This article is making me laugh.
Guy I used to play Diablo + Destiny with mentioned once that he had just sold a knife in CS for 4k, and was going to buy his first (used) car with it.
We thought he was joking.
Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
371–380 of 617 posts
Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
#372Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Yeah, well, fuck them too.
Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
#373Earlier quoted context omitted.
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".
They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.
I honestly don't understand the logic behind policies like this. As a kid, my friends and I loved to buy Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a few years, and while I think most adults thought it was pretty silly, I don't recall anyone ever claiming that this was somehow equivalent to gambling for children despite it basically the same mechanism as loot boxes; most booster packs were essentially not worth the value once opened because with the exception of a few specific rare cards in each set, the cards were not very valuable even to a collector or player of the game.
I could see an argument that there's an issue with closed ecosystems where value of an item can be changed after someone has obtained it due to control by a centralized provider, but that's completely different concern to the idea of gambling being harmful.
Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a big difference between 15 and 18 though...
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.
Typically legal gambling has age limits by law, while the age recommendation for video games is just that, an recommendation. It isn't illegal for a 14 year old to play a game recommended to 18 year olds. Don't know how it works in the US specifically, at least how it works in other places.
I'm guessing the video games industry's attempt at self-regulating with PEGI and similar efforts actually paid off.
Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
#375Gambling 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.
There's something funny about how some countries try to enforce this and how Valve "solved" it, which I think demonstrates how silly "there ought to be a law!" thinking can get.
I believe for some regions, Valve just shows you what's in the "lootbox" (case, whatever), and you have to pay to acquire it before you're shown the next one.
This isn't to say I don't fully agree that this kind of thing is probably predatory and probably unhealthy. But I find most discourse on the topic starts and ends at the shoreline with a version of "there ought to be a law..."
Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
#376Earlier 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.
> Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players.
This is an outright falsehood. Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison.
By your definition, any monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". But it isn't. Just because something is useful, doesn't mean it can't be massively overpriced due to competition not working as it should. Proper market competition should ensure that no company can extract huge profit margins for trivial things. Like hosting games.
Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
#377I 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…
I waded through some Tik Tok comment threads on this change and it was so eye-opening: there are a shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items, thinking it was a retirement portfolio. I fear the crypto era has lead to even further diminished financial literacy at large… Blessed be compound interest and financial regulation.
Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
#378Earlier quoted context omitted.
This just another way of saying their parents allowed it
It's completely different in practice. A child can't buy $50,000 of cereal in an afternoon.
In practice a parent can easily forego allowing their children to make unsupervised purchases linked to the parent's card! That seems absolutely crazy.
Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can monitor and restrict Steam usage with parental controls. This is no more unfeasible than WiFi and device time limits, and last I checked, children don't carry a credit card. What's the mystery here? An 8 year old is not accruing bitcoin to buy skins. Meanwhile you have users here that will tell you that refusing to give their kids smartphone or even any video game is not that hard, but it seems needsly restri…
AFAIK you don't need a credit card linked to the account, you can get in-store credit from selling the guaranteed drop items from playing a few matches, this is enough to get you started trading.
That sounds like a pittance. Either way they would be playing with money they didn't put in themselves.
Re: Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall
#380Earlier quoted context omitted.
They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.
I honestly don't understand the logic behind policies like this. As a kid, my friends and I loved to buy Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a few years, and while I think most adults thought it was pretty silly, I don't recall anyone ever claiming that this was somehow equivalent to gambling for children despite it basically the same mechanism as loot boxes; most booster packs were essentially not worth the value once op…
As a kid I viewed MtG, baseball cards, etc as gambling and often heard them referred to as such.
The loot box issue is in part how easy it is to take this stuff to excess. My 8 year old niece racked up ~1,500$ worth of charges in a game when AT&T messed up permissions after a cellphone upgrade. It’s shockingly easy for people to blow arbitrary money on this stuff as the industry is optimized to be predatory as whales make up the bulk of profits.
So I suspect physical stores being really skeptical if an 8 year old showed up to buy a grand of Pokémon cards likely tampered the backlash.