I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1]
Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
It is also smoothing players' frustration and shopping-spree habits in order to obtain a rare item. If you have the ability to trade N rare items for another rare item then you quite surely may obtain any cosmetic item you want for a much lower investment (less boxes to open). The 'grey market' will adapt to this new value.
That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
[1] EDIT: and probably a preemptive protection for any future legal threat (as some countries tend to prohibit money gambling in games)
They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.
Any market maker, such as Valve, is free to establish the rules of its own "reality".
I understand your analysis, and I certainly failed to mention that point, but making the overall value less attractive to speculators is not evidence of being "rotten to the core".
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.
The problem is defining what falls under those laws. Companies sell trading card boxes with random contents. McDonalds had its Monopoly game. There are many more examples of things that are gambling with money, accessible to kids and still allowed in most countries.
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 didn't downvote you (my account is low reputation) but your argument is weak: that some skins go for absurd amount of money says nothing of the rest of the ecosystem. There can both be children and drug dealers (ab)using the same "gaming" mechanics.
> If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking?
That you used a straw man. The $20k cosmetics weren't mentioned, and even if some buy these, the thing itself can still very well be targeted as gambling towards children.
"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."
They're mentioned right there in the article this is nominally meant to be a discussion thread about.
But the argument was "they're running an online casino directed at children", the fact that someone buys the result of the gambling for adult money / $20k doesn't mean it's not, and is basically irrelevant to that statement.
Damn you’re trying to tell me that people will abandon all morality just to make billions of dollars? Who would of thought that something like that could be possible.
Trades happening off market is also due to valve not having a way to cash out. If you sell your $20,000 item on the steam marketplace that's a lot of games you can buy, but they won't send you money.
It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.
> That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
This doesn't explain though "why now?". All of these reasons would make sense, but they've been in legal disputes before in the 13 years since the game came out. And why would they suddenly care about players' frustration? The skins economy isn't wildly different now than previously.
Well, I don't know their motives, but if we were talking just about legal issues, at least in the EU we're seeing stricter laws about loot boxes this year (and I'm all in about that).
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.
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.
While those statements are true, it is much easier to be pro-consumer when you are running a few morally dubious casinos and marketplaces to keep the bottom line healthy. Would Steam have grown into a position where it can comfortably act like this without the cash cows in the background? We'll never know.
The general market is so distorted that being seen as anti-large corporate behaviours on some policies is seen as enough to be considered pro-consumer.
> 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 and lack of restrictions. Which is an indirect call out at Steam, which hasn't cared in the slightest and continues to have a worse 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 accepting a return. I just had to hang onto the copy until I built a new PC.
This is probably a US vs Europe difference in consumer protections though.
> 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.
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 they are used.
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
The game is rated as 'Mature 17+', and Steam has an age confirmation page before accessing the store page of the game. Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids?
I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.
It's not that simple. The real problem is that Valve allows items to be sold in markets outside of Valve's control which allows third party gambling websites to operate. And you guessed right, they basically don't care about your age. Valve of course knows this but won't do anything, because they make profits off all transactions happening in third party markets. Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos. Coffeezilla did an in-depth piece on this: https://youtu.be/q58dLWjRTBE
> Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos
I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
(Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
I think gambling came in more in later waves. The first wave of popularity (mostly StarCraft, LoL and fighting games) tended more towards funding from sponsors, and not gambling ones (red bull, monster energy, gaming peripheral makers, the game devs themselves, mobile games).
Ideally kids wouldn't be participating in real world transactions at all, and I'd love to see the numbers of how many were actually kids who directly went to gamble I stead of being pushed into it by streamers which is where I see it constantly.
> Now, thanks to a recent update from Valve, the latter is in a downward spiral, having lost 25% of its value — or $1.75 billion — overnight
The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
The thing is Valve is clearly aware of the fact that it’s getting kids addicted to gambling. They have the data. It’s extremely ubiquitous. This has been an ongoing issue for a while and Valve has rightly been criticized for willfully getting kids addicted.
Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids. But that doesn’t give Valve a free pass, particularly when they used dark patterns to appeal to children.
> Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids.
How? Individual parents can't fight off predatory corporations entrenched in mainstream culture going after their kids. They need to make a go at Valve.
edit: Rereading, I guess that was kinda the point you were making?
When you say easier to simply earn, I understand it as you think they do this to benefit their playerbase / users.
Yes, it says that they want a bigger cut of the sales when those items are sold.
Not sad this hits the trading sites as that will also likely mean fewer will get scammed as they will stay in valves market, but saying valve is doing this for the users is crap, they do it for the profits, and maybe to stay under the radar of additional lawsuits regarding gambling laws around the world.
> The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
Them letting it happen for literal decades while being highly aware of what they're doing says more about the ethos than this, in the grand scheme, tiny move.
Don't get me wrong, me as a person who does not participate in any kind of this gray-area gambling has basically a lot of net positives from Steam and Valve. But this doesn't make them a pro-consumer company.
They're still greedy capitalists, and it shows in many different perspectives. They may be "better" to consumers than the average, but still.
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 $2000 to spend on a knife, not that the knife skin was neat. The skin is an auxiliary component to the task.
This is what turned me off of Global Offensive, and CS2 I guess but it doesnt look like much(if anything) has changed between GO and CS2 compared to the changes made from 1.6 -> Source -> GO.
Looking back to ~2012/2013 and its seeming to be clear now that the introduction of weapon crates, the steam marketplace, and all of the other MTX in all of their(proprietary) competitve games may have been a good indication that these would be the last games Valve would develop in-house.
To be fair though and just to give a counter-example, the "clout chasers" with the $1000 knife skins is essentially the same as the bragging rights of a 4/5/6 digit steamID during 1.6 and CS:Source. Although flexing SteamID length was something I only really saw in the competitive scene and of course had a much smaller(unofficial) market.
Oh well, RIP Steam games, long live Steam software(their platform/Proton, etc) and hardware...minus the steam controller.
Making it cheaper reduces the status symbol aspect, since that's mostly about signalling wealth. But maybe not the rarity/exclusivity signals for items made artificially rare or hard to get.
'sv_pure' exists and says no for the official servers, sorry
Community servers are a thing, so is a worse experience. The well-maintained community days passed. We wanted curation and we got it: matchmaking and even our customization/spending.
That's sad. I remember a time before sv_pure. Sure, people installed transparent wall textures, but there was also a lot of cool customization to be done. And it was just your game, before streaming.
I was thinking of your description of the situation before sv_pure. What you wrote sounded like "sure some people completely destroyed the game but you got to see some cool skins". Skins can't make up for wallhacks, and wallhacks won't let you enjoy the skins. It wasn't a tenable situation.
Well, both. I wish less servers had enabled sv_pure in extra strict mode, but it was a solution to the wallhacking and extra loud footsteps. It was also the start of the decline of being able to run your own mods.
This provides a continuous revenue stream that allows maintenance and improvement of the game without affecting gameplay. It's entirely cosmetic. Don't participate in it if you don't want to. I played with stock skins majority of the time till a friend gifted me an AWP Redline after staying at my place. It was cool but to someone who just wants to enjoy the game it hardly matters. Besides you can go to various private servers and play with whatever skins.
No he doesn’t. He’s greedy. Saw the freak on the train the other day the fact that he would stalk a random guy who’s been criticising him just shows how weird the man truly is. This wasn’t in the US btw.
Most of the scarcity in artificial economies like CS is (just as with trading card games) manufactured and vulnerable.
Seeing what happens with a rug-pull in a billion dollar artificial economy like this is a valuable lesson for anyone watching.
If/when the huge Satoshi bitcoin stash gets traded in, we'll see similar outcomes there too.
I'd say that's true: if you have one skin, there's virtually zero production cost to making more copies of said skin.
It's not that different for many things in the real world, I suppose (eg: if you sell way above cost, then your cost is also arguably zero), but I'd say it's magnified in the digital world (or even with NFTs).
Isn't most of our technology based on technologies invented to maximize killing in world war 2, or alternatively as a way to maximize monetization in sleazy ways?
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.
In a scenario where you have a powerful enough quantum computer and are able to break the encryption you can access any wallet (I.e. the system would be done, and the value would be zero).
It's a dumb analysis of the situation that ignores what would actually happen:
A new wallet cert would be created that uses more bits. Enough that a brute force even with a quantum CPU would take too long. Then you transfer the funds to the new wallet. Abandoned wallets might be claimed during this transition but overall the deflationary trend of btc won't really be effected long term.
I think having Trump whisper in your ear before the next Truth Social post is the least effort way to win at Crypto. Inventing a viable quantum computer seems like way too much effort for the bros.
Actually, no. Even a perfect quantum computer can only attack a key if its public key has already been revealed on-chain, which is only the case for a small amount of coin. The other QC attacks rely on cracking a private key after it was broadcast, and before the transactions make it into a block.
Technically, "abandoned wallets" is not something that exists, all you have are "unspent outputs" of transactions. For QC attacks to work the public key to a private key has to be revealed, for modern addresses that only happens when you spend coins, not when you send them somewhere.
I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them.
Not it, Valve. Valve designed and implemented the system. Gabe Newell, founder and own of Valve, is one of the people responsible for introducing gambling to children. Children who grow up and develop a gambling addiction.
Just because they made some good things doesn't mean we can't call them out on literally their biggest, ongoing, evil.
Yes, let’s blame the f2p game dev when there are literally streamers pumping fake platforms, doing fake wins, marketing gambling sites at kids. Valve did that
It's Valve that created the loot box mechanics (i.e. gambling). That's the foundation on what everything is built. And even without the adjacent ecosystem, it's still Valve that's exploiting children by introducing gambling to them.
