Valve just keeps on winning.
I fear the day that Gaben dies/resigns. Hopefully Valve finds a worthy successor, but it's not unheard of for a company to lose its way after the original generation is gone.
I fear the day that Gaben dies/resigns. Hopefully Valve finds a worthy successor, but it's not unheard of for a company to lose its way after the original generation is gone.
As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa super team.
Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that they could do more to protect against underage gambling.
Valve is under 400 people and wast majority of them do not work on Steam or specific game like CSGO. Likely each project support team is like 30-50 people at most.
To compare numbers for other companies in 2023-2024:
* Epic Games - 4000
* Nintendo - 7,724
* Sony Interactive Entertainment - 12,700
* Take-Two Interactive - 12,371
* Electronic Arts - 13,700
* Activision Blizzard - 17,000
* Mircosoft Gaming - 20,100
They play the anti-cheat game of cat and mouse, because if they do not, users will stop playing. No one wants to play with cheaters unless they are cheating.
They could definitely invest some resources into this. But they have no monetarily incentive thus they do nothing. I fully expect legal action or fear of it, will eventually make them do something.
Counter strike cases are a gambling product. They cost money to buy, they cost money to open, and they reward with an item worth real money. This is indisputable, and arguing otherwise is either in bad faith or due to ignorance of the platform and surrounding ecosystem.
Valve wouldn’t be making over a billion dollars a year on case openings alone if the outcome of opening a case was worthless 100% of the time.
I think just means that valve has turned their DRM into a value-add for the consumer with cloud backups and item trading and such convenience features. And I say this as someone who uses GOG. You look at other competitors like Epic Games Store or EA or whatever and the user interface is bloated and slow, and it is just a pain to use.
Epic is gnawing at the lead, at least with me, as they give out a free game every week. I must have 300 games in Epic - I've even paid for a few.
Critically, Valve allows you to trade items. This results in a couple of downstream effects:
1. Items have real-world value because they can be traded for money outside of Steam. Multiple sites exist for people to convert items into real-world money (certain rare items have been sold for >$1m [0]).
2. As these items have value, they can serve as a surrogate for money in casinos, or for sports betting.
3. This can even lead to money laundering [1].
As such, skins should be considered money, but the sites running these services don't. Therefore, it is trivial for a child to walk into a game store, buy Steam credit, use that credit to buy skins, and then spend that money on literal gambling (as very few sites have KYC). I know because I've actively partaken in it as a child. Even cryptocurrency is harder: most legitimate exchanges attempt to do identity validation.
Some video resources that might be useful:
- Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
- People Make Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g
[0]: https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o...
Edit: this is a genuine question. What is the solution here?
Valve's enforcement was one round of C&Ds in 2016 (!), and then some technical measures [0] in 2024. For Valve to take heed the problem, they literally had to have a stage invasion at their esport event [1].
[0]: https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/730/view/41856069942...
[1]: https://internettalk.xyz/blog/cults-vendettas-gambling-how-a... - article I published, Coffeezilla also has a video on this event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q58dLWjRTBE
The problem is, if you can no longer cash out the items for real money, they’re going to lose a lot (>95% I’d guess) of their value. Nobody wants $25k of steam wallet money, they want $25k, period. This would be terrible for valve, since it would severely diminish the value of all items (thus diminishing their cut of every on-platform sale), as well as cut the demand for unboxings (which they of course also make a cut on). Valve obviously cares more about their money printer than the fact that it facilities children gambling, so they do nothing.
It’s pretty easy to see why they allow this. They made over a billion dollars in 2023 on unboxings alone, ignoring the sale/trade fees. I doubt anything will change without a major US lawsuit, which I doubt will come any time soon if it hasn’t already.
You can wrangle that with words in any way you want, its gambling. Same for Team Fortress 2 and stuff like hats.
Most current monetization for cosmetics allows you to both (1) grind for items without paying anything and (2) if you want to pay, show you exactly what you are paying for.
Even games that still use lootboxes (i.e. don't follow #2) allow you to grind for items.
CS is one of the very few (or only current) game where you can't get a cosmetic without paying (must purchase keys to open lootboxes) and you don't know what you are getting (lootboxes).
It's bad and there is no excuse.
The trading mechanic, which adds a real world value to these cosmetics, and encourages players to pay for lootboxes makes it worse.
People sometimes hate on popular games like Fortnite and COD, but they have way better/more fair monetization practices.
You get dropped items through playtime which you can sell on the community market to gain steam wallet funds, which you can then use to purchase most other cosmetics or even games.
I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top trumps" and pokemon cards and such).
Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes.
I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's savings into a game.
I think that's more because people don't want to teach children about sex, while people do demonstrate what gambling is early on. Ones much more complex and if you're letting a kid find their own answers unguided, that can potentially be disasterous.
That's not even mentioning theneffect of instilling shame on your own biological body and treating parts of it as taboo. If parents refuse to talk about something, it can be taken as either a bad thing, a scary thing, or a complicated thing.
