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HTML Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
gadders wrote 1 day ago:
I wonder how long until we get the first prosecution for someone
insider trading on game loot knowledge.
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
What stops Valve from manipulating the market for their benefit?
nyeah wrote 1 day ago:
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.
sleepybrett wrote 1 day ago:
My Tulips!
riotnrrd wrote 1 day ago:
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.
domlebo70 wrote 10 hours 51 min ago:
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?
Mysterise wrote 1 day ago:
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.
riotnrrd wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
pityJuke wrote 1 day ago:
> 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]:
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3yS6_WDb6w
snailmailman wrote 21 hours 58 min ago:
Iâve run into idle bot accounts several times while playing
and itâs 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. Iâve had several in progress matches interrupted
because a few of the actual players bailed and the bots managed
to take over the lobby.
michaelt wrote 1 day ago:
Right, but they didnât want that to happen.
Itâs just a weird side effect thatâs surprisingly difficult
to prevent - online games have had gold farmers for pretty much
as long as there have been online games with gold.
BargirPezza wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
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
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
Hikikomori wrote 1 day ago:
>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?
numpad0 wrote 7 hours 9 min ago:
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.
Ekaros wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mFixman wrote 1 day ago:
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.
terribleperson wrote 21 hours 23 min ago:
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.
tonyhart7 wrote 16 hours 12 min ago:
"geographic arbitrage was very much a thing"
You must like a albion online, its also like that
asacrowflies wrote 14 hours 30 min ago:
Eve online also comes to mind
babypuncher wrote 1 day ago:
Or just skipping the predatory gambling crap entirely and selling
the skins directly like every other live service PvP shooter these
days
kiddico wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Hikikomori wrote 1 day ago:
Gambling for kids so we can gift skins?
therein wrote 1 day ago:
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.
pessimizer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
therein wrote 2 hours 13 min ago:
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.
froggit wrote 7 min ago:
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.
rcx141 wrote 1 day ago:
I must be really old now, I read that story without the slightest clue
what it was talking about
PeterStuer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Cthulhu_ wrote 11 hours 4 min ago:
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.
klustregrif wrote 1 day ago:
Poker is also skill based and also gambling. The concept that gaming
lootboxes isnât gambling because thereâs some tangential element
of skill involvement is just a strange way trying to protect
something that is obviously gambling. Itâs 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 wonât ever see a casino with kids running rampant
getting away with a shrug and âhow are we going to enforce age
restrictionsâ yet gaming companies get away with this all the time.
wnevets wrote 1 day ago:
"video game player economy" shouldn't be a phrase that exist.
asacrowflies wrote 14 hours 28 min ago:
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.
CivBase wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
rewqaz555 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mikkupikku wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Ekaros wrote 1 day ago:
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.
a3w wrote 1 day ago:
1800 what? USD, steam points, EUR?
Ekaros wrote 1 day ago:
USD. Then converted by some rate to local currencies.
DataDaemon wrote 1 day ago:
Deflation.
GNOMES wrote 1 day ago:
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.
simlevesque wrote 1 day ago:
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:
HTML [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44943123
ge96 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
zzixp wrote 1 day ago:
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.
y-curious wrote 5 hours 3 min ago:
I think most people are fine with the âshadyâ 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
Antelope13 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
azemetre wrote 1 day ago:
Nice haul, I remember thinking I was so slick for trading a TF2 hat
for Civilization 5.
hackernewds wrote 1 day ago:
How does that enable money laundering? Steam deck is also bound to
AML rules
dewey wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Beijinger wrote 1 day ago:
Play it here in the Browser:
HTML [1]: https://play-cs.com/en/servers
Beijinger wrote 1 day ago:
Why the downvote?
bangaladore wrote 1 day ago:
Because it's not discussion, but more importantly, this post is
referring to Counter Strike 2 on Steam. Not CSS in browser.
brachkow wrote 1 day ago:
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 â 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 â 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 â 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.
hhmc wrote 1 day ago:
> 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)
y-curious wrote 5 hours 7 min ago:
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.
AgentMatrixAI wrote 1 day ago:
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....
lenerdenator wrote 1 day ago:
Video games shouldn't have economies.
epolanski wrote 1 day ago:
Unless it's MMOs, then those having economies is unavoidable.
Cthulhu_ wrote 10 hours 52 min ago:
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.
lunias wrote 1 day ago:
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.
xboxnolifes wrote 1 day ago:
Every game made after 2010 would just have RMT in the title.
imchillyb wrote 1 day ago:
Building a business off of anotherâs 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. Thatâs
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.
Ekaros wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Raed667 wrote 1 day ago:
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?
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
Look how much people spend on aesthetics of other things - clothes,
cars, watches, etc. Why is this different?
Cthulhu_ wrote 11 hours 0 min ago:
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.
BOBOTWINSTON wrote 1 day ago:
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.
adezxc wrote 1 day ago:
Is there a source on this bigwig Greek economist or is there
sarcasm hidden in that point?
ultimatekiwi wrote 1 day ago:
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:
HTML [1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20150127153425/http://blogs....
strix_varius wrote 1 day ago:
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.
xboxnolifes wrote 1 day ago:
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.
SwtCyber wrote 1 day ago:
It's wild how a virtual knife in a 20-year-old shooter can have more
volatile market behavior than some national currencies
Cthulhu_ wrote 10 hours 55 min ago:
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.
tonyhart7 wrote 1 day ago:
"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
TheServitor wrote 1 day ago:
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.
solsane wrote 1 day ago:
> $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. Itâs 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
bluecalm wrote 1 day ago:
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.
nkrisc wrote 1 day ago:
How are kids under 18 paying for stuff like this? What means of payment
are they using that their parents donât notice?