I have no skin the game, literally or figuratively (buying some 2d sprites for a virtual weapon is childish and pathetic from grown up man point of view and kids should spend 0 time in such game... either buy a real gun, get into ie paintball for the kick of the hunt or find something else that feels amazing and doesnt involve sitting on your introvert ass, worsening isolation and mental issues), but - your argument is very weak whataboutism, and ignoring who introduced it all, to weakest members of society to prey on addictivity of it all.
Pathetic all around, imagine I am giving you a minus I cant give, and expecting better from you next time.
The purpose of the update is certainly not to reduce the cost of these items, but to better position Valve to earn this revenue steam, as opposed to third party scalpers. Looks like it's working.
They don't care about the resell value since they don't earn a commission on those sales.
The point is that, for as long as items can be transferred in game, they are always convertible to cash in the real world. Inserting artificial friction inside the game to increase scarcity, such as limiting convertibility of items, will drive those trades away from the game economy and into the third party ecosystem where the dollar rules supreme as the super-convertible means of exchange. So you have an induced scarcity that in effect drives third party profits.
By increasing in-game convertibility, the trades are directed to other in game assets that are a just a proxy for loot boxes, i.e money in Valve's accounts. So prices crashing in the third party market signal that players have a cheaper and more direct route to acquire them - give the money to Valve - which also generates the supply of new rare items as those loot boxes are opened.
It's a smart economic move.
Buy that doesn't mean the prices will stay low, since they can always control the overall scarcity, or add new, rarer and more exclusive items. The total amount of money they extract from "kids" is ultimately linked to their ability and willingness to pay.
Glad to chat with someone who understands in-game economies. I agree, but for a different reason. I don't think Valve cares about the economics that much. I think it's more of a product strategy move.
They have been threatened numerous times with lawsuits over the gambling aspects of the IAP. This moves completely de-risks that. As you said, it's not going to affect profits very directly. It will however make the speculative market collapse, and keep players engaged within the game's economy.
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 ceiling fan and request someone to switch it on and then pray it works and keeps working. It doesn't; it crashes with flamboyance. There are some browser options, but that's another story altogether, and that too if I can find enough players there, let alone with good pings.
I finally realised that the only computer game I ever loved playing and played really a lot— albeit with gaps worth years in between after college— is just gone for me, and there's no coming back.
I guess now I am too old for all this, and maybe that's the point. Possibly someone who is on the older side will not buy these skins and whatnot; the company's focus is rightly not on us at all.
(PS. I always felt distracted with those skins; even in those younger and much younger days)
I doubt it's going to change anything, this manipulated market will adapt and continue to extract money from kids. The cynic in me could even say that this change was pushed by Valve to take a bigger cut of the skin market (most trades are supervised by 3d parties). Coffeezilla investigated one of the many casino sites, there's a lot more to it.
I wish I knew what happened in the past few years, because steam was supposed to ban csgo gambling and trading sites, but you can see their names plastered all over twitch every day.
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 up front cost to play cheapened the experience for the existing paying customers. It's like going from shopping at Whole Foods to Walmart.
Robinhood is your go-to application if you want to gamble legally and efficiently without (as much) fear of a single actor ruining your day.
Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.
FYI, this is already the case in some countries. In Belgium or Netherland, it's straight up banned, and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)
>and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)
That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.
And in France specifically, the first case you open is guaranteed to not be a good item. So it's essentially the same system but with an additional $2,50 entry fee
I propose any company that flagrantly violates the intent of a ruling like that is sent to a special judge who operates in the same manner - bring forth a penalty while explicitly looking for every violation and arcane loophole to punish the company with.
To save people opening the link...in France it would be a judge not a prosecutor. France has an Inquisitorial rather than the Adversarial legal system the UK and US have. Put simply, a judge doesn't merely decide between the two cases presented to them, they try and establish the facts
Edit: I said 'UK' where I should have said 'England and Wales'. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legal systems, although I believe both have Adversarial systems they are different in some ways. The US system could, however, be seen as a continuation of the English system.
I'll bet apple fan boys will agree to this statement for Valve or any other company, but when it comes to apple having to open up their walled garden in EU and then using every dirty trick in the book to make it impossible, oh boy...
I'd say it's designed to diminish the pyschological draw somewhat.
Gambling is addictive precisely because that "the next one could be the one" element. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a big impact on sales.
That said i think it's still better to just ban it.
So we're against checking IDs cause privacy but we also want to limit kids from accessing certain parts of the internet because gambling/porn? Have a cake and eat a cake?
And close to 0% of children have credit cards to buy these virtual lootboxes. These mechanisms prey on getting children to beg their parents to spend money.
You can have a debit card in the UK as a fairly young child. I think I got one at 12? I don’t know if there’s specific restrictions on buying in-game currency with them? I don’t know how they’d know though.
The first thing I did when I got a debit card was buy the 18 rated GTA Vice City!
they can buy pokemon cards. To be honest, I don't think CS:GO or TF2 or the like are pro-gambling. You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.
Look at the "meta-"game mechanics: you play a few games, you get a guaranteed case drop. This circa $3 case could contain anything, a $0.2 skin or a rare $2500 knife. When you open it a casino-like wheel goes over all the items and selects one randomly. There are hundreds of YT/twitch channels that open cases all day long and their target audience is children. It's gambling, and it's gambling for children.
I'm honestly really not a fan of the collectable trading card type of games (MtG, Pokemon TCG, yu-gi-oh etc). You have to pay to have a chance of getting a good card, which makes the whole thing pay to win. It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you, without having to pay more for having specific cards that you want to complete your ideal deck.
I personally often go to the huge bins of "shit tier" cards that my local game stores have, because I like to have some pretty cards (I often use them as bookmarks), but I don't play the game itself, so the actual mechanical value of the cards is meaningless to me
EDIT: I feel the same way about things like Warhammer. I don't know about other games, but in Warhammer at least there is a limit on how powerful an overall army can be, so sure it may not look as visually good, but just having tokens that say "squad of soldiers" or "mega death tank of doom" should be perfectly acceptable too
> It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you
Unless you play Pokemon TCG or MTG competitively at a national/international level, proxy cards are mostly accepted in the community.
More and more people recognise Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) have money in their eyes in the card games. Pokemon cards are becoming more full-art because that's what sells for crazy markups on third party websites, and MTG are doing crossovers with whoever will sign them a license. They're both playing a risk by moving from old time players (many of whom are now leaving the hobbies) for the sake of some nostalgic "investors".
I just wish I had a local shop with a shitbin. The shops around me just sell packs (when not out of stock) and they're all marked up beyond MSRP. I just want to play the game. I don't care about art, holographic patterns and the like.
On the other hand, whenever people open packs just looking for collectable cards, they flood the market with job lots of regular cards at dirt cheap prices. I managed to get a joblot of 2500+ Pokemon TCG cards for around £20 (lots of duplicates, all regular).
Gambling mechanics is everywhere nowadays, especially in mobile games. It's almost like an industry standard. I think the only solution is to ban all in-game purchases completely.
I would like to see a ban on allowing children to play machines like the Wizard of Oz ones, where you drop the coin on a shelf in the hopes it'll push off other coins or cards you need to collect. It sounds like a skill game, and I liked them when I first saw them. But then I saw how people play them with vacant faces, like slot machines. They're casino games, not arcade.
They're an institution in the UK. They're in the arcades at every seaside town, and every kid plays them. Now that I have kids I actually think they're brilliant; for £2 each they taught mine everything they need to know about gambling.
- You sometimes win a bit along the way, but eventually you lose everything.
- The jackpot prizes are only there to lure you in, and you never win them. Towards the middle of the shelf are things like £20 notes. We noticed that one of them was getting quite near the edge, and might actually become winnable, but then the following morning its position had been reset to the back of the shelf.
- It's still fun as long as you're just playing with money you don't mind losing, and not expecting to come out ahead.
They even learned something about company scrip, from the tickets that come out of the machines and the ridiculous exchange rate between tickets and the actual rewards at the prize shop.
I asked my son on the way home if he'd put all his Christmas money and savings into the machine if I let him, and the answer was hell no - maybe a pound, but he didn't want to lose all of his money. Valuable lessons all round.
Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism.
Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.
If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.
I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.
Pinball and video games I think are something that can be allowed. Even if the model is slightly predatory in this age. At least you only win game time.
Other types of partly fake skill games surely should be banned from kids. Like crane games where there is some hidden variable. And well anything in same category.
> 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.
> Doesn’t really tie in to actual markets involving physical item.
- A designer brand has admitted to destroying its own products. Coach confirmed that it purposely ripped up bags that were returned to its stores, even if the bags were still in good condition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/58846711
Monopolies and cartels are also well known for creating fake scarcity. Fake scarcity is bad for the economy and for consumers, only a few profit from fake scarcity at the cost of everybody else.
only to the extent that they are both artificial. The totality of USD _represents_ the totality of all resources that exist under the control of the USA (ala, the people, gov't, companies etc, as well as any natural resources).
The counterstrike skins don't represent such real life physical resources.
Not really, but it's actually kinda like currency. Imagine if a government suddenly devalued all $500 bills into $100 bills, but every other denomination remained the same.
That’s not really what happens though. What happened was that 500$ bills where so rare in circulation that collectors started paying upwards of 20 100$ to get them. Valve went “yes the 500$ are too rare, we need to fix supply so we’ll start exchanging 5 100$ bills for one 500$ bill”
This had catastrophic impact on people hoarding 500$ expecting their exchange value to remain at the elevated levels.
