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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

#581

Post by Aeolun »

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…

I mean, if you have the disposable income for it, more power to you. I think it’s a massive waste of money.

The only thing I ever spent money on was League of Legends skins/heroes, but those were always guaranteed.

My son keeps asking why I won’t buy robux for him, but those are an even bigger waste of money than some of these lootboxes xD

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

#582

Post by matwood »

omnimus wrote: post #108
matwood wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They are both about signaling wealth and status. What I don’t understand about the digital items is that the people who own them are often anonymous so why signal? Signaling wealth and status IRL can also carry other benefits that don’t seem to carry over digitally.

They are not anonymous but pseudonymus. I assume for many people building up their pseudonyms status is as intriguing as their AFK one.

Good point. Still odd in that it doesn’t connect to the real world easily, though that’s likely just showing my age bias.

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

#583

Post by 3626351828272 »

krapp wrote: post #541
wffurr wrote: post #505

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[flagged]

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

#584

Post by numpad0 »

Hikikomori wrote: post #466
riotnrrd wrote: post #450

I used to work at Valve -- on the CS:GO team, no less -- although I left nearly a decade ago. I don't know what prompted this change but I have some suspicions. Even when I was there and the loot box system was new to CS:GO, there were concerns that a lot of trading was happening outside of the marketplace. The trading happened elsewhere because you can't have more than $300 in your Steam wallet (more than this would…

>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?

This sounded odd to me as well. Most lootbox games today has no trading at all - you can pay to unlock items for your own account, and that's it. I suspect the more accurate way to explain it is Valve successfully prevented authority interventions than this being more consumer friendly.

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

#585

Post by y-curious »

hhmc wrote: post #460
brachkow wrote: post #340

1) My childhood which coincided with peak of unregulated lootbox-skin markets (around 2013-2015). And I and my CS-playing peers had a happy childhood because of… skins gambling. Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys. Some exceptionaly lucky or with natural born trading skills were earning serious money — from quater to multiple salaries of an adul…

> Most of us were able to earn money to buy a pizza or some additional snack betting on teams, or trading keys. Unless I'm missing something, this is zero sum -- so it follows that a bunch of people mostly lost money (perhaps also during their childhoods)

The skins market became a de facto stock market with extremely low volume (and therefore more manipulation). Someone eventually lost money, not necessarily the first link in the chain.

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

#586

Post by y-curious »

thenthenthen wrote: post #242

There is a whole skin stock market for exchanging Chinese Yuan to US Dollar outside of the banking system: https://www.iflow.work/

Yeah, IIRC China has some arbitrarily-low limit to how much foreign currency a Chinese citizen can possess at one time. This is clever

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

#587

Post by y-curious »

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.

I think most people are fine with the “shady” selling sites when it comes to laundering. I sold my CS inventory a week ago (lucky me!) and I had no problems with getting the cash. Reselling steam decks feels very inefficient

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

#588

Post by therein »

pessimizer wrote: post #518
therein wrote: post #511

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're almost purposefully missing the point. A better analogy would be to say kids are banned from bringing cash to school because that makes bullies take their money and kids gamble and bet.

How is that any different? It would be fine if schools banned children from bringing cash to school. If there were a multibillion dollar bullying and gambling market going on at the school, I'd demand it.

My issue with that is that the kids are losing something because someone else is doing something. Very similar to one kid being disorderly in class and everyone losing the recess.

Imagine being a kid in that room and being annoyed by the kid being disorderly, because you want to learn. Now you lost your rights because of that kid. You never did what he was doing, you never contributed to the disorder he caused, if anything you were also victimized by it. And then the power figure in this equation goes and chops away your rights along with his. First lesson in unfairness where the wet grass is burnt alongside the dry grass, because to the powers that be, the rights and allowances you had are mere acceptable collateral damage. Suppressing dissent was more important than protecting what is yours.

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

#589

Post by alexp2021 »

mikkupikku wrote: post #435
mothballed wrote: post #429

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

What are they, then?

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

#590

Post by mikkupikku »

alexp2021 wrote: post #589
mikkupikku wrote: post #435

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 kn…

What are they, then?

Regular honest hard working people, who struggle to make ends meet in large part due to gambling addictions and related poor financial decisions. Financially the guys who gamble are even worse off than the alcoholics that don't; there's only so much money you can spend on shit beer a week. The gambling addicts lose far more money far faster. If they were all tossing dice and losing money to each other that wouldn't be nearly so bad, but the way of modern industrial gambling is that it's done through apps and run by far away corporations or even the government, who take their money and basically make it disappear from the community. There's no winning it back, everybody but the casino owners loses in the long run. I used to be libertarian on gambling but not after what I've seen. It hurts not only those who choose to gamble, but also their families and communities.
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