Genuine question, been at least 20 years since I was that age.
Cthulhu_ wrote 10 hours 56 min ago:
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.
gambiting wrote 1 day ago:
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.
nkrisc wrote 23 hours 54 min ago:
So kids arenât actually spending any money?
gambiting wrote 23 hours 15 min ago:
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.
jmcgough wrote 1 day ago:
Kids aren't the ones spending $12k on rare skins, they're buying keys
to open lootboxes.
nkrisc wrote 23 hours 55 min ago:
Same question. How are they buying things online at all? Whether
$12k or $1.20?
salamanteri wrote 11 hours 8 min ago:
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.
thenthenthen wrote 1 day ago:
There is a whole skin stock market for exchanging Chinese Yuan to US
Dollar outside of the banking system:
HTML [1]: https://www.iflow.work/
y-curious wrote 5 hours 5 min ago:
Yeah, IIRC China has some arbitrarily-low limit to how much foreign
currency a Chinese citizen can possess at one time. This is clever
crimsoneer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
candiddevmike wrote 1 day ago:
I'm against lootboxes in general, even for adults. It's a skinner
box mechanic.
bob1029 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
chii wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Jhsto wrote 1 day ago:
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
bob1029 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
fruitworks wrote 23 hours 2 min ago:
The Freemium model made TF2. Most of the good updates were after the
F2P update, and almost all of the playerbase.
SwtCyber wrote 1 day ago:
Changes like what Valve just did in CS are a sign they're rebalancing
things a bit
adriatp wrote 1 day ago:
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.
neilv wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
doug_durham wrote 1 day ago:
I think the majority is money laundering.
Neil44 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Cthulhu_ wrote 11 hours 19 min ago:
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.
skeaker wrote 1 day ago:
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.
zdc1 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Cthulhu_ wrote 11 hours 10 min ago:
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.
weakfish wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, I recently made ~$70 when I realized this and cleaned out my
inventory from when I played CS:GO in 2015ish
imdsm wrote 1 day ago:
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?
novoreorx wrote 1 day ago:
Took me sometime to understand why these items can be so expensive, The
CS trading market makes NFTs look like child's play.
pnt12 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Cthulhu_ wrote 10 hours 59 min ago:
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.
rolandog wrote 1 day ago:
I'm starting to suspect that market health comes at the expense of
people's.
Bengalilol wrote 1 day ago:
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)
lofaszvanitt wrote 1 day ago:
And they came to this conclusion after how many years of exploitative
behaviour?
650REDHAIR wrote 1 day ago:
Hopefully it doesnât backfire.
The trading/gambling websites sponsor a lot of CS content.
PeterStuer wrote 1 day ago:
"Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is,
for sure, a no go."
Vegas begs to differ.
Imustaskforhelp wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCnQsvdVQ1o
agentcoops wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dcsan wrote 56 min ago:
RIP financial regulation. CFPB was hit early on but the dump coins
were launched even before that
tonyhart7 wrote 16 hours 10 min ago:
"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
webdevver wrote 23 hours 45 min ago:
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.
SL61 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
FuriouslyAdrift wrote 1 day ago:
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.
agentcoops wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, I was trying to think about that when I wrote my comment. I
do think thereâs at the very least a scale change between the
proliferation of unregulated âmarketsâ these days (crypto, cs
skins, Pokémon cards, Iâm sure others) and the âyour beanie
babies will be worth a fortune some dayâ of the past. Perhaps
whatâs 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 Iâm being too
harsh on the collectors and too charitable to our
contemporariesâ¦
FuriouslyAdrift wrote 1 day ago:
People love to gamble and delude themselves into thinking bad
outcomes are only for someone else.
dcow wrote 1 day ago:
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 unfoldâ¦
JeremyNT wrote 1 day ago:
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.
agentcoops wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mikkupikku wrote 1 day ago:
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.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
agentcoops wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, I mean the stock market is made to either pay passive
income if you have millions or to slowly accumulate value
through compound interestâexpecting anything else is just
gambling. If youâre living paycheck to paycheck, neither of
the first two are particularly helpful even medium term â
and itâs not⦠entirely irrational to go all in on option
(C). Iâd be really curious to actually know the scale of
how many people became millionaires from crypto â I have no
intuition for what order of magnitude it is. Regardless,
thereâs clearly a growing belief that the world is now full
of such moonshots.
the_gipsy wrote 1 day ago:
Nobody launders money this way.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
the_gipsy wrote 23 hours 48 min ago:
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.
mothballed wrote 23 hours 44 min ago:
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.[]
[]
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DKXmEkyl7Bw
the_gipsy wrote 23 hours 27 min ago:
You really seem to think that crime money is free,
huh
mikkupikku wrote 1 day ago:
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.
alexp2021 wrote 1 hour 53 min ago:
What are they, then?
mikkupikku wrote 1 hour 39 min ago:
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.
darth_avocado wrote 1 day ago:
> 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, youâd 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 whoâs 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.
nitwit005 wrote 1 day ago:
No way. Look at what's happened in the past. Full on adults were
investing in comic books and beanie babies.
mikkupikku wrote 1 day ago:
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.
drucik wrote 1 day ago:
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
darth_avocado wrote 1 day ago:
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 itâs 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 Iâd 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.
araes wrote 20 hours 29 min ago:
Very much alive. [1] 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 [2] 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.
13-18, 90, 9.4%
19-24, 460, 48.2%
25-30, 271, 28.4%
31-35, 93, 9.7%
36-40, 41, 4.3%
Probably trends really hardcore, since the people listed
average 360 (+-140) maps, and 7800 (+-3000) rounds.