Not really the same is it. You are confusing a stock and a flow. Currency is exchanged for something material you have to give up.
Government may indeed issue more currency, and does do so every day, but it is in exchange for something the private sector has that it wants for the public service. That isn’t a problem as tax is a percentage and operates as a geometric series - meaning that whatever government issues it gets back exactly the same - unless somebody along the way saves it.
There has to be something available to buy in a currency for it to be issued. As we see in the game.
You're forgetting the other side of the equation, demand. The reason they have value is the level of demand versus supply. The item has to have some real world value, even if that's just being able to show off.
They're are plenty of things in very short supply, bit no one wants them.
yeah CS skins is one of the biggest markets of digital-only-aesthetic-items before NFT came around (and now probably still bigger than NFTs). The main thing with NFTs was that there's no "central database", CS skins solely lives in Valve's database.
making a butterfly knife for Valve isn't hard (in the past Steam Customer Service duplicated items lost in scams). It's hard for the players because they have to "gamble" for it through paying keys to open cases.
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 price differences.
I'm surprised the price difference did not disappear if people make that trade.
China notoriously has intense capital controls. It's difficult for ordinary Chinese citizens to take capital out of the country. CS2 items can be bought and sold in both USD and RMB, and can be transferred between Chinese and international accounts. It's not about Steam wallet balances.
Interesting. I'm curious though, assuming I am Chinese and I trade knives for USD - where would I be able to receive USD to evade capital control? Surely not my bank account or Steam wallet. Or is it for people with bank account in both countries? But in that case crypto could be more convenient? I'm puzzled
I feel watches and cars are different. You cant magically "print" 10000000 Bentley's so supply will be constrained and they are expensive to make. I feel the luxury is more tangible than just being rare.
A lot of real economies are based on fake constraints. Or the constraint is a closely held secret that's pretty arbitrary and not based on any grand amount of skill or effort.
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.
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.
It seems more like a market strategy than an economic collapse. Afterall they control the skin market, and this will lead more players to buy very expensive skins (cheaper than the day before yesterday, but still quite pricey). Also, not all skins went down in price, the red ones from collections with gold skins even increased in value.
That's hyperbolic. You had high profile celebrities advertising NFTs, and stuff valued at millions, that's a whole other scale.
Skins have their place when they're modestly priced, as they also have quite a modest impact. But the whole gambling, artificial restrictions and trading is quite suspicious indeed.
I asked friends who play why would Valve do this. Answers were divided to:
1. Valve wants to avoid regulatory scrutiny over loot boxes
2. Valve wants to limit prices; the Steam marketplace only allows items up to 2500 usd to be traded. By averaging out the item prices (knives drop, covert-class increases) they are able to indirectly limit the usefulness and harmful side effects (money laundering, decentralized liquidity) of 3rd party trading sites
I find it fascinating how the "HN Hivemind" (and yes, I know not a real thing, but the trends seem pretty consistent) is so opposed to kids playing with lootboxes, but also very angry at governments trying to impose age verification.
Some people are opposed to kids gambling (or gambling in general) - an understandable sentiment even if i dont agree.
Some people are skeptical of the gov't and the implications of proper identification on the web (which is required for age verification). Whether you are pro or anti gambling doesn't make or change this skepticism.
I think the HN hive mind is more opposed to the concept of loot boxes in general. We don't need to go much beyond that. It follows that a puddle of industrial waste would cause trouble if it began to flow downstream.
"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."
Each instance of a CS skin is assigned a random amount of wear between 0 and 1, so two copies of the same skin can be worth more or less money depending on their condition. To be clear the value is fixed, actually using a skin won't make it dirtier. Factory New is the highest tier with a wear value between 0 and 0.07.
The game itself only distinguishes between those ranges of values, but it's possible to query the exact number via an API so I think traders will even price that in (e.g. Factory New 0.02 is worth more than Factory New 0.06).
Valve employs an army of economists (notably Yanis Varoufakis as alumn) to make these decisions. It was certainly purposeful and will balance itself out.
this is what I think. The change is that 10 of the highest-level weapon textures can be traded for a knife texture: the result is that the supply of knife textures goes up, but the supply of high-level weapon textures goes down significantly more.
It's not so much a depreciation of knife textures, as a distribution of this value down the chain of item rarities.
The broader impact is that it creates a lot of uncertainty around valuations in the market. This is probably the most impactful (on valuations) policy change made by Valve in the history of the market. Now there is an increased fear that more similar such changes may be coming down the pipeline.
Correction. $0 in value. Skins do not exist and are worth exactly $0. If you spend money on skins, they are worth… $0. It’s all a large scale grift money incinerator where the only winner is Valve.
+ whatever pleasure you derive from it, ig. I can understand loot box addiction, but paying $20,000 for valve character dress up? Not even like a Peter Griffin player model or something, but a slightly different looking knife? Madness
$20,000 for a fake knife!? And I buy an item, a real one, and find later there was a cheaper price by few bucks somewhere else and I feel like an idiot.. crazy!
Yeah for a digital item with easy trading it's more like buying a stock vs a physical item which instantly depreciates. Basically holding $20k in an alternative form vs spending $20k.
Thought this might be a hilarious sign of the bubble popping (a run on cs skins) but nope:
> Following Valve's Oct. 22 update to Counter-Strike, the second-highest-tier, Covert (Red), can now be traded up and turned into Knives and Gloves. Essentially, this means that a previously extremely rare and highly sought-after cosmetic is going to be much more obtainable for those who increasingly want it, reducing the value of Knives and Gloves on the open marketplace.
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.
I know people that spend gazillions on vintage sneakers. They will literally go and buy some rare designer second hand pair of Nikes or whatever with some scarce design that they only produced a few off. Personally, I wouldn't be that eager to stick my feet into somebody's well worn sneakers. But apparently that's beside the point. Nike actually on purpose feeds that market by coming up with new limited edition designs. These people have enough shoes. They don't buy them because they need another pair of shoes.
The value of money used to be based on gold. Gold has very limited practical value. It actually kind of sucks as a metal because it's not that hard compared to e.g. iron. The main value proposition is that it's pretty and shiny. But people that buy gold don't tend to even look at it. They just store it in a vault. Or worse, they get a digital receipt that proves they own the gold without ever seeing or handling it. The main value of that is that, if you wanted, you could make pretty and shiny things out of the gold bars. And because those pretty and shiny things are valuable, gold is valuable. And therefore people invest in gold. Not to make those things but to be able to sell it to others that might do those things. Of course the vast majority of people buying and selling gold has zero interest in doing that. Most gold ever mined is locked in a vault in bar form and will never be used for anything else than as an intrinsic token of value.
There are a lot of things that have no value beyond subjective esthetics and the group thinking around that. My home country the Netherlands produced a lot of fancy paintings in the seventeenth century. Those are worth a lot now. They are extremely nice according to some. People visit museums to go see them. They are worth tens/hundreds of millions in some cases.
Objectively, most people that visit museums wouldn't be able to tell apart the original from a good replica. And reproducing these things with high fidelity digitally isn't all that hard either. You can find high quality scans of almost any painting for free on the internet. And you would get most of the appreciation/emotion looking at those as you would get by looking at the originals. Of course, most people aren't that into this stuff in any case. But we appreciate these things because other people tell us they are valuable and we take their word for it. The original paintings keep their value mainly because such people keep reassuring us how rare and amazing these things are. That tends to get embarrassing/awkward with forgeries in museums where experts literally have failed to tell the difference.
The value of things whether digital or real is based on social mechanisms for appreciating things. Some things simply are valuable because people agree for whatever irrational reasons that they have value. And then some people buy these things at the market rate because they enjoy having them. Whether that's original art on the wall, some rare sneakers, or a cool skin for a game character that you engage with for many hours while playing the game. The dynamic between the willingness of people to separate with their cash and scarcity is what creates the value.
NFTs are weird mainly because they are digital receipts for something (anything) that has value. They are no different than a paper certificate of authenticity for a painting. It all boils down to the trust people have in the impressive looking stamps/signatures on the paper, or the blockchain shenanigans used to ensure authenticity for the NFT. Of course a lot of NFTs are silly. But in game worlds, ownership of skin is kind of limited as you can't really resell them easily or prove authenticity. Which is something that NFTs addresses. Which is why NFTs became popular in games.
The value of game skins is as irrational as second hand sneakers are or the appreciation for shiny metals. Or gems. Or paintings. But as long as people buy those, they have value.
Regulation also means that children are excluded, debt is not allowed, and all chips can be settled for cash when the player leaves the property. Even the comps are regulated. The majority of casinos in the US are Indian casinos. When they aren't and are taxed by the government those funds are usually used to improve and fund the local area giving the local citizens the ability to decide, through legislation, if it should be continued or outlawed.
Finally, Steam pays taxes in the US, so the government is already "getting a cut." Games of chance are not moral. Unregulated games of chance are flatly evil.
Wasted is a rather strong word and yes, the whole argument is a slippery slope _but_ I can imagine sports that are less about glorifying deadly violence in a very realistic manner - the loot box and real money part is just the bitter cherry on top.
Glorify? This seems way too serious a take on a game that young males play because of a common, innate fascination with guns and soldiers. 99.9999% of them do not turn into manic killers who just love to kill and glorify it.
> 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.
And yet the US does have a serious problem with (mostly) young males turning into manic killers.
I'm reminded of that scene in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine where he's asking a concerned adult where the violence comes from, and the concerned adult looks sad and confused and says he doesn't know, even though he's standing in front of a nuclear-tipped missile being assembled at the local nuclear-tipped missile plant.
