point becomes moot.
Yes, there's additional detail that I didn't add - that, unlike Microsoft, which used (and continues to use) anticompetitive tactics like paying PC manufacturers to include Windows as the default option, Steam didn't do anything anticompetitive to become the most popular - they were just the best - and they haven't done anything to unfairly leverage their dominant market position. That doesn't strike me as a problem - and my point to the GP was specifically that they're the most popular because they're the best, not because they did scummy backroom deals to get there.
I agree that GOG is probably better. But Steam is "good enough", and modulo the gambling problem, isn't really "bad".
Yea I agree rent seeking is definitely not the problem, huge skins gambling is.
> modulo the gambling problem, isn't really "bad". Can you please explain to me what you mean by this. I feel like valve enabled skins gambling which even underage people could do for a long time, so there is some truth about it and coffeezilla made a video about it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
I am just saying the ethics of the company isn't perfect when they enabled gambling for a long time, I am not sure if right now it can be fixed or how this steps that they did right now fixes that problem if I am being honest.
> Steam provides payment processing,
Other services do the same for arbitrary online shops, at much lower fees. In fact, Valve likely doesn't even run it's own payment processing, but merely integrates other services.
> cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility
The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game. Yet they charging 30% on hundreds or thousands of AAA games and other games.
> This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions.
You clearly stated that Steam is fine because it is useful. But anything sold by a monopoly can be useful while still being massively overpriced. Which proves that mere usefulness of something doesn't mean the price of it is justified. Which refutes your original usefulness argument.
> And yes, there is competition
Yes, but the fact that there is theoretically competition doesn't mean it is working. Large platforms like Steam benefit from network effects which come from their size alone. People will simply stay at Steam because that's already were their other games are, and because they don't see the massive 30% fee, that Valve is keeping, as some cost they have to pay. Any other platform faces a "chicken and egg" style uphill battle against these effects, even if they charge a substantially lower fee.
> Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying
Rather than hurling insults at me consider the simple question: If Steam was so fairly priced, wasn't charging excessive fees, how can it be that they have an extremely high profit margin? Realistically, that can only be because Valve's revenue from Steam vastly exceeds the costs of running and maintaining it.
> > cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility
> The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game
Then surely Epic, or Microsoft, or Sony could just easily create one. There being literally 0 such services means it's likely a bit more difficult than one AAA game :) So your argument is invalid.
It goes down to 20% when you have enough sales. Still high IMO. Marketplaces like steam, app store, etc, should charge based on services rendered rather than some arbitrary %.
I still prefer steam even if its more expensive than other marketplaces. They provide real value over just distribution, like their return policy.
> Other services do the same for arbitrary online shops, at much lower fees. In fact, Valve likely doesn't even run it's own payment processing, but merely integrates other services.
Irrelevant strawman argument. It doesn't matter that Valve doesn't run its own payment processing - it still provides an easier platform for use than going to Stripe and figuring out how to connect user purchase to game licenses.
> The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game. Yet they charging 30% on hundreds or thousands of AAA games and other games.
OK, so now you've both admitted that you were factually incorrect on your original assertion that the only value that Steam provided was hosting, and you've moved the goalposts from "Steam doesn't do anything except hosting" to "well those features aren't worth the cost", which is completely different.
So, we've completely disproved your original claim that Steam is "rent-seeking", because these features provide immense value to both developers and players.
And, that claim about "The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game"? Completely unfounded. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Multiplayer networking is hard, and you're claiming that ALL of the features that Steam provides are comparable to that of a single AAA game.
Also, funny that you mention "one single AAA game" - whose costs can go into the billions of dollars.
> You clearly stated that Steam is fine because it is useful.
Stop trying to justify your lying about my points, please. Admit that you acted dishonestly out of malice and we can move on to any actual points you might have.
> But anything sold by a monopoly can be useful while still being massively overpriced.
More goalpost-moving (you originally claimed that Steam was both "a failure of capitalism" and "rent-seeking" - these claims are completely different), that turns out to not even be relevant because Steam is a monopoly along no relevant dimension. There is nothing that prevents you from creating both a Steam account and an Epic Games account, or a developer from selling on both Steam and the EA store. You can even install non-Steam games on Valve's own hardware. You even concede that there is competition later in this very comment.
> Which proves that mere usefulness of something doesn't mean the price of it is justified. Which refutes your original usefulness argument.
No, it doesn't, because both your first point has no connection whatsoever to your second, and you neither proved that Steam was overpriced, nor actually refuted any of my points as stated in my comments - merely twisted and lied about them. Where do I say "useful" in my original comment?
> Large platforms like Steam benefit from network effects which come from their size alone. People will simply stay at Steam because that's already were their other games are, and because they don't see the massive 30% fee, that Valve is keeping, as some cost they have to pay. Any other platform faces a "chicken and egg" style uphill battle against these effects, even if they charge a substantially lower fee.
This is fallacious. There is no "stay at Steam" - as previously stated, there's zero mutual exclusion between Steam and other platforms on either the dev or the player side. And there's no "chicken and egg" uphill battle either, because Steam accounts don't cost money, and so unlike trying to start a new paid streaming platform where you can't attract users because there's no content, and you can't sign content deals because there's no users. This is an inaccurate, irrelevant, and dishonest analogy.
> Rather than hurling insults at me
You literally lied about my points. That's not an insult - that's a fact. Don't lie if you don't want someone to correctly describe when you're lying.
> consider the simple question: If Steam was so fairly priced, wasn't charging excessive fees, how can it be that they have an extremely high profit margin?
That's a twisted definition of "excessive". Your "excessive" is "Valve charges more than it costs them to provide services". Very few people in the real world (which includes me, most HN users, and most people who actually play games, given that you probably don't) actually operate on that model, and instead consider "excessive" to be either relative to value delivered to them, or to comparable alternatives. Almost nobody, when making a value decision about whether or not to buy a new phone consider the profit margins to the phone manufacturers - they only care about the value delivered to them, which is as it should be, because...
> Realistically, that can only be because Valve's revenue from Steam vastly exceeds the costs of running and maintaining it.
Valve does not have an obligation to price their services at cost, or close to cost. They're entirely entitled to price their services at the amount of value delivered to their customers, without any judgement whatsoever.
So, to summarize - we've objectively refuted your claims that Steam is "rent-seeking", pointed out several more dishonest rhetorical tricks and redefinitions of common words that you've used, including revealing that your claims of "Valve bad" are merely personal indignation that Valve makes more money than you think that they should, and confirmed that yes, you did lie about my earlier points.
Virtual items are legitimate investments.
Anything you put money into is a legitimate investment.
This doesn’t mean they’re viable investments.
IMO the phrase "legitimate investment" should be reserved for situations where you spend money something (e.g. kitchen equipment) that allows you to create new real-world value (e.g. food) which you can hopefully sell for a profit (it's still a legitimate investment if that fails). It should not be used for Ponzi schemes, gambling, outright fraud, or anything of the sort. Buying something and then hoping its price goes up before you sell it should not be called investing, but gambling - unless it fits in the category I just described.
People find value in acquiring things they want. For example if someone wants to have a one letter username on X, there is value for there to be willing to sell one.
This is why I said "new real-world value". An X username does not have real-world value in the same way that potatoes have real-world value.
You can't even use slurp juice on CS skins.
Damn you’re trying to tell me that people will abandon all morality just to make billions of dollars? Who would of thought that something like that could be possible.
Well, that’s lootbox mechanics. I don’t see how this most recent iteration changes any of that.
I honestly don't understand the logic behind policies like this. As a kid, my friends and I loved to buy Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a few years, and while I think most adults thought it was pretty silly, I don't recall anyone ever claiming that this was somehow equivalent to gambling for children despite it basically the same mechanism as loot boxes; most booster packs were essentially not worth the value once opened because with the exception of a few specific rare cards in each set, the cards were not very valuable even to a collector or player of the game.
I could see an argument that there's an issue with closed ecosystems where value of an item can be changed after someone has obtained it due to control by a centralized provider, but that's completely different concern to the idea of gambling being harmful.
As a kid I viewed MtG, baseball cards, etc as gambling and often heard them referred to as such.
The loot box issue is in part how easy it is to take this stuff to excess. My 8 year old niece racked up ~1,500$ worth of charges in a game when AT&T messed up permissions after a cellphone upgrade. It’s shockingly easy for people to blow arbitrary money on this stuff as the industry is optimized to be predatory as whales make up the bulk of profits.
So I suspect physical stores being really skeptical if an 8 year old showed up to buy a grand of Pokémon cards likely tampered the backlash.
It absolutely was and is gambling, and plenty of people complain about it. I've always thought it was disgusting to make a living off of pay-to-play games targeted at children. Morally somewhere around the level of being a pimp.
I don't even like it when targeted at adults, but we allow adults to do far worse when it comes to gambling. A lot of our hollow economies depend on it. But you really have to be a moral sewer to pay your rent from kids hoping to open the right bag to hopefully energize their often very narrow, often very autistic social lives. At best you're a carnie.
So there's one data point, take it as you will.
I quite honestly don’t know anyone under 40 that plays Counterstrike. It seems like an old guy’s game at this point. It isn’t 2003 anymore.
Its probably because you don't know many under 40 year olds. Its been a popular game for a long time.
Valve is not the market-maker here, they are the exchange.
Don’t they also 100% control the supply though?
Trades happening off market is also due to valve not having a way to cash out. If you sell your $20,000 item on the steam marketplace that's a lot of games you can buy, but they won't send you money.
FWIW, people were purchasing Steam Decks with the "Steam Money", then reselling the console for cash.
Its still not "cashing out", but I'm sure some made some decent money. I would assume you could sell game keys to those less-than-reputable sites as well? Dunno
Agreed overall though, these are just extensions of "happening off-market"
They warned the gambling sites plenty of times. They tried legal action several times. Those sites were against valves ToS.
It seems to me that they (Valve) are complicit. Don't they provide the API that those sites use?
I don't think they tried very hard to shut them down, they could be doing a lot more.
Edit: based on what I recall from this Coffeezilla video (https://youtu.be/13eiDhuvM6Y?si=GJ_kXOJyXFTogy40&t=476)
Isn't it the same API that users use?
It’s probably fair to assume that more than 90% of trading bots are not the kind of bots valve should support
Yeah but its not like vavlve provides an api specifically for them.
But they kind of do, there aren’t many other uses for the trading API
What do you think the users use when trading?
They do not use the public trading API
No one claimed that. The point was that Valve controls the API and can cut access to said API to the gambling sites. This is not like sports betting, where the gambling sites don't need any integration with the actual sport : if Valve wants, they can seriously affect the abity of the sites to function.
>Don't they provide the API that those sites use?
Yes, they provide the API that those sites need to function. That doesn't mean the API is exclusively for those sites. Just that Valve is the one enabling those sites, they're not completely independent.
Nonsense argument. They provide an api that players use, that can also be used by boys to perform trades. Maybe the problem you have with this is that they can do trades.
I really don't get what you're confused about. Yes, the existence of the API is good and useful. What Valve should do, if they really cared about stopping CS or TF2 gambling, is to limit access to this API for the gambling sites. The API should ONLY be accessible to individual players. That means IP restrictions, client agent sniffing, bot behavior analysis, etc - not trivial, and not foolproof, but also not exactly rocket science.
> most trades happened off-platform
I thought it was impossible to trade off platform? All item trades happen within Steam, they have an API to facilitate it and everything.
It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.
How does this make them rotten to the core?
This is a business. They invented the game. They host it. How are they rotten for wanting to make money from it?
These aren't real objects. They are entry in a Valve database. I can't understand why people get emotionally, much less financially, invested in it.
Read up on the story, look at the influencers promoting it and the ecosystem that grew around it. Valve is willfully running a casino for underage and have bypassed local laws that protect against this using technicalities. It's frightening.
Yeah… It’s like NFTs with 100% centralized supply and control, if I’m understanding this niche market correctly.
Control, as in, tomorrow Valve might decide that some of those items are “unusable” in their game which would presumably also crash their value.
Humans are social-emotional beings who assign “irrational” value to things for social signaling and emotional (self-)gratification.
With increasing scrutiny around gambling mechanics, this might be Valve trying to get ahead of a future headache...
The Armory and the new terminal shows they are moving way from loot boxes into a kind of "proof of work" economy, in which price is driven up by grinding and limited availability.