HTML [1]: https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/#12y
HTML [2]: https://www.hltv.org/
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
HTML [1]: http://machinegunpriceguide.com/html/german_subguns_0.html
wffurr wrote 1 day ago:
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.
krapp wrote 22 hours 27 min ago:
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.
lovich wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
Yea, kinda hard to believe the numbers when the website appears
to be run by someone bordering on time cube levels of delusion
mikkupikku wrote 1 day ago:
That market could crash overnight with a single SCOTUS ruling
against the NFA.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
NFA for machine guns will never be overruled, never. The odds
of Hughes amendment being ruled against, are one iota above
nil.
Supermancho wrote 19 hours 3 min ago:
> 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.
mlyle wrote 1 day ago:
But something like legislation preventing further transfers,
etc, could also happen.
the_gipsy wrote 1 day ago:
Yea yea, you could have said that about any number of things
the current administration did - so far.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ars wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mikkupikku wrote 22 hours 46 min ago:
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.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
rhcom2 wrote 1 day ago:
Relying on the sanity and/or consistency of government policy
would keep me up at night.
agentcoops wrote 1 day ago:
I mean, I think theyâve proven over the last century that the
single thing theyâre good at is protecting the regular
payment of dividends (and of course buybacks more recently)â¦
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.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
akerl_ wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
5th amendment
akerl_ wrote 1 day ago:
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 âpublic useâ.
Passing a law which you can challenge in court that says
âmachine guns are illegal now, turn them in so we can
melt them down for scrapâ is not public use.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
Taking it for the public smelting furnace for the state
to melt down under the auspices of public safety is a
public use.
akerl_ wrote 1 day ago:
You can pretty clearly see this isnât the case.
Prior to the reversal of the bump stock ban, owners
of bump stocks were required to surrender or destroy
them.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
akerl_ wrote 1 day ago:
The case law Iâm seeing does not seem to
provide that level of certainty.
Thereâs plenty of flexibility in the case law
for what counts as âpublic useâ, but nearly
all of it is about individual cases where the
government takes a specific personâs specific
property, or damages it in some way. There
doesnât 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.
Iâm not saying thereâs no path where the
courts would require compensation, but for the
level of certainty youâre claiming, Iâd
expect there to be a more clear line you can draw
to existing cases.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
akerl_ wrote 23 hours 25 min ago:
Iâm saying: I am certain the constitution
does not guarantee payment in this situation.
I am not certain a court couldnât find a
way to connect the takings clause and expand
current case law to apply to a case like
youâre describing in the future.
None of the above has anything to do with the
government violating the constitution.
mlyle wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
The government has imposed most of those on gold at various
times yet it continues to be a component of many investor
portfolios.
mlyle wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mothballed wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mlyle wrote 22 hours 56 min ago:
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.
antonymoose wrote 1 day ago:
Link to the retirement fund?
Iâm 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.
esseph wrote 1 day ago:
There is no profit without risk
masklinn wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
aqme28 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
duxup wrote 1 day ago:
>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.
SwtCyber wrote 1 day ago:
With increasing scrutiny around gambling mechanics, this might be
Valve trying to get ahead of a future headache...
noxvilleza wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Maken wrote 1 day ago:
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.
daanbread wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tecleandor wrote 1 day ago:
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).
HTML [1]: https://siege.gg/news/several-eu-countries-have-introduced...
gquere wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Hnrobert42 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
aklein wrote 1 day ago:
Humans are social-emotional beings who assign âirrationalâ
value to things for social signaling and emotional
(self-)gratification.
raspasov wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah⦠Itâs like NFTs with 100% centralized supply and
control, if Iâm understanding this niche market correctly.
Control, as in, tomorrow Valve might decide that some of those
items are âunusableâ in their game which would presumably
also crash their value.
gquere wrote 1 day ago:
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.
sellmesoap wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dpoloncsak wrote 1 day ago:
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"
__alexs wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
Sebb767 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Xss3 wrote 1 day ago:
They warned the gambling sites plenty of times. They tried legal
action several times. Those sites were against valves ToS.
abejfehr wrote 1 day ago:
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 ( [1] )
HTML [1]: https://youtu.be/13eiDhuvM6Y?si=GJ_kXOJyXFTogy40&t=476
Hikikomori wrote 1 day ago:
Isn't it the same API that users use?
walletdrainer wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs probably fair to assume that more than 90% of trading
bots are not the kind of bots valve should support
Hikikomori wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah but its not like vavlve provides an api specifically
for them.
walletdrainer wrote 1 day ago:
But they kind of do, there arenât many other uses for
the trading API
Hikikomori wrote 1 day ago:
What do you think the users use when trading?
tsimionescu wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Hikikomori wrote 1 day ago:
>Don't they provide the API that those sites use?
tsimionescu wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Hikikomori wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tsimionescu wrote 14 hours 6 min ago:
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.
Bengalilol wrote 1 day ago:
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".
cturner wrote 1 day ago:
Valve is not the market-maker here, they are the exchange.
raspasov wrote 1 day ago:
Donât they also 100% control the supply though?
gquere wrote 1 day ago:
They're running an online casino directed at children and have
made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several
countries.
saghm wrote 1 day ago:
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.
pessimizer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Retric wrote 1 day ago:
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. Itâs 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.
wincy wrote 1 day ago:
I quite honestly donât know anyone under 40 that plays
Counterstrike. It seems like an old guyâs game at this point.
It isnât 2003 anymore.
snake42 wrote 1 day ago:
Its probably because you don't know many under 40 year olds.
