Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
polygon.com
polygon.com
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.
Why not remove trade and use an auction system with a limit? Or not allowing trades under market price?
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.
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.
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.
Even the good ones at times resorted to those kind of measures. But it seems we agree that collective punishment is unfair.
I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.
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.
You must like a albion online, its also like that
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.
> 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.
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.
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].
It’s just a weird side effect that’s surprisingly difficult to prevent - online games have had gold farmers for pretty much as long as there have been online games with gold.
Worth a watch imo
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)
A timely lesson!
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".
If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That it’s a legitimate investment? The only people spending that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.
People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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".
> 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y
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.
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.
I still prefer steam even if its more expensive than other marketplaces. They provide real value over just distribution, like their return policy.
> 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.
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.
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.
Why don't they?
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.
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.
> 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.
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?
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
That you used a straw man. The $20k cosmetics weren't mentioned, and even if some buy these, the thing itself can still very well be targeted as gambling towards children.
They're mentioned right there in the article this is nominally meant to be a discussion thread about.
Then there are the third party gambling sites where you bet items on matches in the hopes of spinning up your cheap items into more expensive ones
This part is already gambling. The 3rd party site is letting them gamble again.
This doesn’t mean they’re viable investments.
The only thing I ever spent money on was League of Legends skins/heroes, but those were always guaranteed.
My son keeps asking why I won’t buy robux for him, but those are an even bigger waste of money than some of these lootboxes xD
I would still contend and say the gambling aspect, with real money, is a net negative to the community.
I'm guessing the video games industry's attempt at self-regulating with PEGI and similar efforts actually paid off.
I could see an argument that there's an issue with closed ecosystems where value of an item can be changed after someone has obtained it due to control by a centralized provider, but that's completely different concern to the idea of gambling being harmful.
The loot box issue is in part how easy it is to take this stuff to excess. My 8 year old niece racked up ~1,500$ worth of charges in a game when AT&T messed up permissions after a cellphone upgrade. It’s 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.
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.
Market makers do not control the supply of goods. They provide resting liquidity for pre-existing goods.
Similarly, market makers do not get to establish rules of the of their own "reality". Market makers are participants in a venue. It is the venue/exchange that sets the rules.
User Bengalilol seems to have inferred that because Valve made the venue, he can refer to them as the "market maker". This is not correct. Words have meaning. The meaning of market-maker is well-established in the context of exchanges. Market maker is incorrect terminology for Valve’s role.
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 (https://youtu.be/13eiDhuvM6Y?si=GJ_kXOJyXFTogy40&t=476)
I thought it was impossible to trade off platform? All item trades happen within Steam, they have an API to facilitate it and everything.
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"
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.
Control, as in, tomorrow Valve might decide that some of those items are “unusable” in their game which would presumably also crash their value.
https://siege.gg/news/several-eu-countries-have-introduced-s...
They kinda chose that ... a long time ago.
Maybe they changed their mind.
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.
I’m 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Where is that in the constitution?
Passing a law which you can challenge in court that says “machine guns are illegal now, turn them in so we can melt them down for scrap” is not public use.
The EO couldn't have forced an uncompensated surrender of a registered bump stock, were it one existed before the Hughes Amendment.
There’s plenty of flexibility in the case law for what counts as “public use”, but nearly all of it is about individual cases where the government takes a specific person’s specific property, or damages it in some way. There doesn’t 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.
I’m not saying there’s no path where the courts would require compensation, but for the level of certainty you’re claiming, I’d expect there to be a more clear line you can draw to existing cases.
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.
None of the above has anything to do with the government violating the constitution.
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.
Which is also why the Forced Reset Trigger was not banned - they didn't think they could.
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.
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.
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.
If you meant children, with access to parents credit cards, who are addicted to gambling, you’d 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 who’s 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.
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 https://www.hltv.org/
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%
Funko pops, baseball cards, knife skins, it's all used this way.
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.
> 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.
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.[]
At least those cosmetic items in video games actually do something.
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.
i should imagine a whole slew of vitalik buterins were just created.
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
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. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCnQsvdVQ1o
Vegas begs to differ.
The trading/gambling websites sponsor a lot of CS content.
What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
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.
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.
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.
I would also consider building comments into a webpage pretty trivial, it was like the second thing I did when teaching myself web applications years ago.
I bet it's harder in modern frameworks than it used to be, but that doesn't make it a hard problem, we just surrounded an easy problem with more difficult but unrelated problems.
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.
I’d say 90% of ours have it enabled.
They used to ban accounts but I don’t think they have (on community servers) since it went F2P.
'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.
Most lootbox gambling apps are targeted towards the latter use.
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.
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.
It’s maybe the only really “good” actor in that industry left so I try to support them as much as possible
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.
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.
Depends on the jurisdiction. In Germany you have no right to returns on things bought in a physical store.
This is probably a US vs Europe difference in consumer protections though.
Battlefield 6 won't run on your PC unless it has SecureBoot enabled. It's not included in "minimum specifications."
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
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.
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.
How many developers can make a living based off of GOG revenue alone vs Steam revenue alone?
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.
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.
I'm not anti-valve, but "complying with consumer laws in a country you make sales in" should be a minimum standard at least.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
But expecting them to individually fight billion dollar corporations that deliberately court children with damaging addictive services is asking too much.
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.
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.
