Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall • Hacker News Board

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#231

Post by janwl » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:13 AM UTC

themafia wrote: post #191

janwl wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why exactly? Why are these games of chance moral only if the government gets a cut?

Regulation also means that children are excluded, debt is not allowed, and all chips can be settled for cash when the player leaves the property. Even the comps are regulated. The majority of casinos in the US are Indian casinos. When they aren't and are taxed by the government those funds are usually used to improve and fund the local area giving the local citizens the ability to decide, through legislation, if it s…

Games of chance are absolutely moral and completely fine when played by adults who are not mentally incapacitated.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#232

Post by crimsoneer » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:13 AM UTC

I find it fascinating how the "HN Hivemind" (and yes, I know not a real thing, but the trends seem pretty consistent) is so opposed to kids playing with lootboxes, but also very angry at governments trying to impose age verification.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#233

Post by neilwilson » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

bloppe wrote: post #165

neilwilson wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not like, say, houses then. Or shares in Nvidia.

Not really, but it's actually kinda like currency. Imagine if a government suddenly devalued all $500 bills into $100 bills, but every other denomination remained the same.

Not really the same is it. You are confusing a stock and a flow. Currency is exchanged for something material you have to give up.

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.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#234

Post by Orygin » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:16 AM UTC

Aerolfos wrote: post #193

bilekas wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections? 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.

> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, 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…

> Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously)

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.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#235

Post by Sebb767 » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:18 AM UTC

__alexs wrote: post #230

gquere wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.

> most trades happened off-platform I thought it was impossible to trade off platform? All item trades happen within Steam, they have an API to facilitate it and everything.

It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#236

Post by cturner » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

Bengalilol wrote: post #143

gquere wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.

Any market maker, such as Valve, is free to establish the rules of its own "reality". 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".

Valve is not the market-maker here, they are the exchange.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#237

Post by TheOtherHobbes » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:19 AM UTC

apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #101

rand17 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasted is a rather strong word and yes, the whole argument is a slippery slope _but_ I can imagine sports that are less about glorifying deadly violence in a very realistic manner - the loot box and real money part is just the bitter cherry on top.

Glorify? This seems way too serious a take on a game that young males play because of a common, innate fascination with guns and soldiers. 99.9999% of them do not turn into manic killers who just love to kill and glorify it.

And yet the US does have a serious problem with (mostly) young males turning into manic killers.

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.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#238

Post by zufallsheld » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

Aerolfos wrote: post #193

bilekas wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections? 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.

> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, 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…

> Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously)

Depends on the jurisdiction. In Germany you have no right to returns on things bought in a physical store.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#239

Post by tweetle_beetle » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

bilekas wrote: post #127

uvaursi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember back in the day when we just downloaded skin packs from some random Geocities website with obnoxious red text on black background and after going through the install.txt written in broken English/Italian, lo and behold your AK47 now had a proper arctic camo skin and it was so much cooler? What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?

> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections? 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.

While those statements are true, it is much easier to be pro-consumer when you are running a few morally dubious casinos and marketplaces to keep the bottom line healthy. Would Steam have grown into a position where it can comfortably act like this without the cash cows in the background? We'll never know.

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.

Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

#240

Post by zrobotics » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 10:21 AM UTC

Aerolfos wrote: post #193

bilekas wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections? 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.

> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, 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…

I don't know if this has changed since the last time I bought shrink-wrapped software at a retail store, but the return policy on games and software was always that they couldn't be returned once opened, at least at the bigbox retailers in the US. I'm sure stores occasionally made exceptions, but I very clearly remember buying a copy of Oblivion and not being able to install it due to minimum specs and the store not accepting a return. I just had to hang onto the copy until I built a new PC.

This is probably a US vs Europe difference in consumer protections though.