Its been a popular game for a long time.
solsane wrote 1 day ago:
Well, thatâs lootbox mechanics. I donât see how this most
recent iteration changes any of that.
lolitsobvious wrote 1 day ago:
Damn youâre 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.
Dead_Lemon wrote 1 day ago:
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.
armonster wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Our_Benefactors wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs been rated M since the 90s, well before loot crates
were a thing.
seanclayton wrote 1 day ago:
How many kids do you have?
rplnt wrote 1 day ago:
You don't need to play the game to gamble.
catmanjan wrote 1 day ago:
There's a big difference between 15 and 18 though...
the_sleaze_ wrote 1 day ago:
Is there?
BigTTYGothGF wrote 1 day ago:
By and large, yeah.
saghm wrote 1 day ago:
From an objective legal standpoint in some jurisdictions,
the answer is clearly yes
reaperducer wrote 1 day ago:
Found the 14-year-old.
jsheard wrote 1 day ago:
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.
CaptainOfCoit wrote 1 day ago:
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.
josefx wrote 1 day ago:
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.
voxic11 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dcow wrote 1 day ago:
McDonaldâs at least has AMOE and you donât have to
spend a cent to play. Itâs certainly the less
convenient path, purposely, though.
Aeolun wrote 1 day ago:
Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a
child.
If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking?
That itâs a legitimate investment? The only people spending
that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.
temp0826 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Aeolun wrote 10 hours 10 min ago:
I mean, if you have the disposable income for it, more
power to you. I think itâs 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 wonât buy robux for him, but
those are an even bigger waste of money than some of these
lootboxes xD
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
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?
dcow wrote 1 day ago:
Iâve watched grown adults with kids spend hundreds on
baseball tickets and beer in one sitting, too. Iâm not
trying to invalidate your point. But also be careful about
making value judgements (âvalve has their hooks in
themâ reads as a negative sentiment to me). People spend
money on entertainment and there are worse vices out
there.
charcircuit wrote 1 day ago:
Virtual items are legitimate investments.
BigTTYGothGF wrote 1 day ago:
You can't even use slurp juice on CS skins.
bargainbin wrote 1 day ago:
Anything you put money into is a legitimate investment.
This doesnât mean theyâre viable investments.
immibis wrote 1 day ago:
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.
charcircuit wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
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.
shawabawa3 wrote 1 day ago:
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
BoorishBears wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
huimang wrote 1 day ago:
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.
matsemann wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
semanticist wrote 1 day ago:
"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.
matsemann wrote 1 day ago:
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.
gquere wrote 1 day ago:
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.
c048 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
computerex wrote 1 day ago:
I think people have a hard time viewing Valve as âevilâ
given what they have done in the gaming industry.
cubefox wrote 1 day ago:
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.
knome wrote 1 day ago:
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.
cubefox wrote 1 day ago:
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.
8note wrote 1 day ago:
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
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
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.
dugidugout wrote 1 day ago:
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?
throw10920 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
cubefox wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
Scramblejams wrote 1 day ago:
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.
kube-system wrote 1 day ago:
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?
skeaker wrote 1 day ago:
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.
throw10920 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
cubefox wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
throw10920 wrote 18 hours 46 min ago:
> 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.
ashirviskas wrote 22 hours 11 min ago:
> > 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.
Hikikomori wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Imustaskforhelp wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
throw10920 wrote 16 hours 36 min ago:
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".
Imustaskforhelp wrote 10 hours 17 min ago:
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 [1]
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.
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13ei...
suslik wrote 1 day ago:
Not to mention how much they did for Linux gaming.
jackgavigan wrote 1 day ago:
> 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!
system2 wrote 1 day ago:
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."
salamanteri wrote 11 hours 1 min ago:
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.
Cthulhu_ wrote 10 hours 53 min ago:
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.
tasuki wrote 1 day ago:
What does "factory new" mean? That it... hasn't been scratched? Is
that... how Counter Strike works?
jsheard wrote 1 day ago:
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).
Am4TIfIsER0ppos wrote 1 day ago:
Now that you explain that aspect of these dumb skins I now think
they are even dumber. Thank you.
maxbond wrote 1 day ago:
People Make Games did a story on this market. [1] [36m]
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g
hhh wrote 1 day ago:
People love buying unsecured securities and then being upset when bad
things happen
ExpertAdvisor01 wrote 1 day ago:
Unfortunately there was a suicide in china , because of this crash.
neilwilson wrote 1 day ago:
So high prices induce new supply in a market to relieve shortages and
the âeconomy is in free fallâ?
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.
Wouldnât it be nice if those in charge of the economy in the real
world made the same sort of intervention.
Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Doesnât really tie in to actual markets involving physical item.
neilwilson wrote 1 day ago:
Not like, say, houses then.
Or shares in Nvidia.
bloppe wrote 1 day ago:
Not really, but it's actually kinda like currency. Imagine if a
government suddenly devalued all $500 bills into $100 bills, but
every other denomination remained the same.
klustregrif wrote 1 day ago:
Thatâs not really what happens though. What happened was that
500$ bills where so rare in circulation that collectors started
paying upwards of 20 100$ to get them. Valve went âyes the
500$ are too rare, we need to fix supply so weâll start
exchanging 5 100$ bills for one 500$ billâ
This had catastrophic impact on people hoarding 500$ expecting
their exchange value to remain at the elevated levels.
neilwilson wrote 1 day ago:
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 isnât 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.
nutjob2 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Frieren wrote 1 day ago:
> Doesnât 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. [1]
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.
