3 ms·
1) People really like skins 2) Unlike basically every other game with paid skins, Valve games let you sell them to other players on an open market for Steam cr
by enragedcacti 3y ago
1) People really like skins
2) Unlike basically every other game with paid skins, Valve games let you sell them to other players on an open market for Steam credit.
Valve takes 5% of each market transaction and many skins hold their value quite well so using a $200 knife for years and years could only end up costing $10 (+ opportunity cost) or so assuming the market stays flat and you will eventually buy $200 of games in the future.
The real losers in the system are the people with gambling addictions opening cases and hoping to get something really good for less than market price. Cases are free drops but cost $2.50 to open and the average market value of what you win is usually less than (value of the case)+$2.50. Because the cases can be sold there's no limit to the amount of gambling one person can do.
https://csroi.com/ https://csroi.com/
- skeaker 3y ago>Valve takes 5% of each market transaction ... on their own community market platform. Valve supports third party stores that don't have a Valve cut, and they freely provide the ability for users to trade items for items with no fees to allow third party stores to work. These systems kick off a whole third angle of businesses being propped up around the exchange of these items and of people doing speculative trades on certain items.
- babypuncher 3y agoThe market where Valve takes a cut of all cosmetics sold also incentivises them to maintain an extreme level of artificial scarcity for the most desirable cosmetics in the game. To me this is infinitely worse than just having a skin shop and/or battlepass.
- dcow 3y agoI bet valve makes more off the hundreds of thousands of $2 transactions than the occasional $100 or $1000 transaction. I mean think about it...