Then we’re told this is all our fault. Meanwhile schools send home devices that don’t lock or at least disable Web access at night, and I can’t 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.
If you don't take responsibilty for your community, who are you expecting to do it for you?
If/when the huge Satoshi bitcoin stash gets traded in, we'll see similar outcomes there too.
Plenty of market manipulation and rug pulls happening on the regular stock market as well
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).
Edit: minus some race conditions of people changing passwords/moving/emptying wallets.
I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them.
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
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).
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.
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.
The cards were literally indistinguishable even with the loupe. I quit buying cards after that. It’s a suckers game if I can’t 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 couldn’t copy exactly seemed to be the “enchanted” cards, which sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
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.
Pathetic all around, imagine I am giving you a minus I cant give, and expecting better from you next time.
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 lot— albeit with gaps worth years in between after college— 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)
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.
It shall not be a marketplace for gambling and cheaters.
It’s fine to have some cosmetics, but the economy Valve had created brought so much toxicity to the game.
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.
How many whales are buying an in-game cosmetic for $20K for their own use?
How much of this is day-trading? How much is investing? How much is fabricated by trading platforms? How much is money laundering? How much is a criminal payments channel?
But it's probably mostly money laundering, I wouldn't be surprised if the crypto market is tightly integrated in it too. Buy using crypto, sell using fiat, ???, cash.
Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys. Some exceptionaly lucky or with natural born trading skills were earning serious money — from quater to multiple salaries of an adult.
Maybe because casino-tourism in Belarus made people here slightly less prone to gambling, or maybe parents were not used to gift their children micro-transactions — e-sports betting, gambling and trading was financed mostly via in-game drops, returns from these bets and trades, and of course, sometimes, pocket money (which, on average were like 3$ 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 — 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.
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....
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)
It seems like NFT before NFT.
Selling 10 of something for $1000 instead of 1000 of something for $10 is not new.
Also builds brand value.
Nothing about the painting itself would have changed, but its market value depends very much on whether Van Gogh painted it.
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.
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.
CSGO knifes actually currency run by shadow banks providing RMB <-> USD convertion.
Google for "挂刀"
> "Selling Knives" (挂刀) 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 https://github.com/EricZhu-42/SteamTradingSiteTracker/wiki
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?
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.
Wouldn’t it be nice if those in charge of the economy in the real world made the same sort of intervention.
Doesn’t really tie in to actual markets involving physical item.
The counterstrike skins don't represent such real life physical resources.
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
- 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. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/58846711
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.
They're are plenty of things in very short supply, bit no one wants them.
Or shares in Nvidia.
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 isn’t 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.
This had catastrophic impact on people hoarding 500$ expecting their exchange value to remain at the elevated levels.
It's not so much a depreciation of knife textures, as a distribution of this value down the chain of item rarities.
I wont google him, but take at your word an assurance that he can be trusted with the highest levels of economic decision making.
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.
After they already went and built the torment nexus (and were paid handsomely for it)
The (sellable) lootboxes give you weapon skins. This is cosmetic, but the temptation to express yourself or flex with pretty guns is tempting.
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.
"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."
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).
There is a chance this skin won't sell at all anymore, not for that price at least.
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.
> 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?
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.
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.
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.
The only difference with the designer bag is that there is scarcity, but that's about it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
So this article is very funny to me too.
edit: I did try to warn you all: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44943123
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.
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.
its as real as people buy billions using made up money (BTC)
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.
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.
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.
https://web.archive.org/web/20150127153425/http://blogs.valv...
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.
prices have slightly recovered in some cases, but indeed the new inputs for the trade-ups have been inflated beyond measure.
in the past, before trade restrictions, one could "trade up to a knife". now it is literally possible through trash skins you can receive in drops in game. if the lower prices these items are here to stay, then the highest tier stuff will become even more attractive and valuable in the long run.
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.
We deserve this timeline.
Genuine question, been at least 20 years since I was that age.
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.
it literally not, not until latest update
its even better performing than stocks, thats why china invested millions into this
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
> 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.
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
What would you dictate that humans do instead to not be wasteful with their time? Comment on threads about games?
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.
Different benefits and downsides.
Of course, a lot of guys are suckered into sports-related gambling these days too.
Don't be so close-minded; playing games is not different from any other activity.
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.
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.
And 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
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.
For example, if someone is getting too high, it’s nothing to pair that person with a known deserter for 1-3 games to drastically slow their progress.
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.
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.
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
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).
Not if your dad is the one buying you the cards.
Just curious.
Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.
If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s 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.
- 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.
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.
That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.
It's "technically" just, after all.
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.
eats baguette
That said i think it's still better to just ban it.
The first thing I did when I got a debit card was buy the 18 rated GTA Vice City!
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.
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.
Yes, but not "instead". Regulate microtransactions, as we do any form of actual gambling.
> Btw. here they might need cash to take the bus home.
Bus pass.
None of this makes sense. Some parents aren't doing their jobs.
I’d 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 it’s also bad enough that I’d 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.
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.
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.
its not gambling when you "can't" withdraw the money
The ticket conversion rate at these establishments is a worse scam than TF2 knife trading was until this update.
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..."
I still enjoy them though, but I enjoy gambling responsibly!
> https://bhmvending.com/collections/coin-pushers
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.
Correction. $0 in value. Skins do not exist and are worth exactly $0. If you spend money on skins, they are worth… $0. It’s 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
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.
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.