My personal theory is that it's related to their planned launch of their new VR headset soon, and want people to be able to buy it using the Steam Store - so deflating the market means there's reduced buying power on the market, reducing ways in which people can get money 'out' of Steam by buying hardware with Steam-bux and selling for real currency.
> That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
A timely lesson!
> Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go.
Valve let that fester for years. Coffeezilla did a multi-part series on the subject late 2024.
The legal aspect seems the likely angle, valve either heard rumblings or got approached by a state actor and decided to finally cut the shit.
It was a multi-billion dollar market, which blew my mind. Good on valve for bursting the bubble, but it sounds like it should have happened much sooner.
> Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
All the change valve did was make 5 rare items to give a chance/give a extremely rare item
Earlier, that wasn't the case and were locked behind only lootboxes with extremly rare chances i guess.
So this mechanic was already there from 1000 uncommon -> 10 common -> 1(mythic?) -> rare but now it spread to even extremely rare.
The price drop happened because the extremely rare aren't as rare because now it increased the supply as more people created their rares into extremely rares and sold it on the market and more supply, less price, thus the price wipe out and the loss.
Also skins are just cosmetics, they have no in game advantage
I just searched and you get some skin when you level up but the point I am trying to tell you is that if someone actually plays the game for a long time, they get involved in its community and naturally people would flex their skin etc and they would want to get skins to feel cool as well
So its more like people playing -> wants skin / creates money. Instead of wanting money -> people playing games
But maybe someone could be playing/grinding for the skins but I genuinely don't think this is why steam did it.
Steam did it to show the regulatory power they have in game that they can wipe billions. They are creating their in game store which takes prices from online marketplace so they might tighten the regulations on it in such a way that instead of going to random websites or other parties, steam / valve will try to instead be the middleman and try to capture even more %'s of the trade
Another neat point is that if someone wants a skin in the community, they basically got cheaper now 30-40% so it becomes more affordable imo for the people playing but still
I think valve wouldn't have predicted the losses to be of billions of dollar in terms of wipeout since they had mentioned it as a small change and it wasn't even their twitter update note iirc
I think that a lot of people especially chinese people invested into it and it was a bubble in formation and then people got panicked after this news and the panic made other people panic and thus the insane billions of $ of losses.
I recommend atrioc's/ Big A video on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCnQsvdVQ1o
"Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go."
Vegas begs to differ.
This doesn't explain though "why now?". All of these reasons would make sense, but they've been in legal disputes before in the 13 years since the game came out. And why would they suddenly care about players' frustration? The skins economy isn't wildly different now than previously.
Well, I don't know their motives, but if we were talking just about legal issues, at least in the EU we're seeing stricter laws about loot boxes this year (and I'm all in about that).
https://siege.gg/news/several-eu-countries-have-introduced-s...
Hopefully it doesn’t backfire.
The trading/gambling websites sponsor a lot of CS content.
>Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go.
They kinda chose that ... a long time ago.
Maybe they changed their mind.
And they came to this conclusion after how many years of exploitative behaviour?
I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.
Remember back in the day when we just downloaded skin packs from some random Geocities website with obnoxious red text on black background and after going through the install.txt written in broken English/Italian, lo and behold your AK47 now had a proper arctic camo skin and it was so much cooler?
What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
Steam is still a business, but of all the gaming industry, Gaben is one of the highlights, steam try hard to be extremely pro consumer. Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, requiring publisher and developers to explicitly state the AI generated content thats in the game to name just 2.
> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game,
Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously), and (much) weaker than GOGs refund: 1 month after purchase, no playtime restriction.
I believe they explicitly called out the equivalent for physical stores and european consumer protection in general when they announced the policy and lack of restrictions. Which is an indirect call out at Steam, which hasn't cared in the slightest and continues to have a worse policy.
I don't know if this has changed since the last time I bought shrink-wrapped software at a retail store, but the return policy on games and software was always that they couldn't be returned once opened, at least at the bigbox retailers in the US. I'm sure stores occasionally made exceptions, but I very clearly remember buying a copy of Oblivion and not being able to install it due to minimum specs and the store not accepting a return. I just had to hang onto the copy until I built a new PC.
This is probably a US vs Europe difference in consumer protections though.
Standard policy is I think mostly the same, but in Europe there's been arguments that those policies don't follow the actual consumer protection laws, which is a whole thing that I don't think really resolved one way or another.
It varies with country but I believe a number of protection laws specify normal use/testing a product is allowed, so you can open boxes and test functionality (norwegian law does this for sure). Excepting videogames from this is arbitrary, the argument from consumer protection agencies goes.
I believe in practice a number of games did get refunded when threatened with formal complaints along these lines, but that's far from a guaranteed thing.
Anyway, GOG decided to go with the generous interpretation (and the one all kinds of electronic goods except games and CDs/DVDs have), which is nicer for everyone, really
That would be illegal in the UK I think, since you have 1 year mandatory warranty against any faulty goods.
"I misread the minimum specifications" does not a faulty ware make.
Neither does "my PC runs a thousand different games but this one crashes" a faulty computer make.
Battlefield 6 won't run on your PC unless it has SecureBoot enabled. It's not included in "minimum specifications."
I don't see how that is relevant to Oblivion, nor how you'd buy Battlefield 6 plastic wrapped in a store.
Warrantyis thę same as return. If there is nothing wrong with goods, warranty does not apply. Return means return for any reason.
> Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously)
Depends on the jurisdiction. In Germany you have no right to returns on things bought in a physical store.
> Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously)
Huh, we have different laws and physical stores. Here, no store will take your game back if you opened the box. Maybe that changed, but in the past any game opened couldn't be returned because you could have either copied the disk, or copied to key and activated it.
Key activation is actually a good point.
I believe there were some pushes to get rid of opened box = no refund policies as being against standard 14-day returns in Norway, because the law explicitly says the consumer may (paraphrase) "reasonably test the use of a product" which allows you to open the box on other goods. But keys being consumable puts them in another category of goods (like food, which obviously can't be returned after "use"), so that doesn't apply.
2 hour return policy can already be a problem for a very short indie game. There was one which you could beat in 2 hours and refund and people did that.
GOG gets away with their policy because only people who believe in GOG ideallogy go there, and they won't refund a good game. If steam did that, abuse would skyrocket.
And in my country, unless explicitly stated otherwise, most physical goods can't be returned if they are used.
In some sense, GOGs entire existence is testing the hypothesis that it's impossible to run a consumer friendly digital store due to abuse.
If you took the common sense publisher view then no DRM = everything you make is instantly pirated and the whole store fails instantly. But GOG is a viable storefront, so that's demonstrably wrong.
The evidence is no better for Steam's refund policy than it was for DRM being necessary.
> But GOG is a viable storefront, so that's demonstrably wrong.
How many developers can make a living based off of GOG revenue alone vs Steam revenue alone?
GOGs refund is 1 month? Man I can clear DMC5 twice in one week then do a refund in that case.
It’s far easier to just pirate (nearly all?) GOG games. Like there are torrents with big chunks of their entire store on them, and I’ve seen allusions to an unofficial “store” that just has all(?) their games on it for free. I doubt many people are abusing the refund system because going through those steps is more work than piracy.
You can also share games you purchased at GoG with all your friends. They do give you a lot of freedom.
It’s maybe the only really “good” actor in that industry left so I try to support them as much as possible
sadly they don't do regional pricing at all, so steam price is almost half the GoG and maybe even lower. But yeah if you can buy GoG, it's better due to no DRM
Sure steam is cheaper but that’s how they get you. We shouldn’t always go for the cheapest alternative and then whine when things go to shit
While those statements are true, it is much easier to be pro-consumer when you are running a few morally dubious casinos and marketplaces to keep the bottom line healthy. Would Steam have grown into a position where it can comfortably act like this without the cash cows in the background? We'll never know.
The general market is so distorted that being seen as anti-large corporate behaviours on some policies is seen as enough to be considered pro-consumer.
The refund policy was only implemented after Australian courts told Valve they had to implement a refund policy to follow default consumer rights law
They made it available to everyone because they were going to lose that case everywhere but the USA (where you have no rights)
Before that, Valve did not allow any refunds.
I like Valve for being slightly not outright evil and providing a service that is not trying to scam me, but that's such a low bar.
The first one was because the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) took them to court, but yes, they're both very good features.
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The game is rated as 'Mature 17+', and Steam has an age confirmation page before accessing the store page of the game. Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids?
I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.
It's not that simple. The real problem is that Valve allows items to be sold in markets outside of Valve's control which allows third party gambling websites to operate. And you guessed right, they basically don't care about your age. Valve of course knows this but won't do anything, because they make profits off all transactions happening in third party markets. Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos. Coffeezilla did an in-depth piece on this: https://youtu.be/q58dLWjRTBE
> Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos
I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
(Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
I think gambling came in more in later waves. The first wave of popularity (mostly StarCraft, LoL and fighting games) tended more towards funding from sponsors, and not gambling ones (red bull, monster energy, gaming peripheral makers, the game devs themselves, mobile games).
I don’t know much about lol or fighting games but the starcraft pro scene exploded after a gambling/match fixing scandal back in 2010! The first wave absolutely had this problem
They also pay insanely mor money than traditional companies like intel. Much of eSports is also Saudi owned now which have no qualms about gambling.
> I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
I worked in online gambling for about 10 years in the UK. I found how charities and local/national government worked far worse and I was far more frustrated with their attitudes.
e.g. I found an SQL Injection vulnerability with dynamic SQL in a large UK charity (I won't say which one). I reported this to my boss. He kinda just shrugged his shoulders. Similar attitudes were present in local government. The gambling industry was the complete opposite and took security very seriously.
What bothered me the most about charities and government was that on the outside they were giving the impression of having a virtuous purpose. Whereas the gambling sites didn't, it was simply "Try to win some cash".
As a former addict (alcohol), I don't have much sympathy for people that blame the companies for the problems of addicts. The problem ultimately lies with the individual. I was the one that choose to drink. The brewary, the bar, or the off-license never forced the drink down my throat. People choose to go to the casino, in the same way they choose to go to the bar.
> The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
Many of the classic videos games were made to relieve you of change in Arcades. Nearby to where I live there are still classic seaside arcade. They still have machines similar to Sega Rally and Time Crisis there. Video gaming and quasi-gambling have been intertwined since the birth of the industry.
> The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
This is all professional sports (even going back to long ago as the Roman Empire). There is nothing special about professional video gaming.
The industry saw that people were interested in watching matches between highly skilled people. Any form of entertainment/news/sports is bankrolled by advertising and/or gambling.
Many of these large events came out of more grass roots events like large lan parties. These were pretty big in the late 90s to early 2000s.
> (Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
Gambling tends to attract the more profit orientated which roughly aligns with what is considered "right wing" (at least in the US). I found the industry to be pretty apolitical as a whole. Many of the C-suite and above seemed to be actually relatively left-wing at least in some view points. It was odd when the top executives were far at least on somethings far more to the left than I was.
> age confirmation page
You know this is meaningless.
> Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids?
An alternative would be not to run a gambling business. If that's too much to ask, then yeah, they probably should be required to exclude children.
> I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.
This implies that casinos (and liquor stores, and tobacconists, and so on) should be allowed to serve children.
Should 17-year-olds be gambling? They're still in high school, the high-tech excuse of blaming the parents while pocketing billions of dollars is odious and convincing a jury to slap these companies with tobacco industry levels of damage remains feasible.
Nope, just no. When you make billions you have another kind of responsibility, you can't just brush that off as a problem with parenting.
I'm willing to bet a lot of the young people struggling with gambing addictions started with loot boxes like the ones valve make a ton of money on.
Loot boxes in itself are the problem.
You can’t make a non-toxic free2play game.
People need to buy from stores like GoG and stop supporting f2p games at all.
Of course that’s never going to happen; an entire generation was raised on f2p
Free to play doesn't imply loot box or exploitative consumables. Any game with a fixed set of purchases is probably fine. Lots of season passes too.
You can make a non-toxic, high quality free to play game, e.g. Beyond All Reason. Of course there will be no marketing budget for that game so most people won't know it's there.
Ideally kids wouldn't be participating in real world transactions at all, and I'd love to see the numbers of how many were actually kids who directly went to gamble I stead of being pushed into it by streamers which is where I see it constantly.
