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.
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.
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.
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.
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?