Financialisation is indirect personal violence instead of physical violence. The US doesn't have a problem with that at any scale, as long as the right kinds of people are doing it.
Any ranked matchmaking game is designed to addict you by the prospect of being ranked as elite. They have a number of insidious methods to keep your ranking low, some are even patented by the game companies themselves!
For example, if someone is getting too high, it’s nothing to pair that person with a known deserter for 1-3 games to drastically slow their progress.
I don't know, reading? Building something? Exploring the natural world? Sports?
Not to say that all video games are unsubstantive. But the substance in exploring virtual world comes from its uniqueness, not playing de_dust2 for 1000 hours. No other form of entertainment or art is analogous to video games in terms of the maximum time you can spend on it with totally depreciating returns.
No. If you play 1000 hours of a sport, you will at least be stronger, more coordinated, more agile. But the downsides are more about repetitive strain injury and the possibility of screwing up your joints.
Different benefits and downsides.
Of course, a lot of guys are suckered into sports-related gambling these days too.
Playing football or lacrosse is more "real" than working a desk job. For thousands of years, humans had to hunt and make tools and relied on their wits and strength to survive. Survival in the modern day is mostly a question of obedience.
I think the purpose of exploring virtual worlds like quake or counter-strike or something should not be to escape the real world but rather to experience a new kind of physicality. The purpose of playing games should be to engage in a deeper world which is more "real" than the tame one we are ordinarily subjected to.
It's why I am not opposed to video games. I opposed to overplaying video games because you ruin them, they become mundane and predictable.
How about 1000 hours of chess? Or 1000 hours of warhammer? Or D&D?
One may say you make social bonds playing them, but that stands true for video game as well. Speaking for myself, I definitely spent more than 1000 hours on summoner's rift; 15 years later me and my league friends still playing LOL together and chat about all kind of things on a daily basis.
I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1]
Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates.
It is also smoothing players' frustration and shopping-spree habits in order to obtain a rare item. If you have the ability to trade N rare items for another rare item then you quite surely may obtain any cosmetic item you want for a much lower investment (less boxes to open). The 'grey market' will adapt to this new value.
That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
[1] EDIT: and probably a preemptive protection for any future legal threat (as some countries tend to prohibit money gambling in games)
With increasing scrutiny around gambling mechanics, this might be Valve trying to get ahead of a future headache...
They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.
Any market maker, such as Valve, is free to establish the rules of its own "reality".
I understand your analysis, and I certainly failed to mention that point, but making the overall value less attractive to speculators is not evidence of being "rotten to the core".
They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.
The game does have a mature rating, so parents should be vetting their activity.
I would still contend and say the gambling aspect, with real money, is a net negative to the community.
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.
The problem is defining what falls under those laws. Companies sell trading card boxes with random contents. McDonalds had its Monopoly game. There are many more examples of things that are gambling with money, accessible to kids and still allowed in most countries.
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.
Kids buy a $2.50 case in the hope of winning a $20k cosmetic item
Then there are the third party gambling sites where you bet items on matches in the hopes of spinning up your cheap items into more expensive ones
> Kids buy a $2.50 case in the hope of winning a $20k cosmetic item
This part is already gambling. The 3rd party site is letting them gamble again.
No, but they incentivize opening cases in order to obtain such valuable prizes, at $2.50 a pop. TF2 does this too, with Unusual rarity hats.
I didn't downvote you (my account is low reputation) but your argument is weak: that some skins go for absurd amount of money says nothing of the rest of the ecosystem. There can both be children and drug dealers (ab)using the same "gaming" mechanics.
> If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking?
That you used a straw man. The $20k cosmetics weren't mentioned, and even if some buy these, the thing itself can still very well be targeted as gambling towards children.
"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."
They're mentioned right there in the article this is nominally meant to be a discussion thread about.
But the argument was "they're running an online casino directed at children", the fact that someone buys the result of the gambling for adult money / $20k doesn't mean it's not, and is basically irrelevant to that statement.
Virtual items are legitimate investments.
Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off.
People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.
I think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.
Well, that’s lootbox mechanics. I don’t see how this most recent iteration changes any of that.
Damn you’re trying to tell me that people will abandon all morality just to make billions of dollars? Who would of thought that something like that could be possible.
Valve is not the market-maker here, they are the exchange.
They warned the gambling sites plenty of times. They tried legal action several times. Those sites were against valves ToS.
It seems to me that they (Valve) are complicit. Don't they provide the API that those sites use?
I don't think they tried very hard to shut them down, they could be doing a lot more.
Edit: based on what I recall from this Coffeezilla video (https://youtu.be/13eiDhuvM6Y?si=GJ_kXOJyXFTogy40&t=476)
Isn't it the same API that users use?
It’s probably fair to assume that more than 90% of trading bots are not the kind of bots valve should support
Trades happening off market is also due to valve not having a way to cash out. If you sell your $20,000 item on the steam marketplace that's a lot of games you can buy, but they won't send you money.
> most trades happened off-platform
I thought it was impossible to trade off platform? All item trades happen within Steam, they have an API to facilitate it and everything.
It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.
> That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn.
A timely lesson!
This doesn't explain though "why now?". All of these reasons would make sense, but they've been in legal disputes before in the 13 years since the game came out. And why would they suddenly care about players' frustration? The skins economy isn't wildly different now than previously.
Well, I don't know their motives, but if we were talking just about legal issues, at least in the EU we're seeing stricter laws about loot boxes this year (and I'm all in about that).
https://siege.gg/news/several-eu-countries-have-introduced-s...
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.
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.
While those statements are true, it is much easier to be pro-consumer when you are running a few morally dubious casinos and marketplaces to keep the bottom line healthy. Would Steam have grown into a position where it can comfortably act like this without the cash cows in the background? We'll never know.
The general market is so distorted that being seen as anti-large corporate behaviours on some policies is seen as enough to be considered pro-consumer.
> 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 and lack of restrictions. Which is an indirect call out at Steam, which hasn't cared in the slightest and continues to have a worse 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 accepting a return. I just had to hang onto the copy until I built a new PC.
This is probably a US vs Europe difference in consumer protections though.
That would be illegal in the UK I think, since you have 1 year mandatory warranty against any faulty goods.
Warrantyis thę same as return. If there is nothing wrong with goods, warranty does not apply. Return means return for any reason.
"I misread the minimum specifications" does not a faulty ware make.
> 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.
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 they are used.
> Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously)
Depends on the jurisdiction. In Germany you have no right to returns on things bought in a physical store.
GOGs refund is 1 month? Man I can clear DMC5 twice in one week then do a refund in that case.
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
The first one was because the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) took them to court, but yes, they're both very good features.
Making billions of dollars by getting kids addicted to gambling for ones and zeroes as a third
The game is rated as 'Mature 17+', and Steam has an age confirmation page before accessing the store page of the game. Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids?
I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.
It's not that simple. The real problem is that Valve allows items to be sold in markets outside of Valve's control which allows third party gambling websites to operate. And you guessed right, they basically don't care about your age. Valve of course knows this but won't do anything, because they make profits off all transactions happening in third party markets. Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos. Coffeezilla did an in-depth piece on this: https://youtu.be/q58dLWjRTBE
> Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos
I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
(Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
I think gambling came in more in later waves. The first wave of popularity (mostly StarCraft, LoL and fighting games) tended more towards funding from sponsors, and not gambling ones (red bull, monster energy, gaming peripheral makers, the game devs themselves, mobile games).
Nope, just no. When you make billions you have another kind of responsibility, you can't just brush that off as a problem with parenting.
I'm willing to bet a lot of the young people struggling with gambing addictions started with loot boxes like the ones valve make a ton of money on.
Loot boxes in itself are the problem.
You can’t make a non-toxic free2play game.
People need to buy from stores like GoG and stop supporting f2p games at all.
Of course that’s never going to happen; an entire generation was raised on f2p
Free to play doesn't imply loot box or exploitative consumables. Any game with a fixed set of purchases is probably fine. Lots of season passes too.
Ideally kids wouldn't be participating in real world transactions at all, and I'd love to see the numbers of how many were actually kids who directly went to gamble I stead of being pushed into it by streamers which is where I see it constantly.
> Now, thanks to a recent update from Valve, the latter is in a downward spiral, having lost 25% of its value — or $1.75 billion — overnight
The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
The thing is Valve is clearly aware of the fact that it’s getting kids addicted to gambling. They have the data. It’s extremely ubiquitous. This has been an ongoing issue for a while and Valve has rightly been criticized for willfully getting kids addicted.
Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids. But that doesn’t give Valve a free pass, particularly when they used dark patterns to appeal to children.
> Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids.
How? Individual parents can't fight off predatory corporations entrenched in mainstream culture going after their kids. They need to make a go at Valve.
edit: Rereading, I guess that was kinda the point you were making?
When you say easier to simply earn, I understand it as you think they do this to benefit their playerbase / users.
Yes, it says that they want a bigger cut of the sales when those items are sold. Not sad this hits the trading sites as that will also likely mean fewer will get scammed as they will stay in valves market, but saying valve is doing this for the users is crap, they do it for the profits, and maybe to stay under the radar of additional lawsuits regarding gambling laws around the world.
> The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
Them letting it happen for literal decades while being highly aware of what they're doing says more about the ethos than this, in the grand scheme, tiny move. Don't get me wrong, me as a person who does not participate in any kind of this gray-area gambling has basically a lot of net positives from Steam and Valve. But this doesn't make them a pro-consumer company.
