Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Counter-Strike's player economy is in a freefall

polygon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 617 posts

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

#541

Post by krapp »

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.

Most American conservatives and Trumpists believe most if not all of those things from my experience, and a lot of what's on that site now reflects official American government policy. The only surprise I see there is at least implied pro-Ukraine sentiment.

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

#542

Post by cindyllm »

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.

[dead]

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

#543

Post by LunaSea »

jimbob45 wrote: post #492
LunaSea wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We should probably ban all sports then because it tricks people in wanting to be competitive.

No, just the promises of going pro. The conversion rate for high school athletes to the NFL or NBA is less than a hundredth of a percent combined. There are kids skipping classes and destroying their bodies thinking they’re going to go pro when they’re not.

We should van universities as well since its possible to get failing grades and fail your year.

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

#544

Post by ashirviskas »

cubefox wrote: post #418
throw10920 wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Steam does far more than just host, and everyone who uses it knows this, so it's clear that you either have no i…

> Steam provides payment processing, Other services do the same for arbitrary online shops, at much lower fees. In fact, Valve likely doesn't even run it's own payment processing, but merely integrates other services. > cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compati…

> > cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility

> The development cost of these features is likely no larger than of one single AAA game

Then surely Epic, or Microsoft, or Sony could just easily create one. There being literally 0 such services means it's likely a bit more difficult than one AAA game :) So your argument is invalid.

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

#545

Post by snailmailman »

pityJuke wrote: post #494
riotnrrd wrote: post #477

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS. Yes. The Valve philosophy on the cosmetics marketplace (we called it "the economy") is that you distribute random rewards to players and they can trade and sell and discover the value of those goods…

> players grinding out matches just to get random loot box drops I mean... what you have is people operating rooms full of computers running automated bots to farm drops (and presumably accounts to sell later) [0]. [0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3yS6_WDb6w

I’ve run into idle bot accounts several times while playing and it’s infuriating. Mainly in the arms race mode. Players can leave and join that mode at any time. So the bots will constantly be joining and leaving. if the bots manage to become 50% of the game they will vote kick all the remaining players. I’ve had several in progress matches interrupted because a few of the actual players bailed and the bots managed to take over the lobby.

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

#546

Post by terribleperson »

mFixman wrote: post #476
Hikikomori wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other Why not remove trade and use an auction system with a limit? Or not allowing trades under market price?

Runescape tried this back in 2007 along with completely disabling PvP; it was a very unpopular change for the vast majority of players who were not buying items. I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.

The grand exchange (auction house) and the trade restrictions that landed at the same time pretty much killed the game for me.

Prior to the G.E., RuneScape had a thriving, complex economy. Players made money transporting goods from harvesting areas, either on behalf of someone or by paying independents for their goods so the independents could avoid going back to town. Players made money buying and selling goods - geographic arbitrage was very much a thing, as well as across time, and also across servers. People made money turning cheaply available goods into more expensive goods.

When the G.E. landed, it basically killed most of the economy. Harvesting stuff could still be profitable, and players could still make money transporting goods from harvesting areas to the nearest bank so people grinding levels wouldn't have to leave, but basically everything else became irrelevant. There's no point in selling anything anywhere yourself when you could take it to the G.E. and get a sale with no effort.

Less of an issue but still sad, the trading restrictions also killed the generosity of veteran players. 'drop parties', where a rich player leads a group around town dropping valuable items, died off as valuable items would no longer appear in the ground for others. Gifting people stuff was no longer possible if it exceeded (fairly low) thresholds. Very sad.

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

#547

Post by [deleted] »

crossroadsguy wrote: post #212
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.

A few months ago, I realised CS:2 is more than 60GB and still barely worked on my M1 Pro Mac. I tried with these three: Whisky, Sikarigur, and even CrossOver trial. A friend suggested I should try some kind of partitioning and install Windows on that. I definitely will never try that. CS:1.6 (which is what I still would want to play) is history unless I clasp my nose with my toes and then hang upside down from a ceil…

[deleted]

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

#548

Post by araes »

darth_avocado wrote: post #434
mikkupikku wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 teen…

Very much alive. https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/#12y

From mid-2018, CS2 has trended upward at +150,000 players/year. Starting at 500-600,000 that lasted from ~2015 to 2018 with mostly flat rate, after Covid, CS2 has been linearly upward pretty much constantly. The 24hr peak recently was 1,550,265 logged in.

One week variance is maybe ~700,000 during low timeframes, and 1,500,000 during peak hours pretty much every single day. Tends to peak yearly in May, with low tides in May and Nov-Dec usually, although last Dec was relatively up. 2020 and 2023 were both large years, 2025's looking similar.

On the player age question, the best data I was able to find on a quick search was https://www.hltv.org/

Total search over the full range returns 955 entries. Breakdowns by age look like its a pretty heavily 19-24 playerbase. 25-30's also pretty significant. Almost 77% of the player base between them.

  13-18, 90, 9.4%
  19-24, 460, 48.2%
  25-30, 271, 28.4%
  31-35, 93, 9.7%
  36-40, 41, 4.3%
Probably trends really hardcore, since the people listed average 360 (+-140) maps, and 7800 (+-3000) rounds.

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

#549

Post by portaouflop »

fendy3002 wrote: post #270
portaouflop wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also share games you purchased at GoG with all your friends. They do give you a lot of freedom. It’s maybe the only really “good” actor in that industry left so I try to support them as much as possible

sadly they don't do regional pricing at all, so steam price is almost half the GoG and maybe even lower. But yeah if you can buy GoG, it's better due to no DRM

Sure steam is cheaper but that’s how they get you. We shouldn’t always go for the cheapest alternative and then whine when things go to shit

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

#550

Post by Supermancho »

mothballed wrote: post #421
mikkupikku wrote: post #415

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That market could crash overnight with a single SCOTUS ruling against the NFA.

NFA for machine guns will never be overruled, never. The odds of Hughes amendment being ruled against, are one iota above nil.

> NFA for machine guns will never be overruled, never.

2 things make me question this. Never is a long time. People who claim to know the indefinite future, generally don't. These things being understood, forgive me if I don't take your word for it. Nobody should.

Post reply on HN