> Now, thanks to a recent update from Valve, the latter is in a downward spiral, having lost 25% of its value — or $1.75 billion — overnight
The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
The thing is Valve is clearly aware of the fact that it’s getting kids addicted to gambling. They have the data. It’s extremely ubiquitous. This has been an ongoing issue for a while and Valve has rightly been criticized for willfully getting kids addicted.
Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids. But that doesn’t give Valve a free pass, particularly when they used dark patterns to appeal to children.
> Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids.
How? Individual parents can't fight off predatory corporations entrenched in mainstream culture going after their kids. They need to make a go at Valve.
edit: Rereading, I guess that was kinda the point you were making?
I agree we should go after companies clearly engaging in profit-above-all, making societies and future generations worse from the start. Make them hurt, make them bleed bad, take tens % of their global revenue (not profit, thats easy to game).
But - parents are responsible too, more than anybody else. Gaming is generally bad for kids, physically and mentally. Come on, everybody who cares knows that for past 2 decades. Screens generally fuck up kids properly, the younger and more interactive the worse the result. Kids need tons of physical fun and tons of continuous social interaction in larger groups, doesnt matter what some echo chambers claim, 'digital skills' are not something your kid can anyhow miss on.
Its supremely easier to fuck off kids, leave me alone, my adult life is oh so hard already, here play some more, give me some break. Adults being glued to phones hard themselves. Results are what they are. Its called universally bad parenting, by psychologists and various experts for a reason. No sympathies for parents there, but I feel sorry for all those kids whose potential is squished into various anxieties and abysmal social behavior.
Talking all this and much more as parent of 2 small ones, luckily for them environment we are in is firmly agreeing with all above.
When you say easier to simply earn, I understand it as you think they do this to benefit their playerbase / users.
Yes, it says that they want a bigger cut of the sales when those items are sold. Not sad this hits the trading sites as that will also likely mean fewer will get scammed as they will stay in valves market, but saying valve is doing this for the users is crap, they do it for the profits, and maybe to stay under the radar of additional lawsuits regarding gambling laws around the world.
> The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
Them letting it happen for literal decades while being highly aware of what they're doing says more about the ethos than this, in the grand scheme, tiny move. Don't get me wrong, me as a person who does not participate in any kind of this gray-area gambling has basically a lot of net positives from Steam and Valve. But this doesn't make them a pro-consumer company.
They're still greedy capitalists, and it shows in many different perspectives. They may be "better" to consumers than the average, but still.
I see people doing this a lot in Deadlock, Valve's next game that's in pre-release stage now. There are all sorts weird and fun skins people play with through mods, some of them definitely not copyright-friendly.
I wonder how Valve will handle this once the game is ready to be released - will they just blanket ban the mods? (seems likely, and the community is even probably ready for it so will not be too pissed off at the move.) Or will their monetization route be something else this time, not "hats" like usual? (I'm hoping so, although I can't imagine what else it could be without being pay2win.)
All Source games, not just Deadlock, did and still somewhat do have a strong modding scene. The way it's handled now is that official Valve-hosted servers have a config option called sv_pure set that prevents most mod .vpk files from loading on connecting clients (though some things like custom HuDs are whitelisted by this system). Once Deadlock gets paid cosmetics you can expect sv_pure to be turned on for Valve servers, which 99% of the playerbase will exclusively play on.
What's the other 1%? For eg., in Dota 2, if I create a private lobby, would that allow the mod vpk files? Or only for local bot matches? Or some other more involved scenario?
Not sure about Dota specifically but for e.g. TF2 any non-Valve-server game had pure off by default. That does mean bot matches or private lobbies. You could hop into a community server and run your mods fine right now if you wanted.
Its about showing off to other players. You can still do local game mods just fine but that's not what people are after.
> You can still do local game mods just fine
'sv_pure' exists and says no for the official servers, sorry
Community servers are a thing, so is a worse experience. The well-maintained community days passed. We wanted curation and we got it: matchmaking and even our customization/spending.
Which is an easy technical problem to solve, but the liability of abuse when sharing user content with other users is not palatable.
It is also not impressive to others, not a status symbol, and that's actually the purpose of skins in the modern day. No one grinds 1000hrs of warframe for a skin just because they think it looks cool, they think it makes THEM look cool. They want people to be impressed that they had $2000 to spend on a knife, not that the knife skin was neat. The skin is an auxiliary component to the task.
This is what turned me off of Global Offensive, and CS2 I guess but it doesnt look like much(if anything) has changed between GO and CS2 compared to the changes made from 1.6 -> Source -> GO.
Looking back to ~2012/2013 and its seeming to be clear now that the introduction of weapon crates, the steam marketplace, and all of the other MTX in all of their(proprietary) competitve games may have been a good indication that these would be the last games Valve would develop in-house.
To be fair though and just to give a counter-example, the "clout chasers" with the $1000 knife skins is essentially the same as the bragging rights of a 4/5/6 digit steamID during 1.6 and CS:Source. Although flexing SteamID length was something I only really saw in the competitive scene and of course had a much smaller(unofficial) market.
Oh well, RIP Steam games, long live Steam software(their platform/Proton, etc) and hardware...minus the steam controller.
Huh, I wonder what my steamID length was. I would have signed up very early. I will have to check!
> Which is an easy technical problem to solve
Where do people get this impression? It's not trivial to build user comments on a web page let alone a proper chat app but people think it's easy to share game assets for some reason.
It's really not that crazy. You log onto a server, the server communicates your skins to the other clients. Counter strike itself literally did this in the 2000s, it was removed. Modders for other games working for free figured it out. Games used to automatically download maps and skins in a bunch of Valve games as well as other games.
I would also consider building comments into a webpage pretty trivial, it was like the second thing I did when teaching myself web applications years ago.
I bet it's harder in modern frameworks than it used to be, but that doesn't make it a hard problem, we just surrounded an easy problem with more difficult but unrelated problems.
And making it cheaper wouldn't fix anything, I guess?
Making status symbols cheaper means they're no longer exclusive or grant status. So people go looking for other exclusive status symbols.
Making it cheaper reduces the status symbol aspect, since that's mostly about signalling wealth. But maybe not the rarity/exclusivity signals for items made artificially rare or hard to get.
So-called skin changers (which modify what skins you yourself see in-game) are actually considered bannable cheats.
That's sad. I remember a time before sv_pure. Sure, people installed transparent wall textures, but there was also a lot of cool customization to be done. And it was just your game, before streaming.
> Sure, people installed transparent wall textures, but there was also a lot of cool customization to be done
This undersells how bad it was to play a game with people who can see through walls and hear your footsteps from a mile away. No skin is worth that.
sv_pure specifically actually allows the server admin to allow selective model/material swaps.
I was thinking of your description of the situation before sv_pure. What you wrote sounded like "sure some people completely destroyed the game but you got to see some cool skins". Skins can't make up for wallhacks, and wallhacks won't let you enjoy the skins. It wasn't a tenable situation.
Well, both. I wish less servers had enabled sv_pure in extra strict mode, but it was a solution to the wallhacking and extra loud footsteps. It was also the start of the decline of being able to run your own mods.
A lot of people buy CS2 community servers to use a WeaponPaints addon which allows anyone in the server to use any skin.
I’d say 90% of ours have it enabled.
They used to ban accounts but I don’t think they have (on community servers) since it went F2P.
This provides a continuous revenue stream that allows maintenance and improvement of the game without affecting gameplay. It's entirely cosmetic. Don't participate in it if you don't want to. I played with stock skins majority of the time till a friend gifted me an AWP Redline after staying at my place. It was cool but to someone who just wants to enjoy the game it hardly matters. Besides you can go to various private servers and play with whatever skins.
Still doable. Here's modded Morrowind in 2025 running on the FOSS OpenMW engine[0]. Enemy Territory is also still going with ET: Legacy.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I
That doesn't get shown publicly for everyone else watching you.
It really depends on playing the games for fun or to replace social interaction.
Most lootbox gambling apps are targeted towards the latter use.
> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
Isn't most of this trading done on 3rd party services though? I mean sure, Valve is indirectly responsible for allowing trading of rewards like this, but they don't control the market values themselves and only profit indirectly from it.
Which does make me wonder about their other popular collectible game, TF2 - they don't update it, like, ever, but it's still popular and they can potentially make huge amounts of money from it. But they can from the Half-Life franchise too.
TL;DR I don't really understand Valve, but it doesn't really matter because they're swimming in money regardless.
That era was nice but it has a different problem. People will pearl clutch about kids getting exposed to someone's custom skin making their character nude, or putting curse words on the side of a gun or whatever.
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Most of the scarcity in artificial economies like CS is (just as with trading card games) manufactured and vulnerable. Seeing what happens with a rug-pull in a billion dollar artificial economy like this is a valuable lesson for anyone watching.
If/when the huge Satoshi bitcoin stash gets traded in, we'll see similar outcomes there too.
What makes this (or cypto) economy ‘artificial’, and why is our real-world economy not artificial?
Plenty of market manipulation and rug pulls happening on the regular stock market as well
They wrote the scarcity is artificial.
I'd say that's true: if you have one skin, there's virtually zero production cost to making more copies of said skin.
It's not that different for many things in the real world, I suppose (eg: if you sell way above cost, then your cost is also arguably zero), but I'd say it's magnified in the digital world (or even with NFTs).
I got really into Lorcana last year, spent $40 on a particular rare card I needed for a deck. Out of curiosity I bought some cards for $3 each from Aliexpress, and got myself a jewelers loupe.
The cards were literally indistinguishable even with the loupe. I quit buying cards after that. It’s a suckers game if I can’t tell the difference between a $50 and a $3 card even when I know one is fake. Sure enough, a few months later the prices have absolutely cratered for the cards.
The only ones they couldn’t copy exactly seemed to be the “enchanted” cards, which sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Probably the biggest possible investment for quantum computing today is all the abandoned bitcoins wallets ripe for taking
I weep for humanity if that's the best use we can think of for quantum computing.
Isn't most of our technology based on technologies invented to maximize killing in world war 2, or alternatively as a way to maximize monetization in sleazy ways?
World War 2 took at most about a decade (depending on who you ask). The history of development of our technology is much, much longer. I doubt 'most of our technology' is based on anything that happened in WW2.
It's just that technologies are all connected, so if you want to make them look bad you can do so. Is fixation of nitrogen into ammonia something that improved billions of lives through fertilizer, or something that enabled manufacture of many millions of tons of explosives? It's both.
Sure, no question about that. I'm just objecting to connecting everything to WW2. There were plenty of other wars before and after and even at the same time.
The general sentiment is still true, the reasons for engineering and (often science) are not always nobel (pun intended)
Sure. I'm just objecting to connecting everything to WW2.
There's not actually that many things quantum computers are expected to be good at. Material science perhaps?
Honest question why would anyone harvest Bitcoin after this? Wouldn't it lose all its value since everyone has everyone key now?
After? There is no reason. But between "only you have the keys" and that "after" there is literally tens of billions of dollars.
maybe it could be turned into a game.. hide the satoshis from the quantum ghosts
If you can get abandoned wallets, can't you just get any and all wallets?
Edit: minus some race conditions of people changing passwords/moving/emptying wallets.
I am making a lot of assumptions here which are not backed by much knowledge about bitcoin:
1. It's easier to extract funds from abandoned wallets without being noticed
2. There will be a transition to wallets with post-quantum cryptography
3. The abandoned wallets won't be able to make that conversion because these need new wallets/keys
Right, but that just sounds like the race conditions I added in my edit.
Actually, no. Even a perfect quantum computer can only attack a key if its public key has already been revealed on-chain, which is only the case for a small amount of coin. The other QC attacks rely on cracking a private key after it was broadcast, and before the transactions make it into a block.
You lost me... What is the difference between an abandoned wallet and a non-abandoned one in this scenario?
Technically, "abandoned wallets" is not something that exists, all you have are "unspent outputs" of transactions. For QC attacks to work the public key to a private key has to be revealed, for modern addresses that only happens when you spend coins, not when you send them somewhere.
I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them.
Interesting. So as long as your wallet has only received Bitcoin, it's untouchable but the moment you transfer any of it, it's at risk of being emptied. The only way to protect any of the funds is to simply move it to another new wallet. We would be in a situation where any wallets (with known keys) can only be sold off in their entirety to prevent theft. However, who is going to want to buy any Bitcoin if the potential buyer's market decreases with each user exiting the market? The inherent value immediately drops to zero because each successive sale would be less than what it was purchased for. Kind of a Schrodinger's wallet, do you really own any Bitcoin if you can never withdraw from it?
