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.
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%
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.
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.
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