HTML [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/58846711
CrossVR wrote 1 day ago:
So a knife-themed cryptocurrency then?
weird-eye-issue wrote 1 day ago:
You literally just described fiat currency. Just change company to
central bank or government.
yard2010 wrote 1 day ago:
Isn't it the same with USD to some extent?
chii wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tonyhart7 wrote 1 day ago:
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
chii wrote 1 day ago:
my specific point is to claim that skins are not a currency -
the crucial difference between things that are both
artificial.
stodor89 wrote 1 day ago:
Counter-Strike's pLaYeR eCoNoMy shouldn't have been a thing to begin
with.
tamimio wrote 1 day ago:
$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!
pengaru wrote 1 day ago:
sounds like money laundering
chihuahua wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tonyhart7 wrote 1 day ago:
"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)
devsda wrote 1 day ago:
It is more harmful for those who cannot afford to spend 20K, 2K or
even 200 but does anyway out of ignorance or stupidity.
messe wrote 1 day ago:
You forgot addiction, which should not be reduced to just
ignorance or stupidity.
cylemons wrote 1 day ago:
They are doing it for speculation. They buy it for 20k and sell for
higher to profit
Gigachad wrote 1 day ago:
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.
esseph wrote 1 day ago:
24mil a year, 20k would be 1 hundredth of your monthly salary.
jalapenos wrote 1 day ago:
> 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
someothherguyy wrote 1 day ago:
> 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?
jalapenos wrote 1 day ago:
Fair, but my comments only waste a few minutes of my time, and
they're free.
rand17 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
apt-apt-apt-apt wrote 1 day ago:
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.
TheOtherHobbes wrote 1 day ago:
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.
lm28469 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
apt-apt-apt-apt wrote 1 day ago:
I feel like young males in all times would be innately
fascinated with equivalents like bows and arrows and swords.
rand17 wrote 13 hours 44 min ago:
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.
jimbob45 wrote 1 day ago:
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, itâs nothing to pair
that person with a known deserter for 1-3 games to drastically slow
their progress.
jalapenos wrote 1 day ago:
I think you hit a nerve
LunaSea wrote 1 day ago:
We should probably ban all sports then because it tricks people
in wanting to be competitive.
jimbob45 wrote 1 day ago:
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 theyâre going to go pro when
theyâre not.
LunaSea wrote 22 hours 13 min ago:
We should van universities as well since its possible to get
failing grades and fail your year.
themafia wrote 1 day ago:
They can do whatever they want with their time. Except operate and
profit off of make shift casinos and unregulated games of chance.
janwl wrote 1 day ago:
Why exactly? Why are these games of chance moral only if the
government gets a cut?
themafia wrote 1 day ago:
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.
janwl wrote 1 day ago:
Games of chance are absolutely moral and completely fine when
played by adults who are not mentally incapacitated.
hshdhdhehd wrote 1 day ago:
Gambling houses make the most money from "adults who are
mentally incapacitated"
beeflet wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jalapenos wrote 1 day ago:
Wow you really hit a nerve, lol - surprised to discover HN has
such a large community of CS NPCs
episteme wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jalapenos wrote 1 day ago:
> 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
mashlol wrote 1 day ago:
Would you say the same if someone played 1000 hours of a sport?
beeflet wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jalapenos wrote 1 day ago:
Plus you'll have friends who play sports, rather than the
kinds of people who spend all night clicking on each other
immibis wrote 1 day ago:
Video gaming has been shown to train some brain areas too.
It's definitely better than 1000 hours of Netflix.
jalapenos wrote 1 day ago:
That's a very fair take
user432678 wrote 1 day ago:
How about 1000 hours reading/commenting HN?
bombcar wrote 1 day ago:
dang should enable selling posts and create a secondary
market. My posts with the most upvotes can be sold to you
and now YOUâRE the famous one!
asukachikaru wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ang_cire wrote 1 day ago:
You don't think that you get better at CS the more you play
it? Better coordination, better accuracy, etc?
beeflet wrote 1 day ago:
you don't get better at real life the more you play it
jalapenos wrote 1 day ago:
Saddest thing I've heard today
Pooge wrote 1 day ago:
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.
beeflet wrote 1 day ago:
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.
immibis wrote 1 day ago:
It's not "more real" or "more useful" just because
our ancient ancestors had to do it.
ramesh31 wrote 1 day ago:
Valve employs an army of economists (notably Yanis Varoufakis as alumn)
to make these decisions. It was certainly purposeful and will balance
itself out.
evrimoztamur wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
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)
protocolture wrote 1 day ago:
>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.
probably_wrong wrote 1 day ago:
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.
beeflet wrote 1 day ago:
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.
omcnoe wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ExpertAdvisor01 wrote 1 day ago:
It is 5 covert skins not 10
hamhamed wrote 1 day ago:
It made the reds (coverts) way more pricier, so all is balanced
(somewhat). see here, doubling and more in price:
HTML [1]: https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/730/MAC-10%20%7C%20...
adrr wrote 1 day ago:
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.
llama_boy wrote 1 day ago:
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!
giobox wrote 23 hours 28 min ago:
These machines exist a lot in the USA/other countries too,
typically called a coin pusher:
> [1] 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.
HTML [1]: https://bhmvending.com/collections/coin-pushers
Waterluvian wrote 1 day ago:
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..."
Der_Einzige wrote 1 day ago:
Whereâs all the pearl clutching over scam ticket âgamesâ 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.
SwtCyber wrote 1 day ago:
And it's more dangerous because it's targeting kids who don't fully
understand the value of money
Mistletoe wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tonyhart7 wrote 1 day ago:
"Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned."
its not gambling when you "can't" withdraw the money
atraac wrote 1 day ago:
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?
lunar_rover wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mminer237 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
DonHopkins wrote 1 day ago:
The cake is a lie.
mosselman wrote 1 day ago:
How about no gambling at all? That would work for me.
walkabout wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah I used to be for it on grounds of liberty but having seen a
little of the actual industry itâs just purely corrosive, evil
shit. It should be fought.