The attack when sending a transaction has a time constraints. It will take many any years to go from being able to crack private keys in years/month to doing it in minutes.
Why would that only apply to abandoned wallets?
In a scenario where you have a powerful enough quantum computer and are able to break the encryption you can access any wallet (I.e. the system would be done, and the value would be zero).
Showing that you have access to all wallets will surely kill the market but silently getting abandoned ones and selling off would seem better choice.
But on the other hand there are people looking at those abandoned wallets and if money start to flow out from them someone will ask questions.
It's a dumb analysis of the situation that ignores what would actually happen:
A new wallet cert would be created that uses more bits. Enough that a brute force even with a quantum CPU would take too long. Then you transfer the funds to the new wallet. Abandoned wallets might be claimed during this transition but overall the deflationary trend of btc won't really be effected long term.
I think having Trump whisper in your ear before the next Truth Social post is the least effort way to win at Crypto. Inventing a viable quantum computer seems like way too much effort for the bros.
The purpose of the update is certainly not to reduce the cost of these items, but to better position Valve to earn this revenue steam, as opposed to third party scalpers. Looks like it's working.
They crashed the premium market and resell value. Prices down. It’s a side effect, but the direct effect to the user.
They don't care about the resell value since they don't earn a commission on those sales.
The point is that, for as long as items can be transferred in game, they are always convertible to cash in the real world. Inserting artificial friction inside the game to increase scarcity, such as limiting convertibility of items, will drive those trades away from the game economy and into the third party ecosystem where the dollar rules supreme as the super-convertible means of exchange. So you have an induced scarcity that in effect drives third party profits.
By increasing in-game convertibility, the trades are directed to other in game assets that are a just a proxy for loot boxes, i.e money in Valve's accounts. So prices crashing in the third party market signal that players have a cheaper and more direct route to acquire them - give the money to Valve - which also generates the supply of new rare items as those loot boxes are opened.
It's a smart economic move.
Buy that doesn't mean the prices will stay low, since they can always control the overall scarcity, or add new, rarer and more exclusive items. The total amount of money they extract from "kids" is ultimately linked to their ability and willingness to pay.
Glad to chat with someone who understands in-game economies. I agree, but for a different reason. I don't think Valve cares about the economics that much. I think it's more of a product strategy move.
They have been threatened numerous times with lawsuits over the gambling aspects of the IAP. This moves completely de-risks that. As you said, it's not going to affect profits very directly. It will however make the speculative market collapse, and keep players engaged within the game's economy.
I am fine with this . Every third party in this ecosystem is literal scum
>It extracts money from kids
Not it, Valve. Valve designed and implemented the system. Gabe Newell, founder and own of Valve, is one of the people responsible for introducing gambling to children. Children who grow up and develop a gambling addiction.
Just because they made some good things doesn't mean we can't call them out on literally their biggest, ongoing, evil.
Yes, let’s blame the f2p game dev when there are literally streamers pumping fake platforms, doing fake wins, marketing gambling sites at kids. Valve did that
It's Valve that created the loot box mechanics (i.e. gambling). That's the foundation on what everything is built. And even without the adjacent ecosystem, it's still Valve that's exploiting children by introducing gambling to them.
Same as Roblox, Fortnite, Angry Birds, and every other F2P game
Yeah, well, fuck them too.
I have no skin the game, literally or figuratively (buying some 2d sprites for a virtual weapon is childish and pathetic from grown up man point of view and kids should spend 0 time in such game... either buy a real gun, get into ie paintball for the kick of the hunt or find something else that feels amazing and doesnt involve sitting on your introvert ass, worsening isolation and mental issues), but - your argument is very weak whataboutism, and ignoring who introduced it all, to weakest members of society to prey on addictivity of it all.
Pathetic all around, imagine I am giving you a minus I cant give, and expecting better from you next time.
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A few months ago, I realised CS:2 is more than 60GB and still barely worked on my M1 Pro Mac. I tried with these three: Whisky, Sikarigur, and even CrossOver trial. A friend suggested I should try some kind of partitioning and install Windows on that. I definitely will never try that.
CS:1.6 (which is what I still would want to play) is history unless I clasp my nose with my toes and then hang upside down from a ceiling fan and request someone to switch it on and then pray it works and keeps working. It doesn't; it crashes with flamboyance. There are some browser options, but that's another story altogether, and that too if I can find enough players there, let alone with good pings.
I finally realised that the only computer game I ever loved playing and played really a lot— albeit with gaps worth years in between after college— is just gone for me, and there's no coming back.
I guess now I am too old for all this, and maybe that's the point. Possibly someone who is on the older side will not buy these skins and whatnot; the company's focus is rightly not on us at all.
(PS. I always felt distracted with those skins; even in those younger and much younger days)
CS 1.6 ran just fine for me just now on NixOS. Literally just clicked install in Steam and ran it. Aren't Macs incapable of running most games? Get a $150-200 n150 mini PC and install Linux and it should run most things before like 2010 (and probably later) at 4k 60 fps while sipping like 10 W and running completely silently.
Thing is I don’t buy devices more than I absolutely need so that’s just a phone and a laptop. I will try this with NixOS because I have never tried NixOS in the first place. Brew has been enough so never tried anything else and also a lot of FOSS tools I use on my mac pro treat Brew as some kind of standard so that’s there.
FYI NixOS is more of a power user distribution (the draw is it's driven by declarative configuration management). Something like Bazzite is more targeted for e.g. gamers and may be more appropriate if you want a more off the shelf experience (I don't have experience with it but see it discussed a lot). If you only have a mac you might not have much luck though.
The n150 mini PC suggestion is because they really punch above their weight for being so cheap if you otherwise don't have usable hardware and want to play older/less demanding games anyway. They also make for extremely snappy workstations (on Linux. They come with Windows 11 which is super laggy). And they're like 2 inches * 2 inches * 1 inch, so tiny. If you're doing anything other than AI or something like video editing, they're a fantastic value.
Same here. I play the game happily. I would prefer to switch back to the good old "This games costs 50 $" which will also harm cheating. Maintain it and release sometimes an upgrade for a fair sum, keep the old one playable.
It shall not be a marketplace for gambling and cheaters.
Bringing prices down and making rare items more accessible feels like a step toward re-centering the game around, well… the GAME
The whole skin economy around CS has gotten way out of hand. It’s less about the game and more about speculation and gambling at this point.
The quickest way to end it would be to ban gifting skins. You'd be allowed to buy and sell skins in the Valve marketplace where market caps could be in place but no more private sales. Of course you could privately buy an account that has possession of the skins you want but that would add substantial obstacles to the private market.
I doubt it's going to change anything, this manipulated market will adapt and continue to extract money from kids. The cynic in me could even say that this change was pushed by Valve to take a bigger cut of the skin market (most trades are supervised by 3d parties). Coffeezilla investigated one of the many casino sites, there's a lot more to it.
I have been playing since 1.5 and agree. I personally don’t care at all about skins, and just want to play the game.
It’s fine to have some cosmetics, but the economy Valve had created brought so much toxicity to the game.
I wish I knew what happened in the past few years, because steam was supposed to ban csgo gambling and trading sites, but you can see their names plastered all over twitch every day.
Is not that their parent's job?
Parents can only do so much. We have laws protecting children in many ways - we don't say, 'that's the parents' problem'.
If you don't take responsibilty for your community, who are you expecting to do it for you?
Society raises children, it's not fair to expect parents to police everything their child does. I agree often parents should be more responsible and not always take the easy way out.
But expecting them to individually fight billion dollar corporations that deliberately court children with damaging addictive services is asking too much.
It’s hard to express how frustrating it is to try to allow kids access to tech and the Web (it’s kind of important that they have at least some access! And isn’t a bunch of this allegedly for super-charging learning and exploration of the world?) while basically every platform and vendor (of most any kind) except Apple’s and Nintendo’s stuff is somewhere between mediocre and annoying, and utter shit on this front (even, and in some ways especially, open source operating systems) and none of these goddamn things coordinate or communicate with one another (and of course SSO, basically a necessity for even starting to tackle that kind of problem, is an “enterprise” feature for almost every vendor)
Then we’re told this is all our fault. Meanwhile schools send home devices that don’t lock or at least disable Web access at night, and I can’t admin those to fix that dumbfuck oversight. To point out just one of many ways we get undermined. This is a whole bunch of stress and work that simply did not used to exist for parents and I absolutely get why a lot just stop trying.
You can monitor and restrict Steam usage with parental controls. This is no more unfeasible than WiFi and device time limits, and last I checked, children don't carry a credit card. What's the mystery here? An 8 year old is not accruing bitcoin to buy skins.
Meanwhile you have users here that will tell you that refusing to give their kids smartphone or even any video game is not that hard, but it seems needsly restrictive.
AFAIK you don't need a credit card linked to the account, you can get in-store credit from selling the guaranteed drop items from playing a few matches, this is enough to get you started trading.
That sounds like a pittance. Either way they would be playing with money they didn't put in themselves.
It isn't a pittance.
It's literally "The first hit is free". The sketchy gambling sites spot you bonus skins and stuff for the same reason. It doesn't matter, they don't actually have to ever pay out, so they can just give you fake money to get you addicted.
Unless they're using their own money with the blessing of their parents, this remains in the realm of tin-foil-hat paranoia. There's no reason to believe we're in child gambling crisis because of fake money.
My point exactly, you expect other institutions to take care of your children. This is your job as a parent (If you are a parent).
This is good news. It seems some parts of the gaming industry are starting to recover.
I contend that games like Team Fortress 2 were also ruined by the F2P loot box crap. It's not that they took anything away, but it attracted a certain kind of customer that is very unappealing to the prior base. The "hats" made me walk away from TF2. No one on average seemed serious about the core gameplay anymore. Taking away that up front cost to play cheapened the experience for the existing paying customers. It's like going from shopping at Whole Foods to Walmart.
Robinhood is your go-to application if you want to gamble legally and efficiently without (as much) fear of a single actor ruining your day.
Changes like what Valve just did in CS are a sign they're rebalancing things a bit
The Freemium model made TF2. Most of the good updates were after the F2P update, and almost all of the playerbase.
> Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat.
How many whales are buying an in-game cosmetic for $20K for their own use?
How much of this is day-trading? How much is investing? How much is fabricated by trading platforms? How much is money laundering? How much is a criminal payments channel?
I thought the same. Surely the number of people buying a 20k knife so it looks good when they play must be extremely low. The bulk have to be speculators.
This is true and it is also why a large portion of the playerbase likes this change. It makes many of these knives much more affordable for people that actually play the game.
The number is probably nonzero but those are the whales, the kids of the super rich who have millions to blow on trivial shit. The rest will be in it for trading, for the potential that either another trader will buy their stuff for more (in the hopes that it will appreciate more) or one of those whales will.
But it's probably mostly money laundering, I wouldn't be surprised if the crypto market is tightly integrated in it too. Buy using crypto, sell using fiat, ???, cash.
I think the majority is money laundering.
1) My childhood which coincided with peak of unregulated lootbox-skin markets (around 2013-2015). And I and my CS-playing peers had a happy childhood because of… skins gambling.
Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys. Some exceptionaly lucky or with natural born trading skills were earning serious money — from quater to multiple salaries of an adult.
Maybe because casino-tourism in Belarus made people here slightly less prone to gambling, or maybe parents were not used to gift their children micro-transactions — e-sports betting, gambling and trading was financed mostly via in-game drops, returns from these bets and trades, and of course, sometimes, pocket money (which, on average were like 3$ per week).
That said, in modern times where micro-transactions are so common that you are ok with giving your kid V-bucks as birthday gift, I want say that anti child gambling narrative is a good thing.
2) At that time, and afaik it is true even today — you could use skins as a virtual currency to pay for a real things. It was proto-cryptocurrency/NFT in terms of being KYC and AML free.
This is really big market. There are aritcles on NYT about real life terrorists buying real guns for skins.
But without US-centric sensationalism, I beleive you can still pay for VPN or ChatGPT in very sanctioned Russia in CS skins. This can be also done with crypto (and mostly done now), but crypto has learning curve and you already playing CS.
Reading this makes me sad at how different my generation was compared to the new ones.
