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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

#331

Post by ndriscoll »

portaouflop wrote: post #223
Spacemolte wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

You can make a non-toxic, high quality free to play game, e.g. Beyond All Reason. Of course there will be no marketing budget for that game so most people won't know it's there.

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

#332

Post by masklinn »

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…

> Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go.

Valve let that fester for years. Coffeezilla did a multi-part series on the subject late 2024.

The legal aspect seems the likely angle, valve either heard rumblings or got approached by a state actor and decided to finally cut the shit.

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

#333

Post by Der_Einzige »

adrr wrote: post #9

Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.

Where’s all the pearl clutching over scam ticket “games” at Dave and busters and chuckle-cheese?

The ticket conversion rate at these establishments is a worse scam than TF2 knife trading was until this update.

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

#334

Post by cubefox »

computerex wrote: post #171
c048 wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off. People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.

I think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.

They take a 30% cut on Steam, i.e. on most PC games. They are printing money. They have an absurdly high profit-per-employee ratio. That's a failure of capitalism, called rent seeking.

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

#335

Post by [deleted] »

adezxc wrote: post #324
BOBOTWINSTON wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short Answer: The whys can just be boiled down to gambling, weird investing, flexing wealth, sports fandom stuff, or wanting to invest in your hobby. Long Answer: It is a bit of a perfect storm, and you'll get a lot of mixed answers to this, however these are the reasons I see roughly in order of their impact. 1. Skins are the vehicle for gambling (you bet them instead of $). The loot boxes definitely get people hook…

Is there a source on this bigwig Greek economist or is there sarcasm hidden in that point?

[deleted]

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

#336

Post by ultimatekiwi »

adezxc wrote: post #324
BOBOTWINSTON wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Short Answer: The whys can just be boiled down to gambling, weird investing, flexing wealth, sports fandom stuff, or wanting to invest in your hobby. Long Answer: It is a bit of a perfect storm, and you'll get a lot of mixed answers to this, however these are the reasons I see roughly in order of their impact. 1. Skins are the vehicle for gambling (you bet them instead of $). The loot boxes definitely get people hook…

Is there a source on this bigwig Greek economist or is there sarcasm hidden in that point?

My impression (?) was that he (Yanis Varoufakis) was more involved in the overall design of the Steam Community Market than the CS:GO skins system, but this is what the other commenter was referring to:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150127153425/http://blogs.valv...

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

#337

Post by lunar_rover »

atraac wrote: post #162
adrr wrote: post #9

Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.

So we're against checking IDs cause privacy but we also want to limit kids from accessing certain parts of the internet because gambling/porn? Have a cake and eat a cake?

There are better ways to do this.

Enforce 18+ age rating and mandate platform parental controls. If the parents decide to let their child pay for adult content freely that's unfortunate and on them.

Going stricter isn't effective, ID check will become tools for whatever ulterior motives they have.

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

#338

Post by ndriscoll »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #212
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.

A few months ago, I realised CS:2 is more than 60GB and still barely worked on my M1 Pro Mac. I tried with these three: Whisky, Sikarigur, and even CrossOver trial. A friend suggested I should try some kind of partitioning and install Windows on that. I definitely will never try that. 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 ceil…

CS 1.6 ran just fine for me just now on NixOS. Literally just clicked install in Steam and ran it. Aren't Macs incapable of running most games? Get a $150-200 n150 mini PC and install Linux and it should run most things before like 2010 (and probably later) at 4k 60 fps while sipping like 10 W and running completely silently.

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

#340

Post by brachkow »

1) My childhood which coincided with peak of unregulated lootbox-skin markets (around 2013-2015). And I and my CS-playing peers had a happy childhood because of… skins gambling.

Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys. Some exceptionaly lucky or with natural born trading skills were earning serious money — from quater to multiple salaries of an adult.

Maybe because casino-tourism in Belarus made people here slightly less prone to gambling, or maybe parents were not used to gift their children micro-transactions — e-sports betting, gambling and trading was financed mostly via in-game drops, returns from these bets and trades, and of course, sometimes, pocket money (which, on average were like 3$ per week).

That said, in modern times where micro-transactions are so common that you are ok with giving your kid V-bucks as birthday gift, I want say that anti child gambling narrative is a good thing.

2) At that time, and afaik it is true even today — you could use skins as a virtual currency to pay for a real things. It was proto-cryptocurrency/NFT in terms of being KYC and AML free.

This is really big market. There are aritcles on NYT about real life terrorists buying real guns for skins.

But without US-centric sensationalism, I beleive you can still pay for VPN or ChatGPT in very sanctioned Russia in CS skins. This can be also done with crypto (and mostly done now), but crypto has learning curve and you already playing CS.

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