They're still greedy capitalists, and it shows in many different perspectives. They may be "better" to consumers than the average, but still.
Its about showing off to other players. You can still do local game mods just fine but that's not what people are after.
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 $2000 to spend on a knife, not that the knife skin was neat. The skin is an auxiliary component to the task.
This is what turned me off of Global Offensive, and CS2 I guess but it doesnt look like much(if anything) has changed between GO and CS2 compared to the changes made from 1.6 -> Source -> GO.
Looking back to ~2012/2013 and its seeming to be clear now that the introduction of weapon crates, the steam marketplace, and all of the other MTX in all of their(proprietary) competitve games may have been a good indication that these would be the last games Valve would develop in-house.
To be fair though and just to give a counter-example, the "clout chasers" with the $1000 knife skins is essentially the same as the bragging rights of a 4/5/6 digit steamID during 1.6 and CS:Source. Although flexing SteamID length was something I only really saw in the competitive scene and of course had a much smaller(unofficial) market.
Oh well, RIP Steam games, long live Steam software(their platform/Proton, etc) and hardware...minus the steam controller.
Huh, I wonder what my steamID length was. I would have signed up very early. I will have to check!
And making it cheaper wouldn't fix anything, I guess?
Making it cheaper reduces the status symbol aspect, since that's mostly about signalling wealth. But maybe not the rarity/exclusivity signals for items made artificially rare or hard to get.
Making status symbols cheaper means they're no longer exclusive or grant status. So people go looking for other exclusive status symbols.
> You can still do local game mods just fine
'sv_pure' exists and says no for the official servers, sorry
Community servers are a thing, so is a worse experience. The well-maintained community days passed. We wanted curation and we got it: matchmaking and even our customization/spending.
So-called skin changers (which modify what skins you yourself see in-game) are actually considered bannable cheats.
That's sad. I remember a time before sv_pure. Sure, people installed transparent wall textures, but there was also a lot of cool customization to be done. And it was just your game, before streaming.
> Sure, people installed transparent wall textures, but there was also a lot of cool customization to be done
This undersells how bad it was to play a game with people who can see through walls and hear your footsteps from a mile away. No skin is worth that.
sv_pure specifically actually allows the server admin to allow selective model/material swaps.
I was thinking of your description of the situation before sv_pure. What you wrote sounded like "sure some people completely destroyed the game but you got to see some cool skins". Skins can't make up for wallhacks, and wallhacks won't let you enjoy the skins. It wasn't a tenable situation.
Well, both. I wish less servers had enabled sv_pure in extra strict mode, but it was a solution to the wallhacking and extra loud footsteps. It was also the start of the decline of being able to run your own mods.
A lot of people buy CS2 community servers to use a WeaponPaints addon which allows anyone in the server to use any skin.
I’d say 90% of ours have it enabled.
They used to ban accounts but I don’t think they have (on community servers) since it went F2P.
It really depends on playing the games for fun or to replace social interaction.
Most lootbox gambling apps are targeted towards the latter use.
This provides a continuous revenue stream that allows maintenance and improvement of the game without affecting gameplay. It's entirely cosmetic. Don't participate in it if you don't want to. I played with stock skins majority of the time till a friend gifted me an AWP Redline after staying at my place. It was cool but to someone who just wants to enjoy the game it hardly matters. Besides you can go to various private servers and play with whatever skins.
No he doesn’t. He’s greedy. Saw the freak on the train the other day the fact that he would stalk a random guy who’s been criticising him just shows how weird the man truly is. This wasn’t in the US btw.
Most of the scarcity in artificial economies like CS is (just as with trading card games) manufactured and vulnerable. Seeing what happens with a rug-pull in a billion dollar artificial economy like this is a valuable lesson for anyone watching.
If/when the huge Satoshi bitcoin stash gets traded in, we'll see similar outcomes there too.
What makes this (or cypto) economy ‘artificial’, and why is our real-world economy not artificial?
Plenty of market manipulation and rug pulls happening on the regular stock market as well
They wrote the scarcity is artificial.
I'd say that's true: if you have one skin, there's virtually zero production cost to making more copies of said skin.
It's not that different for many things in the real world, I suppose (eg: if you sell way above cost, then your cost is also arguably zero), but I'd say it's magnified in the digital world (or even with NFTs).
Probably the biggest possible investment for quantum computing today is all the abandoned bitcoins wallets ripe for taking
I weep for humanity if that's the best use we can think of for quantum computing.
Isn't most of our technology based on technologies invented to maximize killing in world war 2, or alternatively as a way to maximize monetization in sleazy ways?
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)
There's not actually that many things quantum computers are expected to be good at. Material science perhaps?
Honest question why would anyone harvest Bitcoin after this? Wouldn't it lose all its value since everyone has everyone key now?
maybe it could be turned into a game.. hide the satoshis from the quantum ghosts
Why would that only apply to abandoned wallets?
In a scenario where you have a powerful enough quantum computer and are able to break the encryption you can access any wallet (I.e. the system would be done, and the value would be zero).
Showing that you have access to all wallets will surely kill the market but silently getting abandoned ones and selling off would seem better choice.
But on the other hand there are people looking at those abandoned wallets and if money start to flow out from them someone will ask questions.
It's a dumb analysis of the situation that ignores what would actually happen:
A new wallet cert would be created that uses more bits. Enough that a brute force even with a quantum CPU would take too long. Then you transfer the funds to the new wallet. Abandoned wallets might be claimed during this transition but overall the deflationary trend of btc won't really be effected long term.
I think having Trump whisper in your ear before the next Truth Social post is the least effort way to win at Crypto. Inventing a viable quantum computer seems like way too much effort for the bros.
If you can get abandoned wallets, can't you just get any and all wallets?
Edit: minus some race conditions of people changing passwords/moving/emptying wallets.
I am making a lot of assumptions here which are not backed by much knowledge about bitcoin:
1. It's easier to extract funds from abandoned wallets without being noticed
2. There will be a transition to wallets with post-quantum cryptography
3. The abandoned wallets won't be able to make that conversion because these need new wallets/keys
Right, but that just sounds like the race conditions I added in my edit.
Actually, no. Even a perfect quantum computer can only attack a key if its public key has already been revealed on-chain, which is only the case for a small amount of coin. The other QC attacks rely on cracking a private key after it was broadcast, and before the transactions make it into a block.
You lost me... What is the difference between an abandoned wallet and a non-abandoned one in this scenario?
Technically, "abandoned wallets" is not something that exists, all you have are "unspent outputs" of transactions. For QC attacks to work the public key to a private key has to be revealed, for modern addresses that only happens when you spend coins, not when you send them somewhere.
I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them.
>It extracts money from kids
Not it, Valve. Valve designed and implemented the system. Gabe Newell, founder and own of Valve, is one of the people responsible for introducing gambling to children. Children who grow up and develop a gambling addiction.
Just because they made some good things doesn't mean we can't call them out on literally their biggest, ongoing, evil.
Yes, let’s blame the f2p game dev when there are literally streamers pumping fake platforms, doing fake wins, marketing gambling sites at kids. Valve did that
It's Valve that created the loot box mechanics (i.e. gambling). That's the foundation on what everything is built. And even without the adjacent ecosystem, it's still Valve that's exploiting children by introducing gambling to them.
I have no skin the game, literally or figuratively (buying some 2d sprites for a virtual weapon is childish and pathetic from grown up man point of view and kids should spend 0 time in such game... either buy a real gun, get into ie paintball for the kick of the hunt or find something else that feels amazing and doesnt involve sitting on your introvert ass, worsening isolation and mental issues), but - your argument is very weak whataboutism, and ignoring who introduced it all, to weakest members of society to prey on addictivity of it all.
Pathetic all around, imagine I am giving you a minus I cant give, and expecting better from you next time.
The purpose of the update is certainly not to reduce the cost of these items, but to better position Valve to earn this revenue steam, as opposed to third party scalpers. Looks like it's working.
They crashed the premium market and resell value. Prices down. It’s a side effect, but the direct effect to the user.
They don't care about the resell value since they don't earn a commission on those sales.
The point is that, for as long as items can be transferred in game, they are always convertible to cash in the real world. Inserting artificial friction inside the game to increase scarcity, such as limiting convertibility of items, will drive those trades away from the game economy and into the third party ecosystem where the dollar rules supreme as the super-convertible means of exchange. So you have an induced scarcity that in effect drives third party profits.
By increasing in-game convertibility, the trades are directed to other in game assets that are a just a proxy for loot boxes, i.e money in Valve's accounts. So prices crashing in the third party market signal that players have a cheaper and more direct route to acquire them - give the money to Valve - which also generates the supply of new rare items as those loot boxes are opened.
It's a smart economic move.
Buy that doesn't mean the prices will stay low, since they can always control the overall scarcity, or add new, rarer and more exclusive items. The total amount of money they extract from "kids" is ultimately linked to their ability and willingness to pay.
Glad to chat with someone who understands in-game economies. I agree, but for a different reason. I don't think Valve cares about the economics that much. I think it's more of a product strategy move.
They have been threatened numerous times with lawsuits over the gambling aspects of the IAP. This moves completely de-risks that. As you said, it's not going to affect profits very directly. It will however make the speculative market collapse, and keep players engaged within the game's economy.
I am fine with this . Every third party in this ecosystem is literal scum
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 ceiling fan and request someone to switch it on and then pray it works and keeps working. It doesn't; it crashes with flamboyance. There are some browser options, but that's another story altogether, and that too if I can find enough players there, let alone with good pings.
