561–570 of 617 posts
"video game player economy" shouldn't be a phrase that exist.
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Yes, they provide the API that those sites need to function. That doesn't mean the API is exclusively for those sites. Just that Valve is the one enabling those sites, they're not completely independent.
Nonsense argument. They provide an api that players use, that can also be used by boys to perform trades. Maybe the problem you have with this is that they can do trades.
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> 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.
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"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."
> Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat. How many whales are buying an in-game cosmetic for $20K for their own use? How much of this is day-trading? How much is investing? How much is fabricated by trading platforms? How much is money laundering? How much is a criminal payments channel?
I thought the same. Surely the number of people buying a 20k knife so it looks good when they play must be extremely low. The bulk have to be speculators.
But it's probably mostly money laundering, I wouldn't be surprised if the crypto market is tightly integrated in it too. Buy using crypto, sell using fiat, ???, cash.
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Grandma for Christmas? Really, have you never been a child? They obviously didn’t get it for that specific purpose, that’s for sure.
Yes, and I never ran around with cash. Supposing I did get a cash gift before my teens, it would just sit in the "bank" i.e. a box in the dresser. Of course there were no gift cards or any of that crap back then, which is what you'd expect to receive today. I mean, as an adult now, what are you likely to receive: a gift card from a relative, or cash? There's zero reason for a child to carry cash for no purpose. At an…
Btw. here they might need cash to take the bus home. And yes, people here let kids do that alone. Maybe because we live in a civilized society, who knows.
CS is wild. I used to play and have like 40+ cases from free post-match drops. Because those cases are no longer supplied, the prices have been creeping up and to the right for years now; from $0.40 to $20+. I don't even know why people still buy these, but I will basically never have to pay for a Steam game again.
Nearly 300 "trading cards" but they're all valued between $0.03 and $0.10 at best. Weirdly enough, even the randomest games still get some trading volume. I seriously doubt people are buying cards from random games to complete collections in those volumes, and fully expect it to be bot driven and / or some kind of scam. But I assume Valve gets a percentage for every transaction so they don't really care.
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Kids aren't the ones spending $12k on rare skins, they're buying keys to open lootboxes.
Same question. How are they buying things online at all? Whether $12k or $1.20?
In other cases kids might have access to their parents payment methods, or they can buy prepaid cards from places like gas stations. I used to do this to buy games when I was younger and my parents wouldn't buy games for me.
Valve doesn't prevent anyone from opening cases. There is no KYC.
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World War 2 took at most about a decade (depending on who you ask). The history of development of our technology is much, much longer. I doubt 'most of our technology' is based on anything that happened in WW2.
It's just that technologies are all connected, so if you want to make them look bad you can do so. Is fixation of nitrogen into ammonia something that improved billions of lives through fertilizer, or something that enabled manufacture of many millions of tons of explosives? It's both.
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…
Of course, there's also a market for characters - there's bot / player farms of people leveling characters and acquiring these rarities which then get sold to whales. I don't believe it's a particularly big market though.
There is also a market for leveled characters, as people don't want to spend the time to do so themselves, but they (and I'm sure all other MMOs too nowadays) offer a paid for level boost that takes you to the current max level - 10, at a price point that directly competes with bots.
One issue XIV still has is gold farming and selling bots, they don't offer a means to directly buy gold. Closest thing is buying pure white/black dyes for real money, which can be sold in-game. I suspect it's a PR tradeoff, that is, "boo at people just buying gold".
Of course, XIV has a bit of an inflation issue I think, not enough money sinks. They'll add a new mount that costs 7.5 million in an expansion which will remove some money from the economy, but I don't think it's enough.