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

601–610 of 617 posts

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

#601

Post by RyleHisk »

EZ-E wrote: post #81
est wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not a fake supply CSGO knifes actually currency run by shadow banks providing RMB USD convertion. Google for "挂刀"

Can you explain the shadow banking / conversion angle? All I found was that selling knives was used to get a discount on steam balance thanks to price arbitrage. > "Selling Knives" (挂刀) refers to the technique of buying in-game items from 3rd-party (Chinese) trading sites like NetEase BUFF, C5, IGXE, and UUYP, and then selling them on the Steam Market to obtain a discounted Steam Wallet balance by capitalizing on pri…

Remember the 15% transaction fee on the Steam market? That's why the price difference hasn't disappeared. Players can avoid this fee through gifting and off-platform transactions. And all of this is just Chinese players trying to buy games cheaper—after all, what else can Steam wallet funds be used for? Some comments claim this is a way for Chinese people to evade financial regulations, but that's complete nonsense. The Steam market's capacity is entirely insufficient to meet the demand. They could easily choose to legally exchange currency using the foreign exchange quotas of relatives and friends, engage in cross-border wash trading through underground banks, or use fake trade and fake investment schemes.

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

#602

Post by eru »

breppp wrote: post #121
eru wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The general sentiment is still true, the reasons for engineering and (often science) are not always nobel (pun intended)

Sure. I'm just objecting to connecting everything to WW2.

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

#603

Post by ehnto »

jayd16 wrote: post #366
ehnto wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which is an easy technical problem to solve, but the liability of abuse when sharing user content with other users is not palatable. It is also not impressive to others, not a status symbol, and that's actually the purpose of skins in the modern day. No one grinds 1000hrs of warframe for a skin just because they think it looks cool, they think it makes THEM look cool. They want people to be impressed that they had $2…

> Which is an easy technical problem to solve Where do people get this impression? It's not trivial to build user comments on a web page let alone a proper chat app but people think it's easy to share game assets for some reason.

It's really not that crazy. You log onto a server, the server communicates your skins to the other clients. Counter strike itself literally did this in the 2000s, it was removed. Modders for other games working for free figured it out. Games used to automatically download maps and skins in a bunch of Valve games as well as other games.

I would also consider building comments into a webpage pretty trivial, it was like the second thing I did when teaching myself web applications years ago.

I bet it's harder in modern frameworks than it used to be, but that doesn't make it a hard problem, we just surrounded an easy problem with more difficult but unrelated problems.

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

#604

Post by dcow »

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.

There’s a difference between a physical baseball card and a digital weapon skin. One is permanent, the other is only real as long as the game it’s used in is operational. And we know games have a lifespan. It’s not like csgo/2 weapon skins exist on a chain somewhere… That’s the nuance I’m calling out. It’s not correct to equate a weapon skin to a baseball card even though they are a similar type of social phenomenon.

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

#606

Post by lanfeust6 »

trinix912 wrote: post #566
lanfeust6 wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

So we should be locking kids out of the entire cash economy instead of just banning gambling microtransactions in games? 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.

> So we should be locking kids out of the entire cash economy instead of just banning gambling microtransactions in games?

Yes, but not "instead". Regulate microtransactions, as we do any form of actual gambling.

> Btw. here they might need cash to take the bus home.

Bus pass.

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

#607

Post by averageRoyalty »

jsheard wrote: post #229
catmanjan wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a big difference between 15 and 18 though...

I think most countries have much stricter enforcement for gambling age limits, too. If you sell a kid a copy of GTA5 that's their parents problem, but if you allow kids into your casino it's your problem.

I can't speak for your country, but in Australia it's illegal to sell MA15+ rated material to an under 15, and R18+ material to an under 18. CS is MA15+.

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

#608

Post by averageRoyalty »

bilekas wrote: post #127
uvaursi wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Remember back in the day when we just downloaded skin packs from some random Geocities website with obnoxious red text on black background and after going through the install.txt written in broken English/Italian, lo and behold your AK47 now had a proper arctic camo skin and it was so much cooler? What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?

> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections? Steam is still a business, but of all the gaming industry, Gaben is one of the highlights, steam try hard to be extremely pro consumer. Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, requiring publisher and developers to explicitly state the AI generated content thats in the game to name just 2.

That's sad if that's your bad. They were fined $3m only a few years ago for failing to comply with Australian consumer law and illegally witholding refunds. They didn't even bother getting legal advice.

I'm not anti-valve, but "complying with consumer laws in a country you make sales in" should be a minimum standard at least.

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

#609

Post by rasz »

salamanteri wrote: post #571
system2 wrote: post #97

FYI some items go for $1.5M. "The GOAT of expensive skins in CS2 is the Karambit Case Hardened in the "Blue Gem" pattern. While the original is costly, one Factory-New variant with pattern 387 reached a staggering $1.5 million! The rarity comes down to its blue pattern, which is incredibly rare on a Karambit."

I find it funny that the person who owns this skin was offered $1.5 million over 4 years ago, and he said it was too low so he refused to sell it. There is a chance this skin won't sell at all anymore, not for that price at least.

Offered or "offered" like the videogame scam Pawn Stars Super Mario that started the whole WATA debacle?

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

#610

Post by cturner »

raspasov wrote: post #304
cturner wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valve is not the market-maker here, they are the exchange.

Don’t they also 100% control the supply though?

Yes, Valve controls supply. That strengthens my point.

Market makers do not control the supply of goods. They provide resting liquidity for pre-existing goods.

Similarly, market makers do not get to establish rules of the of their own "reality". Market makers are participants in a venue. It is the venue/exchange that sets the rules.

User Bengalilol seems to have inferred that because Valve made the venue, he can refer to them as the "market maker". This is not correct. Words have meaning. The meaning of market-maker is well-established in the context of exchanges. Market maker is incorrect terminology for Valve’s role.

Post reply on HN