I finally realised that the only computer game I ever loved playing and played really a lot— albeit with gaps worth years in between after college— is just gone for me, and there's no coming back.
I guess now I am too old for all this, and maybe that's the point. Possibly someone who is on the older side will not buy these skins and whatnot; the company's focus is rightly not on us at all.
(PS. I always felt distracted with those skins; even in those younger and much younger days)
I doubt it's going to change anything, this manipulated market will adapt and continue to extract money from kids. The cynic in me could even say that this change was pushed by Valve to take a bigger cut of the skin market (most trades are supervised by 3d parties). Coffeezilla investigated one of the many casino sites, there's a lot more to it.
I wish I knew what happened in the past few years, because steam was supposed to ban csgo gambling and trading sites, but you can see their names plastered all over twitch every day.
The whole skin economy around CS has gotten way out of hand. It’s less about the game and more about speculation and gambling at this point.
Is not that their parent's job?
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 up front cost to play cheapened the experience for the existing paying customers. It's like going from shopping at Whole Foods to Walmart.
Robinhood is your go-to application if you want to gamble legally and efficiently without (as much) fear of a single actor ruining your day.
Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned. Children can't buy lottery tickets or hit tables in Vegas. Its crazy they can buy loot boxes that real life value.
FYI, this is already the case in some countries. In Belgium or Netherland, it's straight up banned, and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)
>and in France we get an adapted case opening that looks less random (X-Ray: you see what's in the box before opening it, but you have to open it to X-Ray the next one)
That still feels like gambling, but rather than gambling on what the current case contains you're gambling on the second one might contain.
And in France specifically, the first case you open is guaranteed to not be a good item. So it's essentially the same system but with an additional $2,50 entry fee
I propose any company that flagrantly violates the intent of a ruling like that is sent to a special judge who operates in the same manner - bring forth a penalty while explicitly looking for every violation and arcane loophole to punish the company with.
It's "technically" just, after all.
You mean "special prosecutor". Judges don't try to find things, they only decide which of the parties before them claiming different things is right.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigating_judge_(France)
To save people opening the link...in France it would be a judge not a prosecutor. France has an Inquisitorial rather than the Adversarial legal system the UK and US have. Put simply, a judge doesn't merely decide between the two cases presented to them, they try and establish the facts
Edit: I said 'UK' where I should have said 'England and Wales'. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own legal systems, although I believe both have Adversarial systems they are different in some ways. The US system could, however, be seen as a continuation of the English system.
I'll bet apple fan boys will agree to this statement for Valve or any other company, but when it comes to apple having to open up their walled garden in EU and then using every dirty trick in the book to make it impossible, oh boy...
Ye seems like not going with the spirit of the law. But the indirection has to remove alot of the gambling thrill though?
It doesn't "feel" like gambling, it's straight 100% the exact same thing but it's designed in a way that bypasses the legal words.
I'd say it's designed to diminish the pyschological draw somewhat. Gambling is addictive precisely because that "the next one could be the one" element. I wouldn't be surprised if it has a big impact on sales.
That said i think it's still better to just ban it.
This. Valve won that case.
This sounds like that betting game in the Stormlight Archives books that's meant to circumvent the religious prohibition on predicting the future.
"Gambling mechanics for anyone under 18 should be banned."
its not gambling when you "can't" withdraw the money
So we're against checking IDs cause privacy but we also want to limit kids from accessing certain parts of the internet because gambling/porn? Have a cake and eat a cake?
How about no gambling at all? That would work for me.
This. It's predatory in every implementation.
The cake is a lie.
But children can buy a cereal box that has some "rare" card.
Being virtual or not doesn’t matter here, ban it all.
That should be banned too. Why are you defending it with a 'but'?
When I was a kid it was baseball cards.
Close to 0% of children do their own grocery shopping and buy their own boxes of cereal
And close to 0% of children have credit cards to buy these virtual lootboxes. These mechanisms prey on getting children to beg their parents to spend money.
They don't have to ask their parents first. The parents can link cards. One example, of many: https://www.techspot.com/news/98980-13-year-old-spent-64000-...
And 0% of children having credit card to buy lootbox (My country requires you to be over 18 to have one)
A lot of gas stations and retail stores sell prepaid credit cards as well as gift cards that you can buy with cash.
You can have a debit card in the UK as a fairly young child. I think I got one at 12? I don’t know if there’s specific restrictions on buying in-game currency with them? I don’t know how they’d know though.
The first thing I did when I got a debit card was buy the 18 rated GTA Vice City!
Ever heard of PaySafe "cards"? Every single kid here uses that.
Where I am from kids can get a debit card that can be used online at age 13.
Their parents link the cards. Kids can buy things without consulting a parent each time.
can't tell if this is sarcasm
they can buy pokemon cards. To be honest, I don't think CS:GO or TF2 or the like are pro-gambling. You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.
Look at the "meta-"game mechanics: you play a few games, you get a guaranteed case drop. This circa $3 case could contain anything, a $0.2 skin or a rare $2500 knife. When you open it a casino-like wheel goes over all the items and selects one randomly. There are hundreds of YT/twitch channels that open cases all day long and their target audience is children. It's gambling, and it's gambling for children.
> You learn pretty quickly as a kid that the best way to get good items is through trading, not gambling.
Not if your dad is the one buying you the cards.
I'm honestly really not a fan of the collectable trading card type of games (MtG, Pokemon TCG, yu-gi-oh etc). You have to pay to have a chance of getting a good card, which makes the whole thing pay to win. It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you, without having to pay more for having specific cards that you want to complete your ideal deck.
I personally often go to the huge bins of "shit tier" cards that my local game stores have, because I like to have some pretty cards (I often use them as bookmarks), but I don't play the game itself, so the actual mechanical value of the cards is meaningless to me
EDIT: I feel the same way about things like Warhammer. I don't know about other games, but in Warhammer at least there is a limit on how powerful an overall army can be, so sure it may not look as visually good, but just having tokens that say "squad of soldiers" or "mega death tank of doom" should be perfectly acceptable too
> It should be perfectly acceptable to print off the cards at home ("proxies") so you can actually make a set that works for you
Unless you play Pokemon TCG or MTG competitively at a national/international level, proxy cards are mostly accepted in the community.
More and more people recognise Nintendo and Wizards of the Coast (Hasbro) have money in their eyes in the card games. Pokemon cards are becoming more full-art because that's what sells for crazy markups on third party websites, and MTG are doing crossovers with whoever will sign them a license. They're both playing a risk by moving from old time players (many of whom are now leaving the hobbies) for the sake of some nostalgic "investors".
I just wish I had a local shop with a shitbin. The shops around me just sell packs (when not out of stock) and they're all marked up beyond MSRP. I just want to play the game. I don't care about art, holographic patterns and the like.
On the other hand, whenever people open packs just looking for collectable cards, they flood the market with job lots of regular cards at dirt cheap prices. I managed to get a joblot of 2500+ Pokemon TCG cards for around £20 (lots of duplicates, all regular).
With the second best way being gambling. Doesn't really change anything.
Where do the items used in trading come from? I guess Gambling.
Gambling mechanics is everywhere nowadays, especially in mobile games. It's almost like an industry standard. I think the only solution is to ban all in-game purchases completely.
Would you consider old school coin operated arcades as something that should be banned?
Just curious.
I would like to see a ban on allowing children to play machines like the Wizard of Oz ones, where you drop the coin on a shelf in the hopes it'll push off other coins or cards you need to collect. It sounds like a skill game, and I liked them when I first saw them. But then I saw how people play them with vacant faces, like slot machines. They're casino games, not arcade.
They're an institution in the UK. They're in the arcades at every seaside town, and every kid plays them. Now that I have kids I actually think they're brilliant; for £2 each they taught mine everything they need to know about gambling.
- You sometimes win a bit along the way, but eventually you lose everything.
- The jackpot prizes are only there to lure you in, and you never win them. Towards the middle of the shelf are things like £20 notes. We noticed that one of them was getting quite near the edge, and might actually become winnable, but then the following morning its position had been reset to the back of the shelf.
- It's still fun as long as you're just playing with money you don't mind losing, and not expecting to come out ahead.
They even learned something about company scrip, from the tickets that come out of the machines and the ridiculous exchange rate between tickets and the actual rewards at the prize shop.
I asked my son on the way home if he'd put all his Christmas money and savings into the machine if I let him, and the answer was hell no - maybe a pound, but he didn't want to lose all of his money. Valuable lessons all round.
Not OP, but I would ban the tickets/prizes mechanism.
Depending on how old is “old school” for you, every game in an arcade might be fine.
If we’re talking 90’s Chuck E. Cheese, maybe half the games would be potentially interesting to play without a token payout. The others round to “roll the dice,” where there is no payoff other than a gambler’s variable reward.
I think this also covers whether skill is involved. Like for me, beating my buddy at basketball shots is mildly rewarding, but smashing a button at the right time is not very interesting even if it requires a lot of skill.
Pinball and video games I think are something that can be allowed. Even if the model is slightly predatory in this age. At least you only win game time.
Other types of partly fake skill games surely should be banned from kids. Like crane games where there is some hidden variable. And well anything in same category.
It's not about banning paying to play games, it's about banning the gambling mechanics done through microtransactions.
There is a whole skin stock market for exchanging Chinese Yuan to US Dollar outside of the banking system: https://www.iflow.work/
It's wild how a virtual knife in a 20-year-old shooter can have more volatile market behavior than some national currencies
"It's wild how a virtual knife in a 20-year-old shooter can have more volatile market behavior than some national currencies"
it literally not, not until latest update
its even better performing than stocks, thats why china invested millions into this
> 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.
