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Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

polygon.com

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

#291

Post by walkabout »

fendy3002 wrote: post #208
Aerolfos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

GOGs refund is 1 month? Man I can clear DMC5 twice in one week then do a refund in that case.

It’s far easier to just pirate (nearly all?) GOG games. Like there are torrents with big chunks of their entire store on them, and I’ve seen allusions to an unofficial “store” that just has all(?) their games on it for free. I doubt many people are abusing the refund system because going through those steps is more work than piracy.

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

#292

Post by SwtCyber »

tetrisgm wrote: post #5

I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.

Bringing prices down and making rare items more accessible feels like a step toward re-centering the game around, well… the GAME

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

#293

Post by retsibsi »

funflame wrote: post #181
justacrow wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The game is rated as 'Mature 17+', and Steam has an age confirmation page before accessing the store page of the game. Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids? I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.

> age confirmation page

You know this is meaningless.

> Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids?

An alternative would be not to run a gambling business. If that's too much to ask, then yeah, they probably should be required to exclude children.

> I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.

This implies that casinos (and liquor stores, and tobacconists, and so on) should be allowed to serve children.

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

#294

Post by bargainbin »

charcircuit wrote: post #219
Aeolun wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Virtual items are legitimate investments.

Anything you put money into is a legitimate investment.

This doesn’t mean they’re viable investments.

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

#295

Post by sundarurfriend »

uvaursi wrote: post #47
tetrisgm wrote: post #5

I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.

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?

I see people doing this a lot in Deadlock, Valve's next game that's in pre-release stage now. There are all sorts weird and fun skins people play with through mods, some of them definitely not copyright-friendly.

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.)

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

#296

Post by dataangel »

uvaursi wrote: post #47
tetrisgm wrote: post #5

I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.

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?

That era was nice but it has a different problem. People will pearl clutch about kids getting exposed to someone's custom skin making their character nude, or putting curse words on the side of a gun or whatever.

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

#297

Post by Hnrobert42 »

gquere wrote: post #140
Bengalilol wrote: post #132

I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1] 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 t…

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.

How does this make them rotten to the core?

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.

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

#298

Post by SwtCyber »

bob1029 wrote: post #179

This is good news. It seems some parts of the gaming industry are starting to recover. 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…

Changes like what Valve just did in CS are a sign they're rebalancing things a bit

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

#299

Post by pfdietz »

eru wrote: post #114
breppp wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't most of our technology based on technologies invented to maximize killing in world war 2, or alternatively as a way to maximize monetization in sleazy ways?

World War 2 took at most about a decade (depending on who you ask). The history of development of our technology is much, much longer. I doubt 'most of our technology' is based on anything that happened in WW2.

It's just that technologies are all connected, so if you want to make them look bad you can do so. Is fixation of nitrogen into ammonia something that improved billions of lives through fertilizer, or something that enabled manufacture of many millions of tons of explosives? It's both.

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

#300

Post by probably_wrong »

protocolture wrote: post #56
ramesh31 wrote: post #11

Valve employs an army of economists (notably Yanis Varoufakis as alumn) to make these decisions. It was certainly purposeful and will balance itself out.

>Yanis Varoufakis I wont google him, but take at your word an assurance that he can be trusted with the highest levels of economic decision making.

You might want to search him, though. As far as "highest levels of economic decision making" goes, he's not a bad choice - not uncontroversial, perhaps, but definitely qualified for it.
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