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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

#531

Post by sundarurfriend »

skeaker wrote: post #447
sundarurfriend wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I see people doing this a lot in Deadlock, Valve's next game that's in pre-release stage now. There are all sorts weird and fun skins people play with through mods, some of them definitely not copyright-friendly. I wonder how Valve will handle this once the game is ready to be released - will they just blanket ban the mods? (seems likely, and the community is even probably ready for it so will not be too pissed off a…

All Source games, not just Deadlock, did and still somewhat do have a strong modding scene. The way it's handled now is that official Valve-hosted servers have a config option called sv_pure set that prevents most mod .vpk files from loading on connecting clients (though some things like custom HuDs are whitelisted by this system). Once Deadlock gets paid cosmetics you can expect sv_pure to be turned on for Valve ser…

What's the other 1%? For eg., in Dota 2, if I create a private lobby, would that allow the mod vpk files? Or only for local bot matches? Or some other more involved scenario?

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

#532

Post by gambiting »

nkrisc wrote: post #522
gambiting wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You trade up. I have a friend who has thousands of dollars worth of CS items, he has never spent a single cent on any of them - you play, you gain some items, you sell them which adds money to your steam account, you use that to buy something else you think might be worth something in the future.

So kids aren’t actually spending any money?

They are. But most of the time they are spending $2 here and there, which is much easier to convince your parents to borrow a credit card for. After all parents are already spending millions(billions?) of dollars on roblox, what's a few dollars for yet another online game. Kids aren't the ones buying $20k skins, but kids are definitely an important part of this economy.

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

#533

Post by skeaker »

sundarurfriend wrote: post #531
skeaker wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All Source games, not just Deadlock, did and still somewhat do have a strong modding scene. The way it's handled now is that official Valve-hosted servers have a config option called sv_pure set that prevents most mod .vpk files from loading on connecting clients (though some things like custom HuDs are whitelisted by this system). Once Deadlock gets paid cosmetics you can expect sv_pure to be turned on for Valve ser…

What's the other 1%? For eg., in Dota 2, if I create a private lobby, would that allow the mod vpk files? Or only for local bot matches? Or some other more involved scenario?

Not sure about Dota specifically but for e.g. TF2 any non-Valve-server game had pure off by default. That does mean bot matches or private lobbies. You could hop into a community server and run your mods fine right now if you wanted.

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

#534

Post by fruitworks »

bob1029 wrote: post #179

This is good news. It seems some parts of the gaming industry are starting to recover. I contend that games like Team Fortress 2 were also ruined by the F2P loot box crap. It's not that they took anything away, but it attracted a certain kind of customer that is very unappealing to the prior base. The "hats" made me walk away from TF2. No one on average seemed serious about the core gameplay anymore. Taking away that…

The Freemium model made TF2. Most of the good updates were after the F2P update, and almost all of the playerbase.

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

#535

Post by mlyle »

mothballed wrote: post #514
mlyle wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The government can destroy the assumptions on which many businesses are built, that are held as stocks in an investment portfolio. Move the goalposts to relation to international markets, and I will likely find how it applies to some other asset commonly found in investment portfolios, like perhaps the current values of some tax preparation companies.

Your original assertion was "...by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up"

Later you said lower risk than many individual stocks. Maybe, maybe not depending on how we define things. But I do think it's quite possible for the price to go down.

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

#536

Post by Aerolfos »

whatevaa wrote: post #260
Aerolfos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously), and (much) weaker than GOGs refund: 1 month after purchase, no playtime restriction. I believe they explicitly called out the equivalent for physical stores and european consumer protection in general when they announced the policy…

2 hour return policy can already be a problem for a very short indie game. There was one which you could beat in 2 hours and refund and people did that. GOG gets away with their policy because only people who believe in GOG ideallogy go there, and they won't refund a good game. If steam did that, abuse would skyrocket. And in my country, unless explicitly stated otherwise, most physical goods can't be returned if the…

In some sense, GOGs entire existence is testing the hypothesis that it's impossible to run a consumer friendly digital store due to abuse.

If you took the common sense publisher view then no DRM = everything you make is instantly pirated and the whole store fails instantly. But GOG is a viable storefront, so that's demonstrably wrong.

The evidence is no better for Steam's refund policy than it was for DRM being necessary.

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

#537

Post by Aerolfos »

Orygin wrote: post #234
Aerolfos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously), and (much) weaker than GOGs refund: 1 month after purchase, no playtime restriction. I believe they explicitly called out the equivalent for physical stores and european consumer protection in general when they announced the policy…

> Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously) Huh, we have different laws and physical stores. Here, no store will take your game back if you opened the box. Maybe that changed, but in the past any game opened couldn't be returned because you could have either copied the disk, or copied to key and activated it.

Key activation is actually a good point.

I believe there were some pushes to get rid of opened box = no refund policies as being against standard 14-day returns in Norway, because the law explicitly says the consumer may (paraphrase) "reasonably test the use of a product" which allows you to open the box on other goods. But keys being consumable puts them in another category of goods (like food, which obviously can't be returned after "use"), so that doesn't apply.

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

#538

Post by mikkupikku »

ars wrote: post #510
mothballed wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Incidentally, the longer forced reset triggers stay legal, the more real machines will have their value growth slow and, almost certainly, eventually tumble. The only reason this hasn't happened yet is because most people aren't yet familiar with them and many of the people who are just kind of assume that once they really go mainstream the government will put a stop to it, meaning "real" machine guns maintain their special status and therefore their special price. If FRTs stay legal for a long time and survive public scrutiny, then confidence in their future will grow and they will then eat much of the market demand for machine guns.

Of course, some machine guns would always remain valuable for their desirability as antiques, as long as people remain interested in them. That presumption of future demand for your collection might be a relatively safe bet for cool old guns in America, but it's still a bet.

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

#539

Post by lovich »

wffurr wrote: post #505
mothballed wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yea, kinda hard to believe the numbers when the website appears to be run by someone bordering on time cube levels of delusion

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

#540

Post by Aerolfos »

zrobotics wrote: post #240
Aerolfos wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously), and (much) weaker than GOGs refund: 1 month after purchase, no playtime restriction. I believe they explicitly called out the equivalent for physical stores and european consumer protection in general when they announced the policy…

I don't know if this has changed since the last time I bought shrink-wrapped software at a retail store, but the return policy on games and software was always that they couldn't be returned once opened, at least at the bigbox retailers in the US. I'm sure stores occasionally made exceptions, but I very clearly remember buying a copy of Oblivion and not being able to install it due to minimum specs and the store not…

Standard policy is I think mostly the same, but in Europe there's been arguments that those policies don't follow the actual consumer protection laws, which is a whole thing that I don't think really resolved one way or another.

It varies with country but I believe a number of protection laws specify normal use/testing a product is allowed, so you can open boxes and test functionality (norwegian law does this for sure). Excepting videogames from this is arbitrary, the argument from consumer protection agencies goes.

I believe in practice a number of games did get refunded when threatened with formal complaints along these lines, but that's far from a guaranteed thing.

Anyway, GOG decided to go with the generous interpretation (and the one all kinds of electronic goods except games and CDs/DVDs have), which is nicer for everyone, really

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