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Comment by jdietrich | Hacker News Reader

It's kinda Valve's fault. Team Fortress 2 was the first major game in the west to implement loot boxes; the CS:GO skins economy spawned a legion of scummy third-party gambling sites, from which this site is clearly derived.

Weirdly, it may also partly be the fault of former Greek finance minister Yanis Varoufakis.

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/economics/it-all-began-with-a...

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Isn't it ironic to blame Valve, when they're pretty much the only ones doing it right ?

By restricting microtransactions to cosmetic elements, the thing they play on is one's vanity. Players who are content exploring the gameplay can do so unencumbered. There is no "special club" for players who buy items. They don't beat you more easily in the games. The main focus is still on winning the matches.

There is no incentive to buy those cosmetic items except players thinking "I want to look cool". Whatever Valve may do, that's not a vice they are responsible for creating, or that anyone is ever exempt from (we all have to buy clothes). They merely brought it, opt-in, to their games.

+ many items can be bought very cheaply (cents) for TF2 if you want to have some fancy hat or skinned weapon on marketplaces (most of my TF2 items are << $1)

Right. Most hats are worth 1.33 ref, which works out to be around 7.4 cents max.

The issue is that unusuals (with only a 1% chance of unboxing) are the real prizes of mann co crates, and because regular hats are so cheap, the base level of "coolness" rises such that regular hats just aren't that fashionable.

Except they created a market place without restriction to sell / trade those items. So yes Valve is to blame. The whole thing with auction house on third party sites is Valve fault, not sure how you can defend them.

Also it's not only cosmetic since you can have weapons / items in those crates.

"I want to look cool" is a very strong motivation. A particularly rare and sought-after CS:GO skin could be worth as much as $2000. Valve actively support the exchange of virtual items for real money via the Community Market, and provide market access to third-party sites via an API.

That combination of factors has created a hive of scum and villainy. CS:GO skins became the ideal unit of value for unregulated gambling sites - they're highly liquid, they have a stable value, they're freely exchangeable for real money and there's no KYC or age verification checks.

The mechanics and appearance of Mystery Brand are almost identical to numerous existing CS:GO gambling sites; they even use the same colour-coding for the rarity of items. Some CS:GO gambling sites already offer real-world prizes like electronics and designer clothing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling

https://hellcase.com/en/open/knifelife

https://www.csgolive.com/case/Millionaire%20Case%20%28vIRL%2...

Your thesis rests on the opinion that merely "creating freely exchangable tokens of value" is a sin in itself.

I'm sure that's a defensible position, but far from common sense. I certainly don't agree with it.

The issue is that children should not have access to gamble with real world currency.

Valve wasn't "doing it right". What they did was deeply immoral and if there was any justice in this world many Valve employees would be rotting in prison. They knew their system was promoting gambling to children and they thought that was great. Valve is a despicable company.

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