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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

#431

Post by Fade_Dance »

jimnotgym wrote: post #196
pdw wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France)

To save people opening the link...in France it would be a judge not a prosecutor. France has an Inquisitorial rather than the Adversarial legal system the UK and US have. Put simply, a judge doesn't merely decide between the two cases presented to them, they try and establish the facts Edit: I said 'UK' where I should have said 'England and Wales'. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legal systems, although…

This is why HN is great. An immediate pivot to the technicalities and semantics of the French judicial system, off of a pithy comment.

eats baguette

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

#432

Post by PeterStuer »

It's complicated. Many "loot" systems in games fall somewhere between pure gambling (roulette, lottery) and a skill/effort based component.

E.g. in popular MMOs "mobs" have loot tables, usually dropping worthless stuff on kill, but with a 0.0001% chance of "awsome". You can kill these 5/sec when geared up. Is this "gambling"?

You can also buy "gold" for real dollars to buy those items of the "auction house" from people that have grinded the farm.

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

#433

Post by kube-system »

mikkupikku wrote: post #426
dcow wrote: post #425

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That anyone would use a game cosmetic as a retirement portfolio is so unbelievable it has to be trolling, right? I think we might just be witnessing the grief process unfold…

It's not trolling. People living paycheck to paycheck, without much in the way of financial literacy, are big consumers of "made to be collectible" widgets because they're desperate for appreciating assets and don't know how to do better when they struggle to save up a few hundred dollars (in no small part, because of their gambling addictions.) Funko pops, baseball cards, knife skins, it's all used this way.

Collectables are a self-explanatory asset class. Children can appreciate and understand the desire for a holographic Charizard card. Series I savings bonds are harder to understand.

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

#434

Post by darth_avocado »

mikkupikku wrote: post #419
darth_avocado wrote: post #395

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items If you meant children, with access to parents credit cards, who are addicted to gambling, you’d be more accurate. Children gambling is a huge problem in CS, which created this economy. The players know it, the influencers know it, Valve knows it and pretty much anyone who’s played CS in the recent years knows it. This implo…

How much of the CS player base is actually kids? Maybe wrongly, my view of CS is that it's a legacy game with an audience in their 30s or 40s. And that kids are mostly gambling with roblox or fornite.

CS2 is very much alive. If you look at the pro scene, most players are in the 19-25 range (some outliers are older and younger) which makes sense since it’s much easier to become a pro after 18 than before. But that also implies a healthy pipeline of young players. Obviously the exact breakdown is difficult to estimate, but I’d be inclined to think fewer people in 30s and 40s would have time for CS than in their teens and 20s. I could be wrong.

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

#435

Post by mikkupikku »

mothballed wrote: post #429
mikkupikku wrote: post #426

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not trolling. People living paycheck to paycheck, without much in the way of financial literacy, are big consumers of "made to be collectible" widgets because they're desperate for appreciating assets and don't know how to do better when they struggle to save up a few hundred dollars (in no small part, because of their gambling addictions.) Funko pops, baseball cards, knife skins, it's all used this way.

It's not always instructive to assume people making seemingly bad financial decisions are acting irrationally. People living paycheck to paycheck due to child support orders, alimony, or other judgements taking a giant cut of their paycheck are likely buying collectibles instead of on-paper stocks or commodities because they can actually keep those without the state being able to as easily take them. Also, the sketch…

I know enough people in this kind of circumstance, my own coworkers, who would be in much better financial shape if they stopped gambling. It's very common for them to one day complain that they can't afford lunch, and the next day to come in fuming because they just lost $500 because sportsball team lost.

> Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money"

I know these people personally, they aren't drug dealers.

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

#437

Post by klustregrif »

PeterStuer wrote: post #432

It's complicated. Many "loot" systems in games fall somewhere between pure gambling (roulette, lottery) and a skill/effort based component. E.g. in popular MMOs "mobs" have loot tables, usually dropping worthless stuff on kill, but with a 0.0001% chance of "awsome". You can kill these 5/sec when geared up. Is this "gambling"? You can also buy "gold" for real dollars to buy those items of the "auction house" from peop…

Poker is also skill based and also gambling. The concept that gaming lootboxes isn’t gambling because there’s some tangential element of skill involvement is just a strange way trying to protect something that is obviously gambling. It’s not complicated. The only complicated element is that these business grew large enough to get lobby orgs influencing politicians before the law got effectively enforced. You won’t ever see a casino with kids running rampant getting away with a shrug and “how are we going to enforce age restrictions” yet gaming companies get away with this all the time.

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

#438

Post by xboxnolifes »

lunias wrote: post #329

Make a regulation that if you have RMT in your game then you have to prefix the official title accordingly, i.e. "RMT: ${my_game_name}". It appears that Valve has made a change that is good for the game, but bad for the merchants. Gambling mechanics in a game are fun, but actual gambling needs to be very explicitly flagged as such and come with a lot more restrictions. I'll surely defend a person's right to gamble, b…

Every game made after 2010 would just have RMT in the title.

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

#439

Post by skeaker »

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…

Epic, Steam's only serious competitor currently aside from maybe GoG, just had a bug in their launcher that had all Fortnite players have to redownload their entire 150~ GB game. The cost of hosting aside, the capabilities of these companies to host their own games pales in comparison to Valve, who hasn't had a single bug in downloading or updating any game in the decade and a half I have used their launcher.

Considering how alternative storefronts can't even get automatic updates to work consistently, the most basic functionality of a games storefront (more important than purchasing even, since if you can't get what you purchased, it's useless), it actually doesn't seem obvious to me that other providers can easily host their own games. Even putting aside everything else Valve uses their cut for (hosting a community forum for every game, hosting a mod DB for every game that wants it, metrics tracking, opt-in soft DRM, providing server hosting, maintaining Proton so your game works on Linux), the cut seems almost reasonable even just for hosting when nobody else is able to do it right.

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

#440

Post by kube-system »

temp0826 wrote: post #400
Aeolun wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child. If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That it’s a legitimate investment? The only people spending that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.

I was recently at a lan party for a friend's 40th birthday (something I don't think any of us had done since highschool or so!), most of them are way more into gaming than me and have been consistently since childhood. I was pretty shocked at one point when they went on a loot box binge and I witnessed them drop hundreds on loot boxes etc (I don't know what it's called, the keys or whatever). Definitely didn't seem l…

Grown adults blowing a couple hundred on some fun doesn't really seem that crazy to me. How is that much different than going out to the bar, sticking a benjamin in a slot machine, or buying some collectables?
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