So high prices induce new supply in a market to relieve shortages and the “economy is in free fall”?
Sounds like it is working as it should. Those with oversight fixing supply in response to price signals when the private system is unable to.
Wouldn’t it be nice if those in charge of the economy in the real world made the same sort of intervention.
The supply of digital knife skins is infinite and free. The only reason they hold any value at all is because a company artificially restricts them.
Doesn’t really tie in to actual markets involving physical item.
> Doesn’t really tie in to actual markets involving physical item.
- A designer brand has admitted to destroying its own products. Coach confirmed that it purposely ripped up bags that were returned to its stores, even if the bags were still in good condition. https://www.bbc.co.uk/newsround/58846711
Monopolies and cartels are also well known for creating fake scarcity. Fake scarcity is bad for the economy and for consumers, only a few profit from fake scarcity at the cost of everybody else.
Isn't it the same with USD to some extent?
only to the extent that they are both artificial. The totality of USD _represents_ the totality of all resources that exist under the control of the USA (ala, the people, gov't, companies etc, as well as any natural resources).
The counterstrike skins don't represent such real life physical resources.
You retelling how money works on how money works comment
USD is human created artificial item, as real as human believe that skins in video games worth something
"The counterstrike skins don't represent such real life physical resources."
it represend steam wallet currency
Not like, say, houses then.
Or shares in Nvidia.
Not really, but it's actually kinda like currency. Imagine if a government suddenly devalued all $500 bills into $100 bills, but every other denomination remained the same.
That’s not really what happens though. What happened was that 500$ bills where so rare in circulation that collectors started paying upwards of 20 100$ to get them. Valve went “yes the 500$ are too rare, we need to fix supply so we’ll start exchanging 5 100$ bills for one 500$ bill”
This had catastrophic impact on people hoarding 500$ expecting their exchange value to remain at the elevated levels.
Not really the same is it. You are confusing a stock and a flow. Currency is exchanged for something material you have to give up.
Government may indeed issue more currency, and does do so every day, but it is in exchange for something the private sector has that it wants for the public service. That isn’t a problem as tax is a percentage and operates as a geometric series - meaning that whatever government issues it gets back exactly the same - unless somebody along the way saves it.
There has to be something available to buy in a currency for it to be issued. As we see in the game.
So a knife-themed cryptocurrency then?
You literally just described fiat currency. Just change company to central bank or government.
You're forgetting the other side of the equation, demand. The reason they have value is the level of demand versus supply. The item has to have some real world value, even if that's just being able to show off.
They're are plenty of things in very short supply, bit no one wants them.
Interesting that a whole economy is based on fake supply constraint. Or is making butterfly knife really hard?
It seems like NFT before NFT.
yeah CS skins is one of the biggest markets of digital-only-aesthetic-items before NFT came around (and now probably still bigger than NFTs). The main thing with NFTs was that there's no "central database", CS skins solely lives in Valve's database.
making a butterfly knife for Valve isn't hard (in the past Steam Customer Service duplicated items lost in scams). It's hard for the players because they have to "gamble" for it through paying keys to open cases.
It's hard as in "it's hard to trick or manipulate the centralized database".
Similarly making USD in a bank account isn't technically hard, but it's fucking hard to get a bank to tweak some numbers in your favour.
it's not a fake supply
CSGO knifes actually currency run by shadow banks providing RMB <-> USD convertion.
Google for "挂刀"
This should be a top level comment, it is the "ah hah" that suddenly makes everything clear.
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 price differences.
I'm surprised the price difference did not disappear if people make that trade.
Source https://github.com/EricZhu-42/SteamTradingSiteTracker/wiki
China notoriously has intense capital controls. It's difficult for ordinary Chinese citizens to take capital out of the country. CS2 items can be bought and sold in both USD and RMB, and can be transferred between Chinese and international accounts. It's not about Steam wallet balances.
Interesting. I'm curious though, assuming I am Chinese and I trade knives for USD - where would I be able to receive USD to evade capital control? Surely not my bank account or Steam wallet. Or is it for people with bank account in both countries? But in that case crypto could be more convenient? I'm puzzled
Both US and CN have a massive player base, they all need to buy games in their own currency
You can buy games with Steam Wallet
You can also buy/sell in-game items with Steam Wallet
Now only if someone invents a commodity with a stable price. Hmm what could that be?
Artificial scarcity has existed for ages. Watches, playing cards, cars, etc.
Selling 10 of something for $1000 instead of 1000 of something for $10 is not new.
Also builds brand value.
I feel watches and cars are different. You cant magically "print" 10000000 Bentley's so supply will be constrained and they are expensive to make. I feel the luxury is more tangible than just being rare.
See the discussion around the supposedly lost Van Gogh painting, eg at https://news.artnet.com/art-world/van-gogh-lmi-group-2602847
Nothing about the painting itself would have changed, but its market value depends very much on whether Van Gogh painted it.
All this froth on the ocean surface is only possible in an economy where household net worth has been inflated to 150 Trillion.
Yeah the measly peasants should have never gotten their hands on such luxuries as game knives skins.
A lot of real economies are based on fake constraints. Or the constraint is a closely held secret that's pretty arbitrary and not based on any grand amount of skill or effort.
It is NFT. But because it's Valve its actually good. Because of reasons.
Yeah if you're paying someone's yearly salary for a tiny patch of cosmetic pixels in a game I basically don't GAF what happens to your money.
We deserve this timeline.
How are kids under 18 paying for stuff like this? What means of payment are they using that their parents don’t notice?
Genuine question, been at least 20 years since I was that age.
Kids aren't the ones spending $12k on rare skins, they're buying keys to open lootboxes.
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.
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.
Could you explain more? I played CS 1.6 back in the day, and then we moved onto CSS, but what is it like these days?
Counter-Strike's pLaYeR eCoNoMy shouldn't have been a thing to begin with.
I'm starting to suspect that market health comes at the expense of people's.
It seems more like a market strategy than an economic collapse. Afterall they control the skin market, and this will lead more players to buy very expensive skins (cheaper than the day before yesterday, but still quite pricey). Also, not all skins went down in price, the red ones from collections with gold skins even increased in value.
Took me sometime to understand why these items can be so expensive, The CS trading market makes NFTs look like child's play.
That's hyperbolic. You had high profile celebrities advertising NFTs, and stuff valued at millions, that's a whole other scale.
Skins have their place when they're modestly priced, as they also have quite a modest impact. But the whole gambling, artificial restrictions and trading is quite suspicious indeed.
Good. Too many game companies are running unregulated casinos aimed at minors with their lootboxes and pay to win mechanics.
People love buying unsecured securities and then being upset when bad things happen
I asked friends who play why would Valve do this. Answers were divided to:
1. Valve wants to avoid regulatory scrutiny over loot boxes
2. Valve wants to limit prices; the Steam marketplace only allows items up to 2500 usd to be traded. By averaging out the item prices (knives drop, covert-class increases) they are able to indirectly limit the usefulness and harmful side effects (money laundering, decentralized liquidity) of 3rd party trading sites
It made the reds (coverts) way more pricier, so all is balanced (somewhat). see here, doubling and more in price: https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/730/MAC-10%20%7C%...
I find it fascinating how the "HN Hivemind" (and yes, I know not a real thing, but the trends seem pretty consistent) is so opposed to kids playing with lootboxes, but also very angry at governments trying to impose age verification.
I'm against lootboxes in general, even for adults. It's a skinner box mechanic.
They are completely unrelated.
Some people are opposed to kids gambling (or gambling in general) - an understandable sentiment even if i dont agree.
Some people are skeptical of the gov't and the implications of proper identification on the web (which is required for age verification). Whether you are pro or anti gambling doesn't make or change this skepticism.
> is so opposed to kids playing with lootboxes
I think the HN hive mind is more opposed to the concept of loot boxes in general. We don't need to go much beyond that. It follows that a puddle of industrial waste would cause trouble if it began to flow downstream.
People Make Games did a story on this market.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g [36m]
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."
What does "factory new" mean? That it... hasn't been scratched? Is that... how Counter Strike works?
Each instance of a CS skin is assigned a random amount of wear between 0 and 1, so two copies of the same skin can be worth more or less money depending on their condition. To be clear the value is fixed, actually using a skin won't make it dirtier. Factory New is the highest tier with a wear value between 0 and 0.07.
The game itself only distinguishes between those ranges of values, but it's possible to query the exact number via an API so I think traders will even price that in (e.g. Factory New 0.02 is worth more than Factory New 0.06).
Valve employs an army of economists (notably Yanis Varoufakis as alumn) to make these decisions. It was certainly purposeful and will balance itself out.
this is what I think. The change is that 10 of the highest-level weapon textures can be traded for a knife texture: the result is that the supply of knife textures goes up, but the supply of high-level weapon textures goes down significantly more.
It's not so much a depreciation of knife textures, as a distribution of this value down the chain of item rarities.
The broader impact is that it creates a lot of uncertainty around valuations in the market. This is probably the most impactful (on valuations) policy change made by Valve in the history of the market. Now there is an increased fear that more similar such changes may be coming down the pipeline.
It is 5 covert skins not 10
>Yanis Varoufakis
I wont google him, but take at your word an assurance that he can be trusted with the highest levels of economic decision making.
> $1.84 billion in value
Correction. $0 in value. Skins do not exist and are worth exactly $0. If you spend money on skins, they are worth… $0. It’s all a large scale grift money incinerator where the only winner is Valve.
