Why do people spend this much? Are they being tricked or something?
2) Unlike basically every other game with paid skins, Valve games let you sell them to other players on an open market for Steam credit.
Valve takes 5% of each market transaction and many skins hold their value quite well so using a $200 knife for years and years could only end up costing $10 (+ opportunity cost) or so assuming the market stays flat and you will eventually buy $200 of games in the future.
The real losers in the system are the people with gambling addictions opening cases and hoping to get something really good for less than market price. Cases are free drops but cost $2.50 to open and the average market value of what you win is usually less than (value of the case)+$2.50. Because the cases can be sold there's no limit to the amount of gambling one person can do.
... on their own community market platform. Valve supports third party stores that don't have a Valve cut, and they freely provide the ability for users to trade items for items with no fees to allow third party stores to work. These systems kick off a whole third angle of businesses being propped up around the exchange of these items and of people doing speculative trades on certain items.
To me this is infinitely worse than just having a skin shop and/or battlepass.
One possibility is that they're gambling addicts in countries where gambling is heavily restricted, and buying "loot boxes" containing random items is the closest they can get to playing a casino slot machine.
Or perhaps they think of themselves as clever investors in collectables, which they hope to sell on at a profit later on. You and I might think they're buying the equivalent of tulips or beanie babies - but they think their purchases are more like fine wines or rare postage stamps.
Perhaps the big spenders actually only spend big five bucks at a time, and they're merely poor at managing their personal finances - spending five bucks a day for five years, unaware of how it's adding up.
Or it could be money laundering - perhaps there's some criminal scheme where bank transfers are heavily monitored by the cops, but transfers of rare TF2 hats aren't.
Perhaps the big money transactions are actually fake, aiming to pump up prices or make people spending mere hundreds of dollars feel better about it because at least they're not spending thousands.
Yet another option is that they're super-successful billionaires, and a thousand bucks is nothing to them, not even worth bending down to pick up if they saw it in the street.
People who make games with microtransactions for a living probably find it a lot easier to sleep at night if they think all their whales are billionaires.
They have a fair amount of disposable income, but certainly aren't billionaires.
I bring it up because games like Overwatch 2 get regularly shit on for introducing things like a battle pass and paid skin shop. Those rely on FOMO as well, but not nearly to the same extent. There are no gambling mechanics, and there is no Blizzard-sanctioned auction house where the most desirable items sell for thousands of dollars. The most desirable cosmetics in the game can be had for 10 dollars plus spending some time playing the game.
As a player, it also just feels really shitty that customizing my character the way I want is reliant entirely on blind luck through gambling mechanics or spending obscene amounts of money.
So if Blizzard is gonna take heat for this (and they do deserve at least some of it), then Valve absolutely should get raked over the coals for their far worse system.
My new thesis is: if "winning" is "looking cool by getting good loot", then allowing people to pay for drops is effectively pay to win. I think this nuance is often skipped over in the conversation about whether some new game's micro-transaction framework is sleazy or not.
Not sure if that's still happening.