Everybody on the planet knows that the modern cellphone is really just a portable vacuum connected directly to people's wallets and steam doesn't want a piece of that action?
They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.
They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.
They have monopoly on the whole unregulated digital gambling market which makes much much more
It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up since [1]
On top of that they take a cut form every single transaction so even just people selling cases between each other makes Valve a fuckton of money.
And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely without any oversight from anyone
0, https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/
1, https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-insane-a...
I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a sink.
In Steam you can actually make money with the skin gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone (~$800 back then)
I just bought low and sold high and I already had some older cases that were going up in price.
Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700 at least in my Steam account, I bought some very popular CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250
Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve).
And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed out with simple bank transfer.
Few days later bought my first gaming PC.
Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party sites.
Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop them as they do not control the platforms.