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I get where you're coming from, but this is definitely not the case. Valve recently banned all gambling sites from using their APIs, so they're all shut down by

I get where you're coming from, but this is definitely not the case. Valve recently banned all gambling sites from using their APIs, so they're all shut down by now. And if you refer to crates of random items as gambling, they've also filled in that gap with the Steam Marketplace where you can buy individual items for market-dictated prices from other Steam users, where Valve takes a portion of the money the items are sold for. This business is extremely profitable. Looking at their game Dota 2 for example where they recently hosted the world's largest e-sports tournament, where the pricepool were completely funded by the players of Dota 2 through in-game virtual items. This pricepool were over $20,000,000 USD, funded through in-game purchases where 25% of the items price would go to the pricepool, and the rest would go to Valve. That is $60,000,000 USD that Valve profited in the span of two months, for one of their games, in one of their tournaments. Valve hosts 4 tournaments per year for this game. Looking at the pricepool of their previous tournaments ( http://www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments http://www.esportsearnings.com/tournaments ), we can see that this amount just keeps increasing year after year.

elmigranto 10y ago
My point is that what Valve does with in-game items is similar to what certain mobile games do with time/pay-walls and how casinos exploit certain aspects of our psychology. And if you do not practice this "shady stuff", it is not that profitable… # Crates Crates or doubling, tripling, etc. item's cost. Say I want a certain hat, on average, I'll need to pay multiple times (crate contains 5 other items, but successive crates do not yield duplicates in most recent Dota 2 versions, so worst case you pay 6 times a price). # Steam Marketplace Adds at least 30% to item's cost, since you buy with real-world dollars, but sell for "Valve Dollars" (only usable in Steam, no withdrawals), this is effectively paying more for a single item (at least 30% more expensive which is Valve's margin for Steam purchases of non-Valve titles). In addition, Valve makes purchases non-tradable via Marketplace for a period of time (multiple months, usually) since original purchases for "preventing fraud". I see it as "incentivising gambling with crates", though. # Third-party site These were probably shut down because they involved real money, so Vavle could be potentially helping organise casino/bookmaking businesses from legal standpoint. It's all fine with Steam Money from marketplace. So, yes, it is extremely profitable, probably orders of magnitude more profitable than "honest" selling where transaction is "pay money, receive item". # Regarding TI It is incredible how much money it made. It is as incredible as how Valve decided to split matchmaking pool for months with International Ranked to boost prize pool, so you had to pay $10 to go into faster queue.

elmigranto 10y ago

My point is that what Valve does with in-game items is similar to what certain mobile games do with time/pay-walls and how casinos exploit certain aspects of our psychology. And if you do not practice this "shady stuff", it is not that profitable… # Crates Crates or doubling, tripling, etc. item's cost. Say I want a certain hat, on average, I'll need to pay multiple times (crate contains 5 other items, but successive crates do not yield duplicates in most recent Dota 2 versions, so worst case you pay 6 times a price). # Steam Marketplace Adds at least 30% to item's cost, since you buy with real-world dollars, but sell for "Valve Dollars" (only usable in Steam, no withdrawals), this is effectively paying more for a single item (at least 30% more expensive which is Valve's margin for Steam purchases of non-Valve titles). In addition, Valve makes purchases non-tradable via Marketplace for a period of time (multiple months, usually) since original purchases for "preventing fraud". I see it as "incentivising gambling with crates", though. # Third-party site These were probably shut down because they involved real money, so Vavle could be potentially helping organise casino/bookmaking businesses from legal standpoint. It's all fine with Steam Money from marketplace. So, yes, it is extremely profitable, probably orders of magnitude more profitable than "honest" selling where transaction is "pay money, receive item". # Regarding TI It is incredible how much money it made. It is as incredible as how Valve decided to split matchmaking pool for months with International Ranked to boost prize pool, so you had to pay $10 to go into faster queue.