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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

#501

Post by Giorgi »

phatfish wrote: post #286
Giorgi wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is not that their parent's job?

Society raises children, it's not fair to expect parents to police everything their child does. I agree often parents should be more responsible and not always take the easy way out. But expecting them to individually fight billion dollar corporations that deliberately court children with damaging addictive services is asking too much.

My point exactly, you expect other institutions to take care of your children. This is your job as a parent (If you are a parent).

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

#502

Post by apt-apt-apt-apt »

lm28469 wrote: post #216
apt-apt-apt-apt wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Glorify? This seems way too serious a take on a game that young males play because of a common, innate fascination with guns and soldiers. 99.9999% of them do not turn into manic killers who just love to kill and glorify it.

> because of a common, innate fascination with guns Your brain after 200+ years of american propaganda... it's innate in the sense that you're bathed in it from birth through movies and games, and that a good chunk of your economy relies on producing weapons and using them.

I feel like young males in all times would be innately fascinated with equivalents like bows and arrows and swords.

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

#503

Post by Scramblejams »

cubefox wrote: post #376
throw10920 wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It can be helpful to look at it less in terms of what it costs Valve to run their service and more in terms of what value developers get from Valve for the money.

I'm in the business and I've asked two different heads of large, very well-known AAA studios how they felt about Valve's percentage, and they basically told me the same thing: They had their teams do rigorous analyses of what it would cost them to 'replace' Valve for their games, and concluded it would cost roughly what they were already paying Valve. So they had no incentive to move off the platform. Look at how many publishers have come slinking back to Steam after trying to go solo -- there are good business reasons for that, and it isn't just about the stubborn fact of their huge social graph.

If it costs that much to replace Valve for your game, it's hard to argue that what they're charging isn't fair.

As others have pointed out, Valve does far more than just host. Shipping a multiplayer game and want comprehensive protection from DDoS attacks? Use Valve's datagram network for no additional fee. Don't want to host your own lobby servers? Use Valve's for no additional fee, they'll accommodate hundreds of thousands of players with no complaints. Want to sell your game in a zillion countries? Valve's got you, easy peasy. And discovery is a thing -- Valve sells a whooole lot of games just by putting them in the carousel in front of players. This is huge, huge value.

And as a player, I'm actually really happy, super happy, did I mention how incredibly happy I am with what they're doing with some of their cut: They saved gaming on Linux -- it's often better than Windows -- and I love my SteamDeck. So that cut is benefiting me directly as a consumer because they're spending it on initiatives I'm really passionate about.

Valve delivers a ton of value for the cost. If someone wants to try to do better, Valve's not stopping them, but I can tell you that as a player and a gamedev, none of the other options are remotely enticing to me. In my view, that's not Valve's problem to solve by cratering their own revenue.

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

#504

Post by mlyle »

mothballed wrote: post #490
mlyle wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated. There's plenty of ways to not confiscate them but impair their value. Further restrictions on transfer, restrictions on use, disadvantaged tax treatment, requirements for storage, security, insurance, bonding, etc.

The government has imposed most of those on gold at various times yet it continues to be a component of many investor portfolios.

There's an international market in gold.

NFA firearms have an artificially high value because of the exact set of legal restrictions that the government has put in place: loose enough to not crater legal demand, yet tight enough to restrict legal supply. This market is tied to within US borders.

The government can destroy the assumptions behind this market with a stroke of the pen.

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

#505

Post by wffurr »

mothballed wrote: post #393
agentcoops wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's hilarious to US CS items/weapons as a retirement portfolio when you could get pretty damn good and government protected monopoly by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up. These are now being used by actual retirement funds. http://machinegunpriceguide.com/html/german_subguns_0.html

Wow the home page on that website is a real piece of work. It's amazing to me that someone can honestly believe all those things.

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

#507

Post by maratc »

kqr wrote: post #259
RobotToaster wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be illegal in the UK I think, since you have 1 year mandatory warranty against any faulty goods.

"I misread the minimum specifications" does not a faulty ware make.

Neither does "my PC runs a thousand different games but this one crashes" a faulty computer make.

Battlefield 6 won't run on your PC unless it has SecureBoot enabled. It's not included in "minimum specifications."

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

#508

Post by mmooss »

Giorgi wrote: post #66
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.

Is not that their parent's job?

Parents can only do so much. We have laws protecting children in many ways - we don't say, 'that's the parents' problem'.

If you don't take responsibilty for your community, who are you expecting to do it for you?

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

#510

Post by ars »

mothballed wrote: post #444
the_gipsy wrote: post #441

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea yea, you could have said that about any number of things the current administration did - so far.

Trump banned bump stocks because he thought they were too close to machine guns. Ron Paul and maybe Massie are about the only politicians of my lifetime that held any real power that I can think of that would even entertain deregulating machine guns.

And the supreme court ruled against the bump stock ban.

Which is also why the Forced Reset Trigger was not banned - they didn't think they could.

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