Iâd 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 itâs also
bad enough that Iâd 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.
pessimizer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
walkabout wrote 1 day ago:
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)
Xss3 wrote 1 day ago:
This. It's predatory in every implementation.
throwaway290 wrote 1 day ago:
but what about freedom
Xss3 wrote 18 hours 34 min ago:
It should only be criminalised as a business. Not between
individuals participating in friendly wagers.
dandanua wrote 1 day ago:
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.
mrheosuper wrote 1 day ago:
But children can buy a cereal box that has some "rare" card.
Xss3 wrote 1 day ago:
That should be banned too. Why are you defending it with a 'but'?
shlant wrote 1 day ago:
can't tell if this is sarcasm
matwood wrote 1 day ago:
When I was a kid it was baseball cards.
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
Close to 0% of children do their own grocery shopping and buy their
own boxes of cereal
mrheosuper wrote 1 day ago:
And 0% of children having credit card to buy lootbox (My country
requires you to be over 18 to have one)
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
Steam has giftcards you can buy at any store with your birthday
cash.
lurk2 wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of gas stations and retail stores sell prepaid credit
cards as well as gift cards that you can buy with cash.
lanfeust6 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
trinix912 wrote 1 day ago:
Ever heard of PaySafe "cards"? Every single kid here uses that.
lanfeust6 wrote 1 day ago:
Who gave them the money for the cards?
trinix912 wrote 1 day ago:
Grandma for Christmas? Really, have you never been a child?
They obviously didnât get it for that specific purpose,
thatâs for sure.
lanfeust6 wrote 23 hours 24 min ago:
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.
trinix912 wrote 11 hours 18 min ago:
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.
leoedin wrote 1 day ago:
You can have a debit card in the UK as a fairly young child. I
think I got one at 12? I donât know if thereâs specific
restrictions on buying in-game currency with them? I donât
know how theyâd know though.
The first thing I did when I got a debit card was buy the 18
rated GTA Vice City!
msh wrote 1 day ago:
Where I am from kids can get a debit card that can be used
online at age 13.
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
Their parents link the cards. Kids can buy things without
consulting a parent each time.
jimmydorry wrote 1 day ago:
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.
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
They don't have to ask their parents first. The parents can
link cards. One example, of many:
HTML [1]: https://www.techspot.com/news/98980-13-year-old-spent-...
lanfeust6 wrote 1 day ago:
This just another way of saying their parents allowed it
smt88 wrote 1 day ago:
It's completely different in practice. A child can't buy
$50,000 of cereal in an afternoon.
lanfeust6 wrote 1 day ago:
In practice a parent can easily forego allowing their
children to make unsupervised purchases linked to the
parent's card! That seems absolutely crazy.
Retric wrote 1 day ago:
Being virtual or not doesnât matter here, ban it all.
TheRoque wrote 1 day ago:
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)
gruez wrote 1 day ago:
>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.
gquere wrote 1 day ago:
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.
modo_mario wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Xss3 wrote 1 day ago:
This. Valve won that case.
tdeck wrote 1 day ago:
This sounds like that betting game in the Stormlight Archives
books that's meant to circumvent the religious prohibition on
predicting the future.
TheBicPen wrote 1 day ago:
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
rightbyte wrote 1 day ago:
Ye seems like not going with the spirit of the law. But the
indirection has to remove alot of the gambling thrill though?
Fade_Dance wrote 1 day ago:
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.
sintax wrote 1 day ago:
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...
teiferer wrote 1 day ago:
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.
pdw wrote 1 day ago:
HTML [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_...
jimnotgym wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Fade_Dance wrote 1 day ago:
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
alberth wrote 1 day ago:
Would you consider old school coin operated arcades as something that
should be banned?
Just curious.
trinix912 wrote 1 day ago:
It's not about banning paying to play games, it's about banning the
gambling mechanics done through microtransactions.
Ekaros wrote 1 day ago:
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.
vharuck wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ad_hockey wrote 1 day ago:
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.
zharknado wrote 1 day ago:
Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism.
Depending on how old is âold schoolâ for you, every game in an
arcade might be fine.
If weâre talking 90âs Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games
would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout.
The others round to âroll the dice,â where there is no payoff
other than a gamblerâs 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.
beeflet wrote 1 day ago:
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.
lurk2 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
gquere wrote 1 day ago:
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.
voidUpdate wrote 1 day ago:
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
sjw987 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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).
vincnetas wrote 1 day ago:
Where do the items used in trading come from? I guess Gambling.
episteme wrote 1 day ago:
With the second best way being gambling. Doesn't really change
anything.
hardwaresofton wrote 1 day ago:
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.
leshokunin wrote 1 day ago:
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.
grapesodaaaaa wrote 1 day ago:
I have been playing since 1.5 and agree. I personally donât care at
all about skins, and just want to play the game.
Itâs fine to have some cosmetics, but the economy Valve had created
brought so much toxicity to the game.
ho_schi wrote 1 day ago:
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.
SwtCyber wrote 1 day ago:
Bringing prices down and making rare items more accessible feels like
a step toward re-centering the game around, well⦠the GAME
crossroadsguy wrote 1 day ago:
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 lotâ albeit with gaps worth years in between
after collegeâ 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)
ndriscoll wrote 1 day ago:
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.
crossroadsguy wrote 1 day ago:
Thing is I donât buy devices more than I absolutely need so
thatâs 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
thatâs there.
ndriscoll wrote 1 day ago:
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.
nubinetwork wrote 1 day ago:
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.