+ whatever pleasure you derive from it, ig. I can understand loot box addiction, but paying $20,000 for valve character dress up? Not even like a Peter Griffin player model or something, but a slightly different looking knife? Madness
Persp: tf2 enjoyer
The problem here is that's not only Valve that is a winner (that would be expected and fair as that's their game) but also scam casino operators.
$20,000 for a fake knife!? And I buy an item, a real one, and find later there was a cheaper price by few bucks somewhere else and I feel like an idiot.. crazy!
I can't even imagine how rich someone must be in order for a $20,000 imaginary knife with only cosmetic value to seem like a rational purchase.
They are doing it for speculation. They buy it for 20k and sell for higher to profit
Yeah for a digital item with easy trading it's more like buying a stock vs a physical item which instantly depreciates. Basically holding $20k in an alternative form vs spending $20k.
It is more harmful for those who cannot afford to spend 20K, 2K or even 200 but does anyway out of ignorance or stupidity.
You forgot addiction, which should not be reduced to just ignorance or stupidity.
24mil a year, 20k would be 1 hundredth of your monthly salary.
sounds like money laundering
Thought this might be a hilarious sign of the bubble popping (a run on cs skins) but nope:
> Following Valve's Oct. 22 update to Counter-Strike, the second-highest-tier, Covert (Red), can now be traded up and turned into Knives and Gloves. Essentially, this means that a previously extremely rare and highly sought-after cosmetic is going to be much more obtainable for those who increasingly want it, reducing the value of Knives and Gloves on the open marketplace.
I play on and off. It's crazy hearing people talk about how they've spend thousands on a skin.
No more than someone spending a few thousand on a tiny designer bag that can fit almost nothing inside.
It's a consistent viewpoint to think that those things are more or less equally nuts.
The only difference with the designer bag is that there is scarcity, but that's about it.
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.
I know people that spend gazillions on vintage sneakers. They will literally go and buy some rare designer second hand pair of Nikes or whatever with some scarce design that they only produced a few off. Personally, I wouldn't be that eager to stick my feet into somebody's well worn sneakers. But apparently that's beside the point. Nike actually on purpose feeds that market by coming up with new limited edition designs. These people have enough shoes. They don't buy them because they need another pair of shoes.
The value of money used to be based on gold. Gold has very limited practical value. It actually kind of sucks as a metal because it's not that hard compared to e.g. iron. The main value proposition is that it's pretty and shiny. But people that buy gold don't tend to even look at it. They just store it in a vault. Or worse, they get a digital receipt that proves they own the gold without ever seeing or handling it. The main value of that is that, if you wanted, you could make pretty and shiny things out of the gold bars. And because those pretty and shiny things are valuable, gold is valuable. And therefore people invest in gold. Not to make those things but to be able to sell it to others that might do those things. Of course the vast majority of people buying and selling gold has zero interest in doing that. Most gold ever mined is locked in a vault in bar form and will never be used for anything else than as an intrinsic token of value.
There are a lot of things that have no value beyond subjective esthetics and the group thinking around that. My home country the Netherlands produced a lot of fancy paintings in the seventeenth century. Those are worth a lot now. They are extremely nice according to some. People visit museums to go see them. They are worth tens/hundreds of millions in some cases.
Objectively, most people that visit museums wouldn't be able to tell apart the original from a good replica. And reproducing these things with high fidelity digitally isn't all that hard either. You can find high quality scans of almost any painting for free on the internet. And you would get most of the appreciation/emotion looking at those as you would get by looking at the originals. Of course, most people aren't that into this stuff in any case. But we appreciate these things because other people tell us they are valuable and we take their word for it. The original paintings keep their value mainly because such people keep reassuring us how rare and amazing these things are. That tends to get embarrassing/awkward with forgeries in museums where experts literally have failed to tell the difference.
The value of things whether digital or real is based on social mechanisms for appreciating things. Some things simply are valuable because people agree for whatever irrational reasons that they have value. And then some people buy these things at the market rate because they enjoy having them. Whether that's original art on the wall, some rare sneakers, or a cool skin for a game character that you engage with for many hours while playing the game. The dynamic between the willingness of people to separate with their cash and scarcity is what creates the value.
NFTs are weird mainly because they are digital receipts for something (anything) that has value. They are no different than a paper certificate of authenticity for a painting. It all boils down to the trust people have in the impressive looking stamps/signatures on the paper, or the blockchain shenanigans used to ensure authenticity for the NFT. Of course a lot of NFTs are silly. But in game worlds, ownership of skin is kind of limited as you can't really resell them easily or prove authenticity. Which is something that NFTs addresses. Which is why NFTs became popular in games.
The value of game skins is as irrational as second hand sneakers are or the appreciation for shiny metals. Or gems. Or paintings. But as long as people buy those, they have value.
Unfortunately there was a suicide in china , because of this crash.
> Counter-Strike's player economy
There's a what? I guess once you've maxed out wasted hours of time playing it, you start wasting money too?
Less absurd than NFTs though I guess
> wasted hours of time playing it
What would you dictate that humans do instead to not be wasteful with their time? Comment on threads about games?
They can do whatever they want with their time. Except operate and profit off of make shift casinos and unregulated games of chance.
Why exactly? Why are these games of chance moral only if the government gets a cut?
Regulation also means that children are excluded, debt is not allowed, and all chips can be settled for cash when the player leaves the property. Even the comps are regulated. The majority of casinos in the US are Indian casinos. When they aren't and are taxed by the government those funds are usually used to improve and fund the local area giving the local citizens the ability to decide, through legislation, if it should be continued or outlawed.
Finally, Steam pays taxes in the US, so the government is already "getting a cut." Games of chance are not moral. Unregulated games of chance are flatly evil.
Games of chance are absolutely moral and completely fine when played by adults who are not mentally incapacitated.
Gambling houses make the most money from "adults who are mentally incapacitated"
Fair, but my comments only waste a few minutes of my time, and they're free.
Wasted is a rather strong word and yes, the whole argument is a slippery slope _but_ I can imagine sports that are less about glorifying deadly violence in a very realistic manner - the loot box and real money part is just the bitter cherry on top.
Glorify? This seems way too serious a take on a game that young males play because of a common, innate fascination with guns and soldiers. 99.9999% of them do not turn into manic killers who just love to kill and glorify it.
> 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.
And yet the US does have a serious problem with (mostly) young males turning into manic killers.
I'm reminded of that scene in Michael Moore's Bowling for Columbine where he's asking a concerned adult where the violence comes from, and the concerned adult looks sad and confused and says he doesn't know, even though he's standing in front of a nuclear-tipped missile being assembled at the local nuclear-tipped missile plant.
Financialisation is indirect personal violence instead of physical violence. The US doesn't have a problem with that at any scale, as long as the right kinds of people are doing it.
Any ranked matchmaking game is designed to addict you by the prospect of being ranked as elite. They have a number of insidious methods to keep your ranking low, some are even patented by the game companies themselves!
For example, if someone is getting too high, it’s nothing to pair that person with a known deserter for 1-3 games to drastically slow their progress.
We should probably ban all sports then because it tricks people in wanting to be competitive.
I think you hit a nerve
I don't know, reading? Building something? Exploring the natural world? Sports?
Not to say that all video games are unsubstantive. But the substance in exploring virtual world comes from its uniqueness, not playing de_dust2 for 1000 hours. No other form of entertainment or art is analogous to video games in terms of the maximum time you can spend on it with totally depreciating returns.
Playing de_dust2 for 1000 hours is as reductive as saying playing on a soccer pitch for 1000 hours.
And soccer only has 1 map.
> soccer only has 1 map
Oh that is gold, that's a special kind of "far gone" - to measure real world things by how many "maps" they have
Would you say the same if someone played 1000 hours of a sport?
No. If you play 1000 hours of a sport, you will at least be stronger, more coordinated, more agile. But the downsides are more about repetitive strain injury and the possibility of screwing up your joints.
Different benefits and downsides.
Of course, a lot of guys are suckered into sports-related gambling these days too.
Plus you'll have friends who play sports, rather than the kinds of people who spend all night clicking on each other
How about 1000 hours reading/commenting HN?
dang should enable selling posts and create a secondary market. My posts with the most upvotes can be sold to you and now YOU’RE the famous one!
You don't think that you get better at CS the more you play it? Better coordination, better accuracy, etc?
you don't get better at real life the more you play it
Playing football for 1000 hours doesn't make you better at any other job (i.e real life).
Don't be so close-minded; playing games is not different from any other activity.
only because the jobs of our time are fake.
Playing football or lacrosse is more "real" than working a desk job. For thousands of years, humans had to hunt and make tools and relied on their wits and strength to survive. Survival in the modern day is mostly a question of obedience.
I think the purpose of exploring virtual worlds like quake or counter-strike or something should not be to escape the real world but rather to experience a new kind of physicality. The purpose of playing games should be to engage in a deeper world which is more "real" than the tame one we are ordinarily subjected to.
It's why I am not opposed to video games. I opposed to overplaying video games because you ruin them, they become mundane and predictable.
It's not "more real" or "more useful" just because our ancient ancestors had to do it.
Saddest thing I've heard today
Video gaming has been shown to train some brain areas too. It's definitely better than 1000 hours of Netflix.
That's a very fair take
How about 1000 hours of chess? Or 1000 hours of warhammer? Or D&D?
One may say you make social bonds playing them, but that stands true for video game as well. Speaking for myself, I definitely spent more than 1000 hours on summoner's rift; 15 years later me and my league friends still playing LOL together and chat about all kind of things on a daily basis.
Wow you really hit a nerve, lol - surprised to discover HN has such a large community of CS NPCs