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

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

#351

Post by voxic11 » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 1:58 PM UTC

josefx wrote: post #263

jsheard wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think most countries have much stricter enforcement for gambling age limits, too. If you sell a kid a copy of GTA5 that's their parents problem, but if you allow kids into your casino it's your problem.

The problem is defining what falls under those laws. Companies sell trading card boxes with random contents. McDonalds had its Monopoly game. There are many more examples of things that are gambling with money, accessible to kids and still allowed in most countries.

McDonalds Monopoly game was a sweepstakes, you could get game pieces for free by simply asking, which is why it doesn't fall afoul of gambling laws.

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

#352

Post by reaperducer » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

the_sleaze_ wrote: post #350

catmanjan wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between 15 and 18 though...

Is there?

Found the 14-year-old.

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

#353

Post by mminer237 » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

lunar_rover wrote: post #337

atraac wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

CS:GO is already rated 18+, and Steam already has parental controls. That has done essentially nothing to prevent it as children sometimes lie about how old they are and don't have their parents set up parental accounts to oversee themselves.

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

#354

Post by armonster » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 2:00 PM UTC

Dead_Lemon wrote: post #163

gquere wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.

The game does have a mature rating, so parents should be vetting their activity. I would still contend and say the gambling aspect, with real money, is a net negative to the community.

But is the game rated mature due to violence, or due to gambling? I might be okay with my kid playing a game just because it has violence, but that doesn't mean I'm wanting to sign them up for gambling, but I'm curious if the mature rating even covers that since it's more of a meta-game thing and not actually part of the "game" itself.

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

#355

Post by tetrisgm » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

GeoAtreides wrote: post #253

tetrisgm wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's Valve that created the loot box mechanics (i.e. gambling). That's the foundation on what everything is built. And even without the adjacent ecosystem, it's still Valve that's exploiting children by introducing gambling to them.

Same as Roblox, Fortnite, Angry Birds, and every other F2P game

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

#356

Post by zipy124 » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 2:05 PM UTC

Der_Einzige wrote: post #341

vecter wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No more than someone spending a few thousand on a tiny designer bag that can fit almost nothing inside.

[flagged]

this is not a gender specific issue. You can easily look at the watch-market, luxury car market etc... to see the same issue play out. In cars it's even worse when you have something like the Lamborghini Urus compared to the Audi RSQ8 which are very close to being the actual same car.

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

#357

Post by weakfish » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 2:19 PM UTC

zdc1 wrote: post #155

CS is wild. I used to play and have like 40+ cases from free post-match drops. Because those cases are no longer supplied, the prices have been creeping up and to the right for years now; from $0.40 to $20+. I don't even know why people still buy these, but I will basically never have to pay for a Steam game again.

Yeah, I recently made ~$70 when I realized this and cleaned out my inventory from when I played CS:GO in 2015ish

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

#358

Post by suslik » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 2:24 PM UTC

throw10920 wrote: post #345

cubefox wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is an outright falsehood. "Rent-seeking" involves extracting value without providing any. Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players. Steam is a huge success of capitalism. Suggest not using words like "rent-seeking" without knowing what they mean.

Not to mention how much they did for Linux gaming.

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

#359

Post by zzixp » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 2:29 PM UTC

The Steam Deck has essentially enabled money laundering through Steam. Before the Deck, if you sold skins on the marketplace you could only use your Steam credit to buy games on the platform, or you had to do a shady 3rd party Paypal exchange. Now, you can use your Steam credits to buy a device with value that you can resell IRL.

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

#360

Post by aklein » Fri, Oct 24, 2025, 2:31 PM UTC

Hnrobert42 wrote: post #297

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.

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.

Humans are social-emotional beings who assign “irrational” value to things for social signaling and emotional (self-)gratification.