Come on now. It's hard to find anything more immediately exciting and alluring than sex, especially for teenagers. The biological imperatives and inclinations are too strong regarding sex for virtually everyone, compared to anything related to gambling. And OP is absolutely right that the barrier to entry is a great deterrent in the case of gambling, as well. Just based on that alone, easy-access, sex-related stuff is always going to have a potentially greater effect on almost anyone, regardless of their previous knowledge about it or warnings received by other people during their childhood.
>people do demonstrate what gambling is early on
Talk about going out on a limb. What are you basing this affirmation on? I don't see any parents lending any word of advice to their children about gambling-like activities, in any case, as most of them indulge in those themselves, let alone their own kids.
And? More reason to educate them early. Similar to why we have a strong desire while young to devour sweets. Now imagine we ignore diet and leave a kid to eat whatever they feel like.
>compared to anything related to gambling.
My theme is education and awareness, not playing a one up contest on what is worse. Could we both agree that these are factors to teach to kids early?
>What are you basing this affirmation on?
My upbringing and education? You think 3rd/4th graders learning about "number cubes" won't equate that to gambling? They also love talking about card games later on. Parent taught me plenty of common games as well, alongside Dominoes. And ofc Z the media. Kids have eyes and can see adults gamble. They don't need a deep dive into a dedicated class to learn the deal (but yes, I was taught that gambling is bad).
You're not trying to sway people away from internet porn, you're telling people how sex actually works in reality. My teachers taught about the basic biology of genetalia (especially wrt sexual function), how to perform safe sex, STD's, Pregnancy, and school resources (we had condoms at the nurses office, for example).
I feel those are the basics needs everyone should he taught. A decent teacher would also have an open Q&A about sex and help in dispelling any potentially bad notions learned from elsewhere. The best lessons come from.those who seek knowledge themselves.
It's not perfect. I wish my education also taught more about genetalia care (there's still so so much misinformation about foreskin) and dove more into what consent actually is (that was more in college). But the point was to counter balance whatever people was seeing on the internet, not necessarily demonize it. Just like how understanding how to calculate probability can change your approach to gambling, learning more about your body and other humans' behavior can change your approach to how you interpret porn online. Even if people continue to consume it after being educated.
But they have a near-monopoly on the pc gaming market so selling on Steam is a must
When you put it that way, the model makes so much more sense to matching how the US operates.
Even more ironically those indies typically use negligible amounts of Steams infrastructure, while the AAA games which enjoy the 20% revenue share are the ones regularly pushing 200GB downloads though Steams servers.
- anticheat
- voice chat, friend list, ...
- matchmaking
- marketplace for mods, maps, skins, ...
- clips and videos
- forums/ discussion board
- cloud saves
- rankings
An indie would have to implement and host those by itself or rely on third party services.
Steam was taking 30% when they did heavy curation and hand picked every game. At that point being on Steam was probably as valuable as a traditional publisher distribution wise because just being on Steam assured some level of quality.
Greenlight was the start of the decline in that value, and then with Steam Direct its just officially insane that they're still pricing their cut at the same rates they did at launch.
The value adds you listed also got much easier to build over time and got commoditized. EGS offers most of that for free for example, sans gambling enabling marketplaces.
For example the Forums feature is seen as a plague, many of the forums on Steam are filled with neo nazi content and spam.
I am however eternally grateful Steam allows me to painlessly run Windows games on Linux so I never have to deal with MS in my personal life ever again. As a game distributor they are awesome. And that is what Valve does best, distribute games.
https://store.steampowered.com/search/?sort_by=Released_DESC...
They also likely have another half-life game in the works, as mentions of half-life-esque things have popped up around their codebase (as published through updates of their existing source 2 games):
Half-Life Alyx actually took me by surprise. As in: "What? Valve still makes games?". And while it is the Half-Life franchise, it is different enough to stand on its own.
Maybe I'm not enough of a hardcore gamer to like DOTA or MOBA style games. I loved TF2 but you can only play for so long.
I would like to see Valve come up with some fresh new imaginative IP that isn't something decades old. Half life was a ground breaking game and to this day I will fire it up and play through about once a year after I get the urge. On a rail was my favorite part. I feel dread when I get to Zen because I know the end of the game is near.
But PCVR isn't really why people buy these things (which they do, Quest headsets cumulatively have sold ~30 million units) it's a value-add, most engagement is with Meta's store. The reason why this engagement isn't noticed by you is because the demographic showing the fastest uptake for VR is kids and teens, while you, I and everyone else posting here is old as fuck.
Valve's release cycle has slowed down to almost nothing, and are just feeding off their cash cows. Gabe is 62 and seems more interested in his Neuralink competitor.
CS:GO is the worst offender; to the point where there's third-party gambling[0] sites to gamble cosmetic gun skins with, that specifically cater to children. Basically all of CS:GO's pro scene is sponsored by it.
[0] The skin gambling sites are not officially condoned by Valve, but they absolutely do not do shit to try and stop it.
[1] Half-Life: Alyx notwithstanding
Source really wasn't built for the amount of particles present in the cosmetics (especially the "Unusuals")