I remember when Counterstrike 1.3 came out and everybody at my school were talking about it and playing it. We would line up at computer labs before lunch started, pay a toonie and entire room would crackle with in-game radio comms, AK47 and HE going off with a room full of people side by side excitedly shouting for an hour until lunch was over.
When classes finished we would head back to the lab again and we would play endless round of de_dust 1 & 2, de_rats, fy_iceworld and the occasional as_oilrig and the rush of being the VIP and experiencing my first headshot.
Sometimes the admin running the labs would add fun mods like no gravity and weird stuff....
It was such a memorable and social fun time and it runs in complete contrast to the everything-gambling culture that has taken foothold....
> Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys.
Unless I'm missing something, this is zero sum -- so it follows that a bunch of people mostly lost money (perhaps also during their childhoods)
The skins market became a de facto stock market with extremely low volume (and therefore more manipulation). Someone eventually lost money, not necessarily the first link in the chain.
Interesting that a whole economy is based on fake supply constraint. Or is making butterfly knife really hard?
It seems like NFT before NFT.
yeah CS skins is one of the biggest markets of digital-only-aesthetic-items before NFT came around (and now probably still bigger than NFTs). The main thing with NFTs was that there's no "central database", CS skins solely lives in Valve's database.
making a butterfly knife for Valve isn't hard (in the past Steam Customer Service duplicated items lost in scams). It's hard for the players because they have to "gamble" for it through paying keys to open cases.
It's hard as in "it's hard to trick or manipulate the centralized database".
Similarly making USD in a bank account isn't technically hard, but it's fucking hard to get a bank to tweak some numbers in your favour.
it's not a fake supply
CSGO knifes actually currency run by shadow banks providing RMB <-> USD convertion.
Google for "挂刀"
This should be a top level comment, it is the "ah hah" that suddenly makes everything clear.
Can you explain the shadow banking / conversion angle? All I found was that selling knives was used to get a discount on steam balance thanks to price arbitrage.
> "Selling Knives" (挂刀) refers to the technique of buying in-game items from 3rd-party (Chinese) trading sites like NetEase BUFF, C5, IGXE, and UUYP, and then selling them on the Steam Market to obtain a discounted Steam Wallet balance by capitalizing on price differences.
I'm surprised the price difference did not disappear if people make that trade.
Source https://github.com/EricZhu-42/SteamTradingSiteTracker/wiki
China notoriously has intense capital controls. It's difficult for ordinary Chinese citizens to take capital out of the country. CS2 items can be bought and sold in both USD and RMB, and can be transferred between Chinese and international accounts. It's not about Steam wallet balances.
Interesting. I'm curious though, assuming I am Chinese and I trade knives for USD - where would I be able to receive USD to evade capital control? Surely not my bank account or Steam wallet. Or is it for people with bank account in both countries? But in that case crypto could be more convenient? I'm puzzled
Yes you would need to receive in a foreign USD bank account outside of China, the whole goal is to get the capital out of China and into a foreign account. Cryptocurrency transactions/exchanges are illegal in China so that's definitely not convenient! Meanwhile you can buy CS2 items with any ordinary payment method.
Both US and CN have a massive player base, they all need to buy games in their own currency
You can buy games with Steam Wallet
You can also buy/sell in-game items with Steam Wallet
Now only if someone invents a commodity with a stable price. Hmm what could that be?
Remember the 15% transaction fee on the Steam market? That's why the price difference hasn't disappeared. Players can avoid this fee through gifting and off-platform transactions. And all of this is just Chinese players trying to buy games cheaper—after all, what else can Steam wallet funds be used for? Some comments claim this is a way for Chinese people to evade financial regulations, but that's complete nonsense. The Steam market's capacity is entirely insufficient to meet the demand. They could easily choose to legally exchange currency using the foreign exchange quotas of relatives and friends, engage in cross-border wash trading through underground banks, or use fake trade and fake investment schemes.
Artificial scarcity has existed for ages. Watches, playing cards, cars, etc.
Selling 10 of something for $1000 instead of 1000 of something for $10 is not new.
Also builds brand value.
I feel watches and cars are different. You cant magically "print" 10000000 Bentley's so supply will be constrained and they are expensive to make. I feel the luxury is more tangible than just being rare.
See the discussion around the supposedly lost Van Gogh painting, eg at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/van-gogh-lmi-group-2602847
Nothing about the painting itself would have changed, but its market value depends very much on whether Van Gogh painted it.
A lot of real economies are based on fake constraints. Or the constraint is a closely held secret that's pretty arbitrary and not based on any grand amount of skill or effort.
All this froth on the ocean surface is only possible in an economy where household net worth has been inflated to 150 Trillion.
Yeah the measly peasants should have never gotten their hands on such luxuries as game knives skins.
It is NFT. But because it's Valve its actually good. Because of reasons.
There is a whole skin stock market for exchanging Chinese Yuan to US Dollar outside of the banking system: https://www.iflow.work/
Yeah, IIRC China has some arbitrarily-low limit to how much foreign currency a Chinese citizen can possess at one time. This is clever
There is also a limit to what amount you can bring in and out. For foreigners it depends on how much tax you payed over your salary…
So high prices induce new supply in a market to relieve shortages and the “economy is in free fall”?
Sounds like it is working as it should. Those with oversight fixing supply in response to price signals when the private system is unable to.
Wouldn’t it be nice if those in charge of the economy in the real world made the same sort of intervention.
The supply of digital knife skins is infinite and free. The only reason they hold any value at all is because a company artificially restricts them.
Doesn’t really tie in to actual markets involving physical item.
> Doesn’t really tie in to actual markets involving physical item.
- A designer brand has admitted to destroying its own products. Coach confirmed that it purposely ripped up bags that were returned to its stores, even if the bags were still in good condition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/58846711
Monopolies and cartels are also well known for creating fake scarcity. Fake scarcity is bad for the economy and for consumers, only a few profit from fake scarcity at the cost of everybody else.
Isn't it the same with USD to some extent?
only to the extent that they are both artificial. The totality of USD _represents_ the totality of all resources that exist under the control of the USA (ala, the people, gov't, companies etc, as well as any natural resources).
The counterstrike skins don't represent such real life physical resources.
You retelling how money works on how money works comment
USD is human created artificial item, as real as human believe that skins in video games worth something
"The counterstrike skins don't represent such real life physical resources."
it represend steam wallet currency
my specific point is to claim that skins are not a currency - the crucial difference between things that are both artificial.
You're forgetting the other side of the equation, demand. The reason they have value is the level of demand versus supply. The item has to have some real world value, even if that's just being able to show off.
They're are plenty of things in very short supply, bit no one wants them.
So a knife-themed cryptocurrency then?
Not like, say, houses then.
Or shares in Nvidia.
Not really, but it's actually kinda like currency. Imagine if a government suddenly devalued all $500 bills into $100 bills, but every other denomination remained the same.
That’s not really what happens though. What happened was that 500$ bills where so rare in circulation that collectors started paying upwards of 20 100$ to get them. Valve went “yes the 500$ are too rare, we need to fix supply so we’ll start exchanging 5 100$ bills for one 500$ bill”
This had catastrophic impact on people hoarding 500$ expecting their exchange value to remain at the elevated levels.
Not really the same is it. You are confusing a stock and a flow. Currency is exchanged for something material you have to give up.
Government may indeed issue more currency, and does do so every day, but it is in exchange for something the private sector has that it wants for the public service. That isn’t a problem as tax is a percentage and operates as a geometric series - meaning that whatever government issues it gets back exactly the same - unless somebody along the way saves it.
There has to be something available to buy in a currency for it to be issued. As we see in the game.
You literally just described fiat currency. Just change company to central bank or government.
The Steam Deck has essentially enabled money laundering through Steam. Before the Deck, if you sold skins on the marketplace you could only use your Steam credit to buy games on the platform, or you had to do a shady 3rd party Paypal exchange. Now, you can use your Steam credits to buy a device with value that you can resell IRL.
Before that, you could also buy the Index VR set, which probably aren't as liquid as a Steam Deck. I won a Dota chest that could only be acquired by watching tournament games in-person, and after letting it appreciate for two years it nearly covered the cost of an Index. I was thankful because I had no idea what to do with hundreds of dollars in Steam credit.
Nice haul, I remember thinking I was so slick for trading a TF2 hat for Civilization 5.
I think most people are fine with the “shady” selling sites when it comes to laundering. I sold my CS inventory a week ago (lucky me!) and I had no problems with getting the cash. Reselling steam decks feels very inefficient
How does that enable money laundering? Steam deck is also bound to AML rules
If you are in that business the question isn't really if it's against the rules or not, but if it's possible. You can use your in-game currency that you've gotten through whatever means to get a physical product that you can then resell for cash.
Valve employs an army of economists (notably Yanis Varoufakis as alumn) to make these decisions. It was certainly purposeful and will balance itself out.
this is what I think. The change is that 10 of the highest-level weapon textures can be traded for a knife texture: the result is that the supply of knife textures goes up, but the supply of high-level weapon textures goes down significantly more.
It's not so much a depreciation of knife textures, as a distribution of this value down the chain of item rarities.
The broader impact is that it creates a lot of uncertainty around valuations in the market. This is probably the most impactful (on valuations) policy change made by Valve in the history of the market. Now there is an increased fear that more similar such changes may be coming down the pipeline.
It is 5 covert skins not 10
Yanis Varoufakis is now writing and warning us about digital feudalism, seemingly based on his learnings at his Valve tenure.
Valve, as a digital feudalist, generates funds, practically for free, from both transactions of items and the lootboxes. It operates the markets on which digital goods are traded, taxes all sales occurring on these platforms.
Oh gee, I'm so glad all these smart people want to tell me about how we shouldn't build the torment nexus...
After they already went and built the torment nexus (and were paid handsomely for it)
>Yanis Varoufakis
I wont google him, but take at your word an assurance that he can be trusted with the highest levels of economic decision making.
You might want to search him, though. As far as "highest levels of economic decision making" goes, he's not a bad choice - not uncontroversial, perhaps, but definitely qualified for it.
> Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat.
> Now, that Butterfly Knife mentioned above? It's going for around $12,000, as people are essentially dumping their stock, with 15 sold over the past 16 hours at the time of this writing.
Why on earth would anyone think an item in a video game is a good store of real-world value? Who are the people buying these items right now for $12k? How the heck did we get here?
CS is wild. I used to play and have like 40+ cases from free post-match drops. Because those cases are no longer supplied, the prices have been creeping up and to the right for years now; from $0.40 to $20+. I don't even know why people still buy these, but I will basically never have to pay for a Steam game again.
I had to check but I barely played CS:GO. I have a 5 year veteran coin, untradeable, that's it lol. I also have a $0.03 gun for Payday 2, lol.
Nearly 300 "trading cards" but they're all valued between $0.03 and $0.10 at best. Weirdly enough, even the randomest games still get some trading volume. I seriously doubt people are buying cards from random games to complete collections in those volumes, and fully expect it to be bot driven and / or some kind of scam. But I assume Valve gets a percentage for every transaction so they don't really care.
Yeah, I recently made ~$70 when I realized this and cleaned out my inventory from when I played CS:GO in 2015ish
Could you explain more? I played CS 1.6 back in the day, and then we moved onto CSS, but what is it like these days?
FYI some items go for $1.5M.
"The GOAT of expensive skins in CS2 is the Karambit Case Hardened in the "Blue Gem" pattern. While the original is costly, one Factory-New variant with pattern 387 reached a staggering $1.5 million! The rarity comes down to its blue pattern, which is incredibly rare on a Karambit."
I find it funny that the person who owns this skin was offered $1.5 million over 4 years ago, and he said it was too low so he refused to sell it.
There is a chance this skin won't sell at all anymore, not for that price at least.
It's like that with any investment, cash out or wait for it to go up?
I mean I could've bought more or kept my Tesla stock and earn more as it became a trillion dollar company, but I had lost faith in it by then and took my gains.
What does "factory new" mean? That it... hasn't been scratched? Is that... how Counter Strike works?
Each instance of a CS skin is assigned a random amount of wear between 0 and 1, so two copies of the same skin can be worth more or less money depending on their condition. To be clear the value is fixed, actually using a skin won't make it dirtier. Factory New is the highest tier with a wear value between 0 and 0.07.
The game itself only distinguishes between those ranges of values, but it's possible to query the exact number via an API so I think traders will even price that in (e.g. Factory New 0.02 is worth more than Factory New 0.06).