GeoAtreides wrote 1 day ago:
>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.
leshokunin wrote 1 day ago:
Yes, letâs blame the f2p game dev when there are literally
streamers pumping fake platforms, doing fake wins, marketing
gambling sites at kids. Valve did that
kakacik wrote 1 day ago:
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.
GeoAtreides wrote 1 day ago:
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.
leshokunin wrote 1 day ago:
Same as Roblox, Fortnite, Angry Birds, and every other F2P game
GeoAtreides wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah, well, fuck them too.
frenzcan wrote 1 day ago:
The whole skin economy around CS has gotten way out of hand. Itâs
less about the game and more about speculation and gambling at this
point.
wildzzz wrote 1 hour 35 min ago:
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.
gquere wrote 1 day ago:
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.
pryce wrote 1 day ago:
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.
wincy wrote 1 day ago:
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. Itâs a suckers game if I canât
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 couldnât copy exactly seemed to be the
âenchantedâ cards, which sell for hundreds or thousands of
dollars.
breppp wrote 1 day ago:
Probably the biggest possible investment for quantum computing
today is all the abandoned bitcoins wallets ripe for taking
jen729w wrote 1 day ago:
I weep for humanity if that's the best use we can think of for
quantum computing.
eru wrote 1 day ago:
There's not actually that many things quantum computers are
expected to be good at. Material science perhaps?
breppp wrote 1 day ago:
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?
eru wrote 1 day ago:
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.
pfdietz wrote 1 day ago:
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.
eru wrote 11 hours 5 min ago:
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.
breppp wrote 1 day ago:
The general sentiment is still true, the reasons for
engineering and (often science) are not always nobel (pun
intended)
yard2010 wrote 1 day ago:
Honest question why would anyone harvest Bitcoin after this?
Wouldn't it lose all its value since everyone has everyone key
now?
Ray20 wrote 1 day ago:
After? There is no reason. But between "only you have the keys"
and that "after" there is literally tens of billions of
dollars.
stOneskull wrote 1 day ago:
maybe it could be turned into a game.. hide the satoshis from
the quantum ghosts
highwaylights wrote 1 day ago:
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).
ozim wrote 1 day ago:
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.
phatfish wrote 1 day ago:
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.
hparadiz wrote 1 day ago:
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.
rkomorn wrote 1 day ago:
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.
breppp wrote 1 day ago:
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
rkomorn wrote 1 day ago:
Right, but that just sounds like the race conditions I added
in my edit.
toenail wrote 1 day ago:
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.
rkomorn wrote 1 day ago:
You lost me... What is the difference between an abandoned
wallet and a non-abandoned one in this scenario?
toenail wrote 1 day ago:
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.
wildzzz wrote 1 hour 18 min ago:
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?
pprotas wrote 1 day ago:
What makes this (or cypto) economy âartificialâ, and why is our
real-world economy not artificial?
Plenty of market manipulation and rug pulls happening on the
regular stock market as well
rkomorn wrote 1 day ago:
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).
Giorgi wrote 1 day ago:
Is not that their parent's job?
mmooss wrote 1 day ago:
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?
phatfish wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Giorgi wrote 1 day ago:
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).
walkabout wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs hard to express how frustrating it is to try to allow kids
access to tech and the Web (itâs kind of important that they
have at least some access! And isnât 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
Appleâs and Nintendoâs 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 âenterpriseâ feature for almost
every vendor)
Then weâre told this is all our fault. Meanwhile schools send
home devices that donât lock or at least disable Web access at
night, and I canât 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.
lanfeust6 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
gquere wrote 1 day ago:
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.
lanfeust6 wrote 1 day ago:
That sounds like a pittance. Either way they would be playing
with money they didn't put in themselves.
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
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.
lanfeust6 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
cornholio wrote 1 day ago:
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.
galaxy_gas wrote 1 day ago:
I am fine with this . Every third party in this ecosystem is
literal scum
leshokunin wrote 1 day ago:
They crashed the premium market and resell value. Prices down.
Itâs a side effect, but the direct effect to the user.
cornholio wrote 1 day ago:
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.
leshokunin wrote 1 day ago:
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.
uvaursi wrote 1 day ago:
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? Doesnât gaben have enough money for his
super yachts and sword collections?
ndriscoll wrote 1 day ago:
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]
HTML [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I
drchickensalad wrote 1 day ago:
That doesn't get shown publicly for everyone else watching you.
Cthulhu_ wrote 1 day ago:
> Doesnât 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.
dataangel wrote 1 day ago:
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.
sundarurfriend wrote 1 day ago:
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.)
skeaker wrote 1 day ago:
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.
sundarurfriend wrote 23 hours 18 min ago:
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?
skeaker wrote 23 hours 7 min ago:
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.
lolitsobvious wrote 1 day ago:
No he doesnât. Heâs greedy. Saw the freak on the train the
other day the fact that he would stalk a random guy whoâs been
criticising him just shows how weird the man truly is. This
wasnât in the US btw.
bilekas wrote 1 day ago:
> Doesnât 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.
mrguyorama wrote 1 day ago:
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.
tweetle_beetle wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Aerolfos wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
whatevaa wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Aerolfos wrote 22 hours 55 min ago:
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.
throw10920 wrote 17 hours 29 min ago:
> 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?
zrobotics wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Aerolfos wrote 22 hours 38 min ago:
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
RobotToaster wrote 1 day ago:
That would be illegal in the UK I think, since you have 1
year mandatory warranty against any faulty goods.
whatevaa wrote 1 day ago:
Warrantyis thÄ same as return. If there is nothing wrong
with goods, warranty does not apply. Return means return
for any reason.
kqr wrote 1 day ago:
"I misread the minimum specifications" does not a faulty
ware make.
maratc wrote 1 day ago:
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."
kqr wrote 13 hours 37 min ago:
I don't see how that is relevant to Oblivion, nor how
you'd buy Battlefield 6 plastic wrapped in a store.
zufallsheld wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
Orygin wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
Aerolfos wrote 22 hours 51 min ago:
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.
fendy3002 wrote 1 day ago:
GOGs refund is 1 month? Man I can clear DMC5 twice in one week
then do a refund in that case.
walkabout wrote 1 day ago:
Itâs far easier to just pirate (nearly all?) GOG games.
