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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

#361

Post by wincy »

gquere wrote: post #144
Bengalilol wrote: post #143

Earlier 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 quite honestly don’t know anyone under 40 that plays Counterstrike. It seems like an old guy’s game at this point. It isn’t 2003 anymore.

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

#362

Post by hackernewds »

zzixp wrote: post #359

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.

How does that enable money laundering? Steam deck is also bound to AML rules

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

#363

Post by Antelope13 »

zzixp wrote: post #359

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.

Before that, you could also buy the Index VR set, which probably aren't as liquid as a Steam Deck. I won a Dota chest that could only be acquired by watching tournament games in-person, and after letting it appreciate for two years it nearly covered the cost of an Index. I was thankful because I had no idea what to do with hundreds of dollars in Steam credit.

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

#365

Post by cubefox »

knome wrote: post #349
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.

having a high profit-per-employee is not the definition of rent seeking. valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.

It's not "high", it's extremely high. They just have a few hundred employees while making several millions of profit per employee. More than Apple. They are printing money.

> valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users,

A 30% fee just for hosting the game is not valuable.

> and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.

The cost is substantial. It costs the developer 30%. That's a huge chunk of the total revenue. Hosting a game is very cheap, and could probably be done with less than a 3% fee. Often Valve will make more profit from a game than the developer itself. Sometimes the developer will lose money (after subtracting development cost) but Valve will still make a big profit with that game.

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

#366

Post by jayd16 »

ehnto wrote: post #83
jayd16 wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its about showing off to other players. You can still do local game mods just fine but that's not what people are after.

Which is an easy technical problem to solve, but the liability of abuse when sharing user content with other users is not palatable. It is also not impressive to others, not a status symbol, and that's actually the purpose of skins in the modern day. No one grinds 1000hrs of warframe for a skin just because they think it looks cool, they think it makes THEM look cool. They want people to be impressed that they had $2…

> Which is an easy technical problem to solve

Where do people get this impression? It's not trivial to build user comments on a web page let alone a proper chat app but people think it's easy to share game assets for some reason.

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

#367

Post by noxvilleza »

SwtCyber wrote: post #280
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…

With increasing scrutiny around gambling mechanics, this might be Valve trying to get ahead of a future headache...

My personal theory is that it's related to their planned launch of their new VR headset soon, and want people to be able to buy it using the Steam Store - so deflating the market means there's reduced buying power on the market, reducing ways in which people can get money 'out' of Steam by buying hardware with Steam-bux and selling for real currency.

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

#368

Post by dewey »

hackernewds wrote: post #362
zzixp wrote: post #359

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.

How does that enable money laundering? Steam deck is also bound to AML rules

If you are in that business the question isn't really if it's against the rules or not, but if it's possible. You can use your in-game currency that you've gotten through whatever means to get a physical product that you can then resell for cash.

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

#369

Post by ge96 »

I briefly looked into this, there was a freelance job of making proxy bots to scrape the steam page for prices, the number mentioned here is even crazier than what I saw eg. $12K for something vs. $2K for a Karambit knife skin.

I didn't get far with the project, was harder than I thought as the proxys you can rent were blocked at least the few I tried at the time.

The problem was the rate of checking it was I can't remember hundreds of times a second to provide a "real time" ticker.

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

#370

Post by wincy »

pryce wrote: post #69
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.

Most of the scarcity in artificial economies like CS is (just as with trading card games) manufactured and vulnerable. Seeing what happens with a rug-pull in a billion dollar artificial economy like this is a valuable lesson for anyone watching. If/when the huge Satoshi bitcoin stash gets traded in, we'll see similar outcomes there too.

I got really into Lorcana last year, spent $40 on a particular rare card I needed for a deck. Out of curiosity I bought some cards for $3 each from Aliexpress, and got myself a jewelers loupe.

The cards were literally indistinguishable even with the loupe. I quit buying cards after that. It’s a suckers game if I can’t tell the difference between a $50 and a $3 card even when I know one is fake. Sure enough, a few months later the prices have absolutely cratered for the cards.

The only ones they couldn’t copy exactly seemed to be the “enchanted” cards, which sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.

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