Now that you explain that aspect of these dumb skins I now think they are even dumber. Thank you.
Counter-Strike's pLaYeR eCoNoMy shouldn't have been a thing to begin with.
Good. Too many game companies are running unregulated casinos aimed at minors with their lootboxes and pay to win mechanics.
It made the reds (coverts) way more pricier, so all is balanced (somewhat). see here, doubling and more in price: https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/730/MAC-10%20%7C%...
People love buying unsecured securities and then being upset when bad things happen
I briefly looked into this, there was a freelance job of making proxy bots to scrape the steam page for prices, the number mentioned here is even crazier than what I saw eg. $12K for something vs. $2K for a Karambit knife skin.
I didn't get far with the project, was harder than I thought as the proxys you can rent were blocked at least the few I tried at the time.
The problem was the rate of checking it was I can't remember hundreds of times a second to provide a "real time" ticker.
People Make Games did a story on this market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g [36m]
Building a business off of another’s business is risky. There is a non zero chance that the original business will take steps to manipulate, change, alter, or outright control the outcome. That’s what Valve did.
Tomorrow Valve could decide that the value of crates is too high so they drop the price of crates to a penny a piece. What would that do to this 3rd party market? Poof.
I doubt they will touch crates. There are hundreds to hundreds of thousands of transactions on each type each day. And they take their cut on each of those.
One example I checked was about 0.20 going to Valve on each sold on market. And they sold 280 thousand of them in last 24 hours. So 56 thousand in single day by minimal effort.
I think this is smart move. Basically any item with price higher than 1800 is useless for Valve. As that item can not be transacted on Steam's marketplace. As such forcing prices lower than this means more transactions can happen there and Valve gets to take their 15% cut on each of them.
1800 what? USD, steam points, EUR?
USD. Then converted by some rate to local currencies.
I play on and off. It's crazy hearing people talk about how they've spend thousands on a skin.
No more than someone spending a few thousand on a tiny designer bag that can fit almost nothing inside.
It's a consistent viewpoint to think that those things are more or less equally nuts.
The only difference with the designer bag is that there is scarcity, but that's about it.
Actually with CS stuff there's scarcity too, but since it's digital it's easy to change. Same with designer bags (nothing stopping them from churning out more, but they choose not to do that). Not so with vintage items though, since they're no longer made.
But a lot of Stuff is made with future vintage in mind, e.g. every Ferrari or other high end sports car will only appreciate in value.
They are both about signaling wealth and status. What I don’t understand about the digital items is that the people who own them are often anonymous so why signal? Signaling wealth and status IRL can also carry other benefits that don’t seem to carry over digitally.
They are not anonymous but pseudonymus. I assume for many people building up their pseudonyms status is as intriguing as their AFK one.
Good point. Still odd in that it doesn’t connect to the real world easily, though that’s likely just showing my age bias.
I know people that spend gazillions on vintage sneakers. They will literally go and buy some rare designer second hand pair of Nikes or whatever with some scarce design that they only produced a few off. Personally, I wouldn't be that eager to stick my feet into somebody's well worn sneakers. But apparently that's beside the point. Nike actually on purpose feeds that market by coming up with new limited edition designs. These people have enough shoes. They don't buy them because they need another pair of shoes.
The value of money used to be based on gold. Gold has very limited practical value. It actually kind of sucks as a metal because it's not that hard compared to e.g. iron. The main value proposition is that it's pretty and shiny. But people that buy gold don't tend to even look at it. They just store it in a vault. Or worse, they get a digital receipt that proves they own the gold without ever seeing or handling it. The main value of that is that, if you wanted, you could make pretty and shiny things out of the gold bars. And because those pretty and shiny things are valuable, gold is valuable. And therefore people invest in gold. Not to make those things but to be able to sell it to others that might do those things. Of course the vast majority of people buying and selling gold has zero interest in doing that. Most gold ever mined is locked in a vault in bar form and will never be used for anything else than as an intrinsic token of value.
There are a lot of things that have no value beyond subjective esthetics and the group thinking around that. My home country the Netherlands produced a lot of fancy paintings in the seventeenth century. Those are worth a lot now. They are extremely nice according to some. People visit museums to go see them. They are worth tens/hundreds of millions in some cases.
Objectively, most people that visit museums wouldn't be able to tell apart the original from a good replica. And reproducing these things with high fidelity digitally isn't all that hard either. You can find high quality scans of almost any painting for free on the internet. And you would get most of the appreciation/emotion looking at those as you would get by looking at the originals. Of course, most people aren't that into this stuff in any case. But we appreciate these things because other people tell us they are valuable and we take their word for it. The original paintings keep their value mainly because such people keep reassuring us how rare and amazing these things are. That tends to get embarrassing/awkward with forgeries in museums where experts literally have failed to tell the difference.
The value of things whether digital or real is based on social mechanisms for appreciating things. Some things simply are valuable because people agree for whatever irrational reasons that they have value. And then some people buy these things at the market rate because they enjoy having them. Whether that's original art on the wall, some rare sneakers, or a cool skin for a game character that you engage with for many hours while playing the game. The dynamic between the willingness of people to separate with their cash and scarcity is what creates the value.
NFTs are weird mainly because they are digital receipts for something (anything) that has value. They are no different than a paper certificate of authenticity for a painting. It all boils down to the trust people have in the impressive looking stamps/signatures on the paper, or the blockchain shenanigans used to ensure authenticity for the NFT. Of course a lot of NFTs are silly. But in game worlds, ownership of skin is kind of limited as you can't really resell them easily or prove authenticity. Which is something that NFTs addresses. Which is why NFTs became popular in games.
The value of game skins is as irrational as second hand sneakers are or the appreciation for shiny metals. Or gems. Or paintings. But as long as people buy those, they have value.
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this is not a gender specific issue. You can easily look at the watch-market, luxury car market etc... to see the same issue play out. In cars it's even worse when you have something like the Lamborghini Urus compared to the Audi RSQ8 which are very close to being the actual same car.
I'm starting to suspect that market health comes at the expense of people's.
It's complicated. Many "loot" systems in games fall somewhere between pure gambling (roulette, lottery) and a skill/effort based component.
E.g. in popular MMOs "mobs" have loot tables, usually dropping worthless stuff on kill, but with a 0.0001% chance of "awsome". You can kill these 5/sec when geared up. Is this "gambling"?
You can also buy "gold" for real dollars to buy those items of the "auction house" from people that have grinded the farm.
It depends on the game; notably, FFXIV does not allow trading most of the drops you get from the boss fights, so anyone that has a rare mount from one of those "earned" them themselves.
Of course, there's also a market for characters - there's bot / player farms of people leveling characters and acquiring these rarities which then get sold to whales. I don't believe it's a particularly big market though.
There is also a market for leveled characters, as people don't want to spend the time to do so themselves, but they (and I'm sure all other MMOs too nowadays) offer a paid for level boost that takes you to the current max level - 10, at a price point that directly competes with bots.
One issue XIV still has is gold farming and selling bots, they don't offer a means to directly buy gold. Closest thing is buying pure white/black dyes for real money, which can be sold in-game. I suspect it's a PR tradeoff, that is, "boo at people just buying gold".
Of course, XIV has a bit of an inflation issue I think, not enough money sinks. They'll add a new mount that costs 7.5 million in an expansion which will remove some money from the economy, but I don't think it's enough.
Poker is also skill based and also gambling. The concept that gaming lootboxes isn’t gambling because there’s some tangential element of skill involvement is just a strange way trying to protect something that is obviously gambling. It’s not complicated. The only complicated element is that these business grew large enough to get lobby orgs influencing politicians before the law got effectively enforced. You won’t ever see a casino with kids running rampant getting away with a shrug and “how are we going to enforce age restrictions” yet gaming companies get away with this all the time.
Make a regulation that if you have RMT in your game then you have to prefix the official title accordingly, i.e. "RMT: ${my_game_name}". It appears that Valve has made a change that is good for the game, but bad for the merchants. Gambling mechanics in a game are fun, but actual gambling needs to be very explicitly flagged as such and come with a lot more restrictions. I'll surely defend a person's right to gamble, but I find it insidious how culturally acceptable actual gambling has become.
Every game made after 2010 would just have RMT in the title.
I get why they wanted to do this, but I don't get why they made it this way, I mean yeah it makes a bit money in short term, but creates terrible problems long term.
First of all having 3 billions less in economy means we are 3 billions closer to recession. Worth keeping in mind that games are not essential.
Second thing is trust, without it whole steam can implode. Whole business is based on infinite purchases.
Third thing is people may do harm to themselves and this usually brings eye of Sauron.
People holding virtual cosmetic items that nominally had some value as collectables doesn't mean the whole thing was actually worth that much to society. If everybody tried to cash out their collection they would have soon found there was nothing close to 3 billion in value. The prices of these things were inflated by gamblers using them for speculation. And generally speaking, anything that teaches gamblers a lesson is good for society in the long run.
As for it collapsing Steam; not a chance. They didn't take away anybody's games, and that's what Steam is for to the overwhelmingly majority of users. The gambling addicts are a small minority and generally an annoyance to everybody else.
This article is making me laugh.
Guy I used to play Diablo + Destiny with mentioned once that he had just sold a knife in CS for 4k, and was going to buy his first (used) car with it.
We thought he was joking.
I sold my old skins CS from 2013 last month. I bought a Pixel 10 Pro with the proceeds and I still have some cash in my wallet.
So this article is very funny to me too.
edit: I did try to warn you all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44943123
Can someone explain to me how such an "economy" can grow so large ? How many people actually care about the skin of the CS knife or gun?
Short Answer: The whys can just be boiled down to gambling, weird investing, flexing wealth, sports fandom stuff, or wanting to invest in your hobby.
Long Answer: It is a bit of a perfect storm, and you'll get a lot of mixed answers to this, however these are the reasons I see roughly in order of their impact.
1. Skins are the vehicle for gambling (you bet them instead of $). The loot boxes definitely get people hooked, but the skin gambling arena is a whole different beast.
2. Valve, whether by luck or skill, created a perfect system of scarcity. I can elaborate a lot on how this is done. The rarity of the skins is one thing, but the float system giving each drop a mostly unique appearance causes a 2nd tier of scarcity that adds a lot of value. They hired a bigwig Greek economist to develop this system.
3. The market has been stable-ish for long enough that some people view it as a legitimate safe investment. I have heard this is very popular in China, but I really don't know how this behavior is spread out globally. I have a friend with over $100k in the market (well, he did before this).
4. Almost everyone I know who plays seriously has at least invested a small amount in the game. I play with roughly the same 8 people, and 7 of us all spent $1-2k on the game, with inventories ranging from $1-5k.
Is there a source on this bigwig Greek economist or is there sarcasm hidden in that point?
My impression (?) was that he (Yanis Varoufakis) was more involved in the overall design of the Steam Community Market than the CS:GO skins system, but this is what the other commenter was referring to:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150127153425/http://blogs.valv...
This is what I'd like to know as well. $20k - $12k at "dumping stock" prices! - for a digital item for a video game is just incomprehensible to me.
But clearly it's happening, so I'd like to understand better the venn diagram of people who have $20k completely disposable and people who are so highly motivated by their appearance in a video game. My assumptions are obviously wrong.
There is a number of wealthy individuals who whale on video games. Thats at least a part of the venn diagram. Having money doesn't remove your vanity.
But the skins are also used as a money substitute for gambling and as an intermediate item to exchange money between currencies. The skins "just happened" to be a stable enough store of value to create secondary markets.
Look how much people spend on aesthetics of other things - clothes, cars, watches, etc. Why is this different?
Because in this case the value can change overnight, and Valve doesn't otherwise have control over the market (value) of the items.
Expensive clothes aren't much more expensive to produce than cheaper ones, but it is known that brands like Louis Vuitton will destroy old stock rather than put it on sale. Some products are intrinsically valuable though, because production can't scale as well - some cars (although a brand can do a new design and mass produce it), watches, semiconductor manufacturing, etc are constrained due to their complexity.
$20,000 for a fake knife!? And I buy an item, a real one, and find later there was a cheaper price by few bucks somewhere else and I feel like an idiot.. crazy!
I can't even imagine how rich someone must be in order for a $20,000 imaginary knife with only cosmetic value to seem like a rational purchase.
