6 ms·

Off-topic: this is genuinely cool, along with many things Valve do, but Valve does generate a significant amount from gambling (and underaged gambling) so I won

Off-topic: this is genuinely cool, along with many things Valve do, but Valve does generate a significant amount from gambling (and underaged gambling) so I won't give a complete pass to being a great company.

doctorpangloss 2y ago
This is a little complicated. There are many companies that sell gambling products. Nothing special about that. The tragedy is when you list your game on Steam and it gets popular, you are paying Valve 30% for the privilege of finding new users for CSGO and DOTA2. That is how they make money.
- almatabata 2y ago
  And with skin sales. Remember that Valve charges a Tax on every item sale. Every time you sell an Item like a skin on the steam market, valve takes a cut. If they crackdown on the gambling it will impact their bottom line. As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa super team. Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that they could do more to protect against underage gambling.
  - SXX 2y ago
    I guess it will sounds like I being Valve advocate here, but it's just not only a bottom line. Valve simply dont have headcount to crackdown on many things and neither they have headcount to do lots of predatory stuff too. Valve is under 400 people and wast majority of them do not work on Steam or specific game like CSGO. Likely each project support team is like 30-50 people at most. To compare numbers for other companies in 2023-2024: * Epic Games - 4000 * Nintendo - 7,724 * Sony Interactive Entertainment - 12,700 * Take-Two Interactive - 12,371 * Electronic Arts - 13,700 * Activision Blizzard - 17,000 * Mircosoft Gaming - 20,100 Might be they do have to go to hire 100 more people to solve this problem and might be it's fully their fault, but expectations many people have of this certainly rich, but small company are not realistic.
    - Ekaros 2y ago
      Also looking at things like pirate sites, it would be never ending process. Close one and lock the their inventories and 3 will popup somewhere else. It is unlikely to be solvable issue.
      - almatabata 2y ago
        Just because you cannot "solve" an issue, does not mean you should do nothing. By that logic valve should not implement VAC, because after all, cheaters will always find a way. They play the anti-cheat game of cat and mouse, because if they do not, users will stop playing. No one wants to play with cheaters unless they are cheating. They could definitely invest some resources into this. But they have no monetarily incentive thus they do nothing. I fully expect legal action or fear of it, will eventually make them do something.
    - almatabata 2y ago
      They can definitely hire 2-5 people to do something, and at least try to crack down.
  - jmb99 2y ago
    > As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. Counter strike cases are a gambling product. They cost money to buy, they cost money to open, and they reward with an item worth real money. This is indisputable, and arguing otherwise is either in bad faith or due to ignorance of the platform and surrounding ecosystem. Valve wouldn’t be making over a billion dollars a year on case openings alone if the outcome of opening a case was worthless 100% of the time.
- beeflet 2y ago
  Yeah the 30% cut is insane, and its surprising to me that game publishers tolerate it under steam. But if you look at the PC games market, you can clearly be successful doing the "self publish" route like Minecraft did. I think just means that valve has turned their DRM into a value-add for the consumer with cloud backups and item trading and such convenience features. And I say this as someone who uses GOG. You look at other competitors like Epic Games Store or EA or whatever and the user interface is bloated and slow, and it is just a pain to use.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Publishers have discovered that pc gamers prefer Steam over all other platforms. Basically all the big publishers are back on Steam or entering it. After trying to manage outside.
    - softawre 2y ago
      Which is true because people already have large Steam game libraries. I barely game anymore but I must have 3000 games in Steam. Epic is gnawing at the lead, at least with me, as they give out a free game every week. I must have 300 games in Epic - I've even paid for a few.
  - ZeWaka 2y ago
    Traditional publishers before Steam took even more - this is why companies tolerate it.
  - account42 2y ago
    Minecraft is the exception that proves the rule. You really need to get lucky to make it big without being on Steam.
    - fhars 2y ago
      From what I gather about the game market, you need to get lucky to make it big being on Steam, too.
MonitorBird 2y ago
Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without spending it? In that case isn't the entire game industry guilty of trying to rip money from the credit cards of unsuspecting parents? Isn't the entire modern web just a tool to suck cash out of cards, or try and get your card sucked? What are we talking about here. I cut my teeth on CS:S, but haven't played much after that. I know the newer games have lootbox mechanics, but I assumed it was for items you could potentially grind? Just like.. every other modern online multiplayer money sucking game that exists. Warframe, Fortnite, Roblox, I dunno. Everything these days seems to be a bloodsucker. Steam gets a full pass from me, I'm not a prude.
- pityJuke 2y ago
  > Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without spending it? Critically, Valve allows you to trade items. This results in a couple of downstream effects: 1. Items have real-world value because they can be traded for money outside of Steam. Multiple sites exist for people to convert items into real-world money (certain rare items have been sold for >$1m [0]). 2. As these items have value, they can serve as a surrogate for money in casinos, or for sports betting. 3. This can even lead to money laundering [1]. As such, skins should be considered money, but the sites running these services don't. Therefore, it is trivial for a child to walk into a game store, buy Steam credit, use that credit to buy skins, and then spend that money on literal gambling (as very few sites have KYC). I know because I've actively partaken in it as a child. Even cryptocurrency is harder: most legitimate exchanges attempt to do identity validation. Some video resources that might be useful: - Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y - People Make Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g [0]: https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-over-1-million https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o... [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50262447 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50262447
  - chipgap98 2y ago
    And Valve should get rid of item trading because it could potentially be used this way? Edit: this is a genuine question. What is the solution here?
beeflet 2y ago
Having played TF2 and such as a kid, the bottleneck was always asking your parents for their credit card or getting steam cards/vanilla credit cards for your birthday. I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top trumps" and pokemon cards and such). Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes. I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's savings into a game.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  >Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes. I think that's more because people don't want to teach children about sex, while people do demonstrate what gambling is early on. Ones much more complex and if you're letting a kid find their own answers unguided, that can potentially be disasterous. That's not even mentioning theneffect of instilling shame on your own biological body and treating parts of it as taboo. If parents refuse to talk about something, it can be taken as either a bad thing, a scary thing, or a complicated thing.
  - Funes- 2y ago
    >I think that's more because people don't want to teach children about sex Come on now. It's hard to find anything more immediately exciting and alluring than sex, especially for teenagers. The biological imperatives and inclinations are too strong regarding sex for virtually everyone, compared to anything related to gambling. And OP is absolutely right that the barrier to entry is a great deterrent in the case of gambling, as well. Just based on that alone, easy-access, sex-related stuff is always going to have a potentially greater effect on almost anyone, regardless of their previous knowledge about it or warnings received by other people during their childhood. >people do demonstrate what gambling is early on Talk about going out on a limb. What are you basing this affirmation on? I don't see any parents lending any word of advice to their children about gambling-like activities, in any case, as most of them indulge in those themselves, let alone their own kids.
culi 2y ago
Also they still take a huge cut of profits from game sales. That's 30% of each sale going to the platform (compared to 12% by Epic). Indie game devs suffer if people don't opt to buy directly or from platforms like itch.io But they have a near-monopoly on the pc gaming market so selling on Steam is a must
- dralley 2y ago
  At least they're funding a lot of useful open source development with that money pile.
- johnnyanmac 2y ago
  It's okay, if you're a AAA company with something like like 25-50m in sales, y9u get a tax cut to 20% When you put it that way, the model makes so much more sense to matching how the US operates.
- jsheard 2y ago
  In a sense it's worse than that - when the mega-publishers started leaving Steam in favor of their own stores with better margins, Valve conceded by introducing a tiered system where their cut drops to 25% after $10M in sales and again to 20% after $50M in sales. It's deliberately structured to give a discount to the mega-corps which least need it (EA, Ubisoft, etc) while ensuring that indies with no leverage over Valve mostly remain on the 30% bracket. Even more ironically those indies typically use negligible amounts of Steams infrastructure, while the AAA games which enjoy the 20% revenue share are the ones regularly pushing 200GB downloads though Steams servers.
- CodeArtisan 2y ago
  30% may be a lot but you get more than a store page; - anticheat - voice chat, friend list, ... - matchmaking - marketplace for mods, maps, skins, ... - clips and videos - forums/ discussion board - cloud saves - rankings An indie would have to implement and host those by itself or rely on third party services. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/ https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/
  - 2y ago
kibwen 2y ago
Especially relevant to this conversation is that TF2 is the game that single-handedly popularized the lootbox model outside of Korea.
- rightbyte 2y ago
  Ye it was unfortunate. I remember at the time I thought it was silly but innocent