Like there are torrents with big chunks of their entire store
on them, and Iâve seen allusions to an unofficial
âstoreâ 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.
portaouflop wrote 1 day ago:
You can also share games you purchased at GoG with all your
friends.
They do give you a lot of freedom.
Itâs maybe the only really âgoodâ actor in that
industry left so I try to support them as much as possible
fendy3002 wrote 1 day ago:
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
portaouflop wrote 19 hours 29 min ago:
Sure steam is cheaper but thatâs how they get you.
We shouldnât always go for the cheapest alternative and
then whine when things go to shit
endgame wrote 1 day ago:
The first one was because the Australian Competition and Consumer
Commission (ACCC) took them to court, but yes, they're both very
good features.
nottorp wrote 1 day ago:
It really depends on playing the games for fun or to replace social
interaction.
Most lootbox gambling apps are targeted towards the latter use.
renewiltord wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jayd16 wrote 1 day ago:
Its about showing off to other players. You can still do local
game mods just fine but that's not what people are after.
bravetraveler wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
formerly_proven wrote 1 day ago:
So-called skin changers (which modify what skins you yourself see
in-game) are actually considered bannable cheats.
bashy wrote 1 day ago:
A lot of people buy CS2 community servers to use a WeaponPaints
addon which allows anyone in the server to use any skin.
Iâd say 90% of ours have it enabled.
They used to ban accounts but I donât think they have (on
community servers) since it went F2P.
asmor wrote 1 day ago:
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.
close04 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
asmor wrote 1 day ago:
sv_pure specifically actually allows the server admin to
allow selective model/material swaps.
close04 wrote 1 day ago:
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.
asmor wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ehnto wrote 1 day ago:
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.
jayd16 wrote 1 day ago:
> 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.
friedtofu wrote 1 day ago:
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.
ehnto wrote 1 day ago:
Huh, I wonder what my steamID length was. I would have signed
up very early. I will have to check!
eru wrote 1 day ago:
And making it cheaper wouldn't fix anything, I guess?
ehnto wrote 1 day ago:
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.
close04 wrote 1 day ago:
Making status symbols cheaper means they're no longer
exclusive or grant status. So people go looking for other
exclusive status symbols.
zingababba wrote 1 day ago:
I play on and off. It's crazy hearing people talk about how they've
spend thousands on a skin.
vecter wrote 1 day ago:
No more than someone spending a few thousand on a tiny designer bag
that can fit almost nothing inside.
messe wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Cthulhu_ wrote 10 hours 50 min ago:
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.
jillesvangurp wrote 1 day ago:
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.
matwood wrote 1 day ago:
They are both about signaling wealth and status. What I donât
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 donât seem to
carry over digitally.
omnimus wrote 1 day ago:
They are not anonymous but pseudonymus. I assume for many
people building up their pseudonyms status is as intriguing as
their AFK one.
matwood wrote 8 hours 51 min ago:
Good point. Still odd in that it doesnât connect to the
real world easily, though thatâs likely just showing my age
bias.
elphinstone wrote 1 day ago:
Good. Too many game companies are running unregulated casinos aimed at
minors with their lootboxes and pay to win mechanics.
mkagenius wrote 1 day ago:
Interesting that a whole economy is based on fake supply constraint. Or
is making butterfly knife really hard?
It seems like NFT before NFT.
TiredOfLife wrote 1 day ago:
It is NFT. But because it's Valve its actually good. Because of
reasons.
est wrote 1 day ago:
it's not a fake supply
CSGO knifes actually currency run by shadow banks providing RMB <->
USD convertion.
Google for "æå"
EZ-E wrote 1 day ago:
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" (æå) 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
HTML [1]: https://github.com/EricZhu-42/SteamTradingSiteTracker/wiki
omcnoe wrote 1 day ago:
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.
EZ-E wrote 1 day ago:
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
omcnoe wrote 1 day ago:
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.
est wrote 1 day ago:
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?
stickfigure wrote 1 day ago:
This should be a top level comment, it is the "ah hah" that
suddenly makes everything clear.
pols45 wrote 1 day ago:
All this froth on the ocean surface is only possible in an economy
where household net worth has been inflated to 150 Trillion.
omnimus wrote 1 day ago:
Yeah the measly peasants should have never gotten their hands on
such luxuries as game knives skins.
raihansaputra wrote 1 day ago:
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.
TZubiri wrote 1 day ago:
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.
Incipient wrote 1 day ago:
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.
hshdhdhehd wrote 1 day ago:
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.
eru wrote 1 day ago:
See the discussion around the supposedly lost Van Gogh painting, eg
at [1] Nothing about the painting itself would have changed, but
its market value depends very much on whether Van Gogh painted it.
HTML [1]: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/van-gogh-lmi-group-26028...
colechristensen wrote 1 day ago:
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.
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