They are doing it for speculation. They buy it for 20k and sell for higher to profit
Yeah for a digital item with easy trading it's more like buying a stock vs a physical item which instantly depreciates. Basically holding $20k in an alternative form vs spending $20k.
"I can't even imagine how rich someone must be in order for a $20,000 imaginary knife with only cosmetic value to seem like a rational purchase."
its as real as people buy billions using made up money (BTC)
It is more harmful for those who cannot afford to spend 20K, 2K or even 200 but does anyway out of ignorance or stupidity.
You forgot addiction, which should not be reduced to just ignorance or stupidity.
24mil a year, 20k would be 1 hundredth of your monthly salary.
sounds like money laundering
Took me sometime to understand why these items can be so expensive, The CS trading market makes NFTs look like child's play.
That's hyperbolic. You had high profile celebrities advertising NFTs, and stuff valued at millions, that's a whole other scale.
Skins have their place when they're modestly priced, as they also have quite a modest impact. But the whole gambling, artificial restrictions and trading is quite suspicious indeed.
NFTs failed because organized crime didn't latch onto it like they did CS knives. Only half-joking, the other half is stuff like grey market money conversion as mentioned in another thread.
Video games shouldn't have economies.
Unless it's MMOs, then those having economies is unavoidable.
I think the previous commenter meant real-life economies, not in-game ones so much. Although with any MMO or any multiplayer game with trading for that matter, there will be a grey market of trading items, gold, or characters for real money, and a bot market to go with it.
It seems more like a market strategy than an economic collapse. Afterall they control the skin market, and this will lead more players to buy very expensive skins (cheaper than the day before yesterday, but still quite pricey). Also, not all skins went down in price, the red ones from collections with gold skins even increased in value.
This is exactly why my family never hoarded tens of thousands of dollars worth of arcade tokens back in the 1980s. Creating a secondary cash market for tokens wouldn't have changed my parents' minds about that.
Yeah if you're paying someone's yearly salary for a tiny patch of cosmetic pixels in a game I basically don't GAF what happens to your money.
We deserve this timeline.
How are kids under 18 paying for stuff like this? What means of payment are they using that their parents don’t notice?
Genuine question, been at least 20 years since I was that age.
You trade up. I have a friend who has thousands of dollars worth of CS items, he has never spent a single cent on any of them - you play, you gain some items, you sell them which adds money to your steam account, you use that to buy something else you think might be worth something in the future.
So kids aren’t actually spending any money?
They are. But most of the time they are spending $2 here and there, which is much easier to convince your parents to borrow a credit card for. After all parents are already spending millions(billions?) of dollars on roblox, what's a few dollars for yet another online game. Kids aren't the ones buying $20k skins, but kids are definitely an important part of this economy.
Kids aren't the ones spending $12k on rare skins, they're buying keys to open lootboxes.
Same question. How are they buying things online at all? Whether $12k or $1.20?
Counter Strike has weekly drops, you get a case and some random skin. Usually those are not worth much themselves, except maybe for the case. People then sell these weekly drops on the community market and get Steam balance. Sell enough to afford a key (+case).
In other cases kids might have access to their parents payment methods, or they can buy prepaid cards from places like gas stations. I used to do this to buy games when I was younger and my parents wouldn't buy games for me.
Valve doesn't prevent anyone from opening cases. There is no KYC.
There's a lot of assumptions in your comment, such as that people under 18 don't have their own money, that their parents monitor it, that it should be a secret, etc. And maybe that only under 18's spend money in video games, but I haven't read the article in detail, don't know if it's mentioned.
I wonder how long until we get the first prosecution for someone insider trading on game loot knowledge.
What stops Valve from manipulating the market for their benefit?
It's wild how a virtual knife in a 20-year-old shooter can have more volatile market behavior than some national currencies
How is that wild? Currency values are controlled by governments and international market forces, virtual knives by the publisher and trading platforms. Valve can collapse the whole market with one proverbial press of a button, you'd need to be an autocrat to do that in real life and even then it wouldn't be easy.
"It's wild how a virtual knife in a 20-year-old shooter can have more volatile market behavior than some national currencies"
it literally not, not until latest update
its even better performing than stocks, thats why china invested millions into this
I must be really old now, I read that story without the slightest clue what it was talking about
I asked friends who play why would Valve do this. Answers were divided to:
1. Valve wants to avoid regulatory scrutiny over loot boxes
2. Valve wants to limit prices; the Steam marketplace only allows items up to 2500 usd to be traded. By averaging out the item prices (knives drop, covert-class increases) they are able to indirectly limit the usefulness and harmful side effects (money laundering, decentralized liquidity) of 3rd party trading sites
"video game player economy" shouldn't be a phrase that exist.
I mean a lot of games entire point/gameplay is economy like Eve online.... There is such a thing as a fun pro player version of this.... But real life money incentive makes it gross or scammy.
Thought this might be a hilarious sign of the bubble popping (a run on cs skins) but nope:
> Following Valve's Oct. 22 update to Counter-Strike, the second-highest-tier, Covert (Red), can now be traded up and turned into Knives and Gloves. Essentially, this means that a previously extremely rare and highly sought-after cosmetic is going to be much more obtainable for those who increasingly want it, reducing the value of Knives and Gloves on the open marketplace.
Unfortunately there was a suicide in china , because of this crash.
> Counter-Strike's player economy
There's a what? I guess once you've maxed out wasted hours of time playing it, you start wasting money too?
Less absurd than NFTs though I guess
> wasted hours of time playing it
What would you dictate that humans do instead to not be wasteful with their time? Comment on threads about games?
They can do whatever they want with their time. Except operate and profit off of make shift casinos and unregulated games of chance.
Why exactly? Why are these games of chance moral only if the government gets a cut?
Regulation also means that children are excluded, debt is not allowed, and all chips can be settled for cash when the player leaves the property. Even the comps are regulated. The majority of casinos in the US are Indian casinos. When they aren't and are taxed by the government those funds are usually used to improve and fund the local area giving the local citizens the ability to decide, through legislation, if it should be continued or outlawed.
Finally, Steam pays taxes in the US, so the government is already "getting a cut." Games of chance are not moral. Unregulated games of chance are flatly evil.
Games of chance are absolutely moral and completely fine when played by adults who are not mentally incapacitated.
Gambling houses make the most money from "adults who are mentally incapacitated"
Any ranked matchmaking game is designed to addict you by the prospect of being ranked as elite. They have a number of insidious methods to keep your ranking low, some are even patented by the game companies themselves!
For example, if someone is getting too high, it’s nothing to pair that person with a known deserter for 1-3 games to drastically slow their progress.
We should probably ban all sports then because it tricks people in wanting to be competitive.
No, just the promises of going pro. The conversion rate for high school athletes to the NFL or NBA is less than a hundredth of a percent combined. There are kids skipping classes and destroying their bodies thinking they’re going to go pro when they’re not.
We should van universities as well since its possible to get failing grades and fail your year.
I think you hit a nerve
Fair, but my comments only waste a few minutes of my time, and they're free.
Wasted is a rather strong word and yes, the whole argument is a slippery slope _but_ I can imagine sports that are less about glorifying deadly violence in a very realistic manner - the loot box and real money part is just the bitter cherry on top.
Glorify? This seems way too serious a take on a game that young males play because of a common, innate fascination with guns and soldiers. 99.9999% of them do not turn into manic killers who just love to kill and glorify it.
> because of a common, innate fascination with guns
Your brain after 200+ years of american propaganda... it's innate in the sense that you're bathed in it from birth through movies and games, and that a good chunk of your economy relies on producing weapons and using them.
I feel like young males in all times would be innately fascinated with equivalents like bows and arrows and swords.
Yet most computer games employ firearms and the targets are other humans, rarely (but of course not never) you hunt and gather food for survival. Don't get me wrong, I played my fair share of games from the earliest 8bit machines in the eighties to modern day shooters but in my opinion glorification comes unintended and killing is a cheap game mechanic, and has always been: here, in backwater European country, middle of nowhere, we have zero domestic gun violence, maybe even 0.0001% is just too much.
And yet the US does have a serious problem with (mostly) young males turning into manic killers.
I'm reminded of that scene in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine where he's asking a concerned adult where the violence comes from, and the concerned adult looks sad and confused and says he doesn't know, even though he's standing in front of a nuclear-tipped missile being assembled at the local nuclear-tipped missile plant.
Financialisation is indirect personal violence instead of physical violence. The US doesn't have a problem with that at any scale, as long as the right kinds of people are doing it.
I don't know, reading? Building something? Exploring the natural world? Sports?
Not to say that all video games are unsubstantive. But the substance in exploring virtual world comes from its uniqueness, not playing de_dust2 for 1000 hours. No other form of entertainment or art is analogous to video games in terms of the maximum time you can spend on it with totally depreciating returns.
Playing de_dust2 for 1000 hours is as reductive as saying playing on a soccer pitch for 1000 hours.
And soccer only has 1 map.
> soccer only has 1 map
Oh that is gold, that's a special kind of "far gone" - to measure real world things by how many "maps" they have
Would you say the same if someone played 1000 hours of a sport?
No. If you play 1000 hours of a sport, you will at least be stronger, more coordinated, more agile. But the downsides are more about repetitive strain injury and the possibility of screwing up your joints.
Different benefits and downsides.
Of course, a lot of guys are suckered into sports-related gambling these days too.
Video gaming has been shown to train some brain areas too. It's definitely better than 1000 hours of Netflix.
That's a very fair take
How about 1000 hours reading/commenting HN?
dang should enable selling posts and create a secondary market. My posts with the most upvotes can be sold to you and now YOU’RE the famous one!
You don't think that you get better at CS the more you play it? Better coordination, better accuracy, etc?
you don't get better at real life the more you play it
Playing football for 1000 hours doesn't make you better at any other job (i.e real life).
Don't be so close-minded; playing games is not different from any other activity.
only because the jobs of our time are fake.
Playing football or lacrosse is more "real" than working a desk job. For thousands of years, humans had to hunt and make tools and relied on their wits and strength to survive. Survival in the modern day is mostly a question of obedience.
I think the purpose of exploring virtual worlds like quake or counter-strike or something should not be to escape the real world but rather to experience a new kind of physicality. The purpose of playing games should be to engage in a deeper world which is more "real" than the tame one we are ordinarily subjected to.
It's why I am not opposed to video games. I opposed to overplaying video games because you ruin them, they become mundane and predictable.
It's not "more real" or "more useful" just because our ancient ancestors had to do it.
Saddest thing I've heard today
How about 1000 hours of chess? Or 1000 hours of warhammer? Or D&D?
One may say you make social bonds playing them, but that stands true for video game as well. Speaking for myself, I definitely spent more than 1000 hours on summoner's rift; 15 years later me and my league friends still playing LOL together and chat about all kind of things on a daily basis.
Plus you'll have friends who play sports, rather than the kinds of people who spend all night clicking on each other
Wow you really hit a nerve, lol - surprised to discover HN has such a large community of CS NPCs
My Tulips!
Deflation.
Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.
FYI, this is already the case in some countries. In Belgium or Netherland, it's straight up banned, and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)
>and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)
That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.
And in France specifically, the first case you open is guaranteed to not be a good item. So it's essentially the same system but with an additional $2,50 entry fee
I propose any company that flagrantly violates the intent of a ruling like that is sent to a special judge who operates in the same manner - bring forth a penalty while explicitly looking for every violation and arcane loophole to punish the company with.
It's "technically" just, after all.
You mean "special prosecutor". Judges don't try to find things, they only decide which of the parties before them claiming different things is right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France)
To save people opening the link...in France it would be a judge not a prosecutor. France has an Inquisitorial rather than the Adversarial legal system the UK and US have. Put simply, a judge doesn't merely decide between the two cases presented to them, they try and establish the facts
Edit: I said 'UK' where I should have said 'England and Wales'. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legal systems, although I believe both have Adversarial systems they are different in some ways. The US system could, however, be seen as a continuation of the English system.
This is why HN is great. An immediate pivot to the technicalities and semantics of the French judicial system, off of a pithy comment.
eats baguette
I'll bet apple fan boys will agree to this statement for Valve or any other company, but when it comes to apple having to open up their walled garden in EU and then using every dirty trick in the book to make it impossible, oh boy...
Ye seems like not going with the spirit of the law. But the indirection has to remove alot of the gambling thrill though?
