251–260 of 617 posts
How are kids under 18 paying for stuff like this? What means of payment are they using that their parents don’t notice? Genuine question, been at least 20 years since I was that age.
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Nope, just no. When you make billions you have another kind of responsibility, you can't just brush that off as a problem with parenting. I'm willing to bet a lot of the young people struggling with gambing addictions started with loot boxes like the ones valve make a ton of money on.
Loot boxes in itself are the problem. You can’t make a non-toxic free2play game. People need to buy from stores like GoG and stop supporting f2p games at all. Of course that’s never going to happen; an entire generation was raised on f2p
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>It extracts money from kids 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.
Yes, let’s blame the f2p game dev when there are literally streamers pumping fake platforms, doing fake wins, marketing gambling sites at kids. Valve did that
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> 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…
How are kids under 18 paying for stuff like this? What means of payment are they using that their parents don’t notice? Genuine question, been at least 20 years since I was that age.
FYI some items go for $1.5M. "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."
What does "factory new" mean? That it... hasn't been scratched? Is that... how Counter Strike works?
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).
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Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child. 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.
Kids buy a $2.50 case in the hope of winning a $20k cosmetic item 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.
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Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child. 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.
> If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? 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.
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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…
That would be illegal in the UK I think, since you have 1 year mandatory warranty against any faulty goods.
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> 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…
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.