It doesn't "feel" like gambling, it's straight 100% the exact same thing but it's designed in a way that bypasses the legal words.
I'd say it's designed to diminish the pyschological draw somewhat. Gambling is addictive precisely because that "the next one could be the one" element. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a big impact on sales.
That said i think it's still better to just ban it.
This. Valve won that case.
This sounds like that betting game in the Stormlight Archives books that's meant to circumvent the religious prohibition on predicting the future.
As someone who moved to the UK I find it crazy that 2p machines exist. You put 2p in, and hope to get more out. It's literally child gambling. Where I come from we had arcades with tickets for stuff, but to me that's a whole different level to money in -> money out.
I still enjoy them though, but I enjoy gambling responsibly!
These machines exist a lot in the USA/other countries too, typically called a coin pusher:
> https://bhmvending.com/collections/coin-pushers
While it won't be true for all kids, personally I felt coin pushers taught me an important lesson about the drawbacks of gambling at a young age - it's obvious even to many children how rigged the penny pusher is. My own son had similar thoughts after a quick try of one too.
But children can buy a cereal box that has some "rare" card.
Being virtual or not doesn’t matter here, ban it all.
That should be banned too. Why are you defending it with a 'but'?
When I was a kid it was baseball cards.
Close to 0% of children do their own grocery shopping and buy their own boxes of cereal
And close to 0% of children have credit cards to buy these virtual lootboxes. These mechanisms prey on getting children to beg their parents to spend money.
They don't have to ask their parents first. The parents can link cards. One example, of many: https://www.techspot.com/news/98980-13-year-old-spent-64000-...
This just another way of saying their parents allowed it
It's completely different in practice. A child can't buy $50,000 of cereal in an afternoon.
In practice a parent can easily forego allowing their children to make unsupervised purchases linked to the parent's card! That seems absolutely crazy.
And 0% of children having credit card to buy lootbox (My country requires you to be over 18 to have one)
You can have a debit card in the UK as a fairly young child. I think I got one at 12? I don’t know if there’s specific restrictions on buying in-game currency with them? I don’t know how they’d know though.
The first thing I did when I got a debit card was buy the 18 rated GTA Vice City!
Ever heard of PaySafe "cards"? Every single kid here uses that.
Who gave them the money for the cards?
Grandma for Christmas? Really, have you never been a child? They obviously didn’t get it for that specific purpose, that’s for sure.
Yes, and I never ran around with cash. Supposing I did get a cash gift before my teens, it would just sit in the "bank" i.e. a box in the dresser. Of course there were no gift cards or any of that crap back then, which is what you'd expect to receive today. I mean, as an adult now, what are you likely to receive: a gift card from a relative, or cash?
There's zero reason for a child to carry cash for no purpose. At any rate their lives are so structured usually that this notion that they're going to run to some store to convert it to prepaid cards is far-fetched to begin with.
I see a failure of parenting that some don't want to give credence. I'm not sure why.
So we should be locking kids out of the entire cash economy instead of just banning gambling microtransactions in games?
Btw. here they might need cash to take the bus home. And yes, people here let kids do that alone. Maybe because we live in a civilized society, who knows.
> So we should be locking kids out of the entire cash economy instead of just banning gambling microtransactions in games?
Yes, but not "instead". Regulate microtransactions, as we do any form of actual gambling.
> Btw. here they might need cash to take the bus home.
Bus pass.
A lot of gas stations and retail stores sell prepaid credit cards as well as gift cards that you can buy with cash.
Why should kids be walking around with large bills? Any parent worth their salt knows this could be exchanged for drugs and alcohol just as easily.
None of this makes sense. Some parents aren't doing their jobs.
Steam has giftcards you can buy at any store with your birthday cash.
Their parents link the cards. Kids can buy things without consulting a parent each time.
Where I am from kids can get a debit card that can be used online at age 13.
can't tell if this is sarcasm
So we're against checking IDs cause privacy but we also want to limit kids from accessing certain parts of the internet because gambling/porn? Have a cake and eat a cake?
How about no gambling at all? That would work for me.
Yeah I used to be for it on grounds of liberty but having seen a little of the actual industry it’s just purely corrosive, evil shit. It should be fought.
I’d maybe be OK with some kind of well-thought-through thing that still allowed friendly poker matches or sports brackets between people who actually know each other, but got the big money out of it. Maybe just ban corporations from having anything to do with it so limited-liability and serious investment is taken off the table? Something along those lines? But it’s also bad enough that I’d definitely vote for an outright ban if it came up. Complete switch-around for me on this topic, from where I was on it for years.
No casino gambling. Casino gambling is not gambling. It's putting $1.00 into a machine and getting $0.80 back, but the exact refund amount after every dollar put in is arbitrary. There's absolutely no risk to the casino, the casino is not gambling. The only gambling being done is by individual bettors, and they have an expected massive loss.
I don't care very much if people gamble with each other, and expect $1 back for every $1 they put in.* But casino games and lootboxes are specifically designed for consistent losses to the house. It's simply another tax, but on the addicted, desperate, and/or innumerate. The weakest people at their weakest moments; and if we're not protecting them, the government has no purpose.
* I actually think that it is good for people who have the same wealth levels to gamble with each other, as long as the outcomes are largely random. The problem is with vigs, and with pots that get too large to cover against a house that can endlessly extend itself.
Yeah, I think you nailed it. A ban on playing against "the house" would do it. Taking a fixed amount from each pot (as at poker tables) for play among patrons would still be allowed, but slot machines wouldn't. Your solution's much better than a full ban because it wouldn't drive as much illegal betting (a problem no only because it circumvents the law, but because for gambling in particular but for any black market, really, it tends to become connected with other criminal activity)
This. It's predatory in every implementation.
but what about freedom
It should only be criminalised as a business. Not between individuals participating in friendly wagers.
There are better ways to do this.
Enforce 18+ age rating and mandate platform parental controls. If the parents decide to let their child pay for adult content freely that's unfortunate and on them.
Going stricter isn't effective, ID check will become tools for whatever ulterior motives they have.
CS:GO is already rated 18+, and Steam already has parental controls. That has done essentially nothing to prevent it as children sometimes lie about how old they are and don't have their parents set up parental accounts to oversee themselves.
The cake is a lie.
There's something funny about how some countries try to enforce this and how Valve "solved" it, which I think demonstrates how silly "there ought to be a law!" thinking can get.
I believe for some regions, Valve just shows you what's in the "lootbox" (case, whatever), and you have to pay to acquire it before you're shown the next one.
This isn't to say I don't fully agree that this kind of thing is probably predatory and probably unhealthy. But I find most discourse on the topic starts and ends at the shoreline with a version of "there ought to be a law..."
And it's more dangerous because it's targeting kids who don't fully understand the value of money
Even worse it creates adults that don't understand the value of money. Maybe that's why the laws against it are lax now that I think about it.
"Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned."
its not gambling when you "can't" withdraw the money
they can buy pokemon cards. To be honest, I don't think CS:GO or TF2 or the like are pro-gambling. You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.
Look at the "meta-"game mechanics: you play a few games, you get a guaranteed case drop. This circa $3 case could contain anything, a $0.2 skin or a rare $2500 knife. When you open it a casino-like wheel goes over all the items and selects one randomly. There are hundreds of YT/twitch channels that open cases all day long and their target audience is children. It's gambling, and it's gambling for children.
I'm honestly really not a fan of the collectable trading card type of games (MtG, Pokemon TCG, yu-gi-oh etc). You have to pay to have a chance of getting a good card, which makes the whole thing pay to win. It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you, without having to pay more for having specific cards that you want to complete your ideal deck.
I personally often go to the huge bins of "shit tier" cards that my local game stores have, because I like to have some pretty cards (I often use them as bookmarks), but I don't play the game itself, so the actual mechanical value of the cards is meaningless to me
EDIT: I feel the same way about things like Warhammer. I don't know about other games, but in Warhammer at least there is a limit on how powerful an overall army can be, so sure it may not look as visually good, but just having tokens that say "squad of soldiers" or "mega death tank of doom" should be perfectly acceptable too
> It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you
Unless you play Pokemon TCG or MTG competitively at a national/international level, proxy cards are mostly accepted in the community.
More and more people recognise Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) have money in their eyes in the card games. Pokemon cards are becoming more full-art because that's what sells for crazy markups on third party websites, and MTG are doing crossovers with whoever will sign them a license. They're both playing a risk by moving from old time players (many of whom are now leaving the hobbies) for the sake of some nostalgic "investors".
I just wish I had a local shop with a shitbin. The shops around me just sell packs (when not out of stock) and they're all marked up beyond MSRP. I just want to play the game. I don't care about art, holographic patterns and the like.
On the other hand, whenever people open packs just looking for collectable cards, they flood the market with job lots of regular cards at dirt cheap prices. I managed to get a joblot of 2500+ Pokemon TCG cards for around £20 (lots of duplicates, all regular).
> You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.
Not if your dad is the one buying you the cards.
With the second best way being gambling. Doesn't really change anything.
Where do the items used in trading come from? I guess Gambling.
Where’s all the pearl clutching over scam ticket “games” at Dave and busters and chuckle-cheese?
The ticket conversion rate at these establishments is a worse scam than TF2 knife trading was until this update.
Would you consider old school coin operated arcades as something that should be banned?
Just curious.
I would like to see a ban on allowing children to play machines like the Wizard of Oz ones, where you drop the coin on a shelf in the hopes it'll push off other coins or cards you need to collect. It sounds like a skill game, and I liked them when I first saw them. But then I saw how people play them with vacant faces, like slot machines. They're casino games, not arcade.
They're an institution in the UK. They're in the arcades at every seaside town, and every kid plays them. Now that I have kids I actually think they're brilliant; for £2 each they taught mine everything they need to know about gambling.
- You sometimes win a bit along the way, but eventually you lose everything.
- The jackpot prizes are only there to lure you in, and you never win them. Towards the middle of the shelf are things like £20 notes. We noticed that one of them was getting quite near the edge, and might actually become winnable, but then the following morning its position had been reset to the back of the shelf.
- It's still fun as long as you're just playing with money you don't mind losing, and not expecting to come out ahead.
They even learned something about company scrip, from the tickets that come out of the machines and the ridiculous exchange rate between tickets and the actual rewards at the prize shop.
I asked my son on the way home if he'd put all his Christmas money and savings into the machine if I let him, and the answer was hell no - maybe a pound, but he didn't want to lose all of his money. Valuable lessons all round.
Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism.
Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.
If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.
I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.
Pinball and video games I think are something that can be allowed. Even if the model is slightly predatory in this age. At least you only win game time.
Other types of partly fake skill games surely should be banned from kids. Like crane games where there is some hidden variable. And well anything in same category.
It's not about banning paying to play games, it's about banning the gambling mechanics done through microtransactions.
Gambling mechanics is everywhere nowadays, especially in mobile games. It's almost like an industry standard. I think the only solution is to ban all in-game purchases completely.
> $1.84 billion in value
Correction. $0 in value. Skins do not exist and are worth exactly $0. If you spend money on skins, they are worth… $0. It’s all a large scale grift money incinerator where the only winner is Valve.
+ whatever pleasure you derive from it, ig. I can understand loot box addiction, but paying $20,000 for valve character dress up? Not even like a Peter Griffin player model or something, but a slightly different looking knife? Madness
Persp: tf2 enjoyer
The problem here is that's not only Valve that is a winner (that would be expected and fair as that's their game) but also scam casino operators.
I find it fascinating how the "HN Hivemind" (and yes, I know not a real thing, but the trends seem pretty consistent) is so opposed to kids playing with lootboxes, but also very angry at governments trying to impose age verification.
They are completely unrelated.
Some people are opposed to kids gambling (or gambling in general) - an understandable sentiment even if i dont agree.
Some people are skeptical of the gov't and the implications of proper identification on the web (which is required for age verification). Whether you are pro or anti gambling doesn't make or change this skepticism.
I'm against lootboxes in general, even for adults. It's a skinner box mechanic.
> is so opposed to kids playing with lootboxes
I think the HN hive mind is more opposed to the concept of loot boxes in general. We don't need to go much beyond that. It follows that a puddle of industrial waste would cause trouble if it began to flow downstream.
Play it here in the Browser: https://play-cs.com/en/servers
Why the downvote?
Because it's not discussion, but more importantly, this post is referring to Counter Strike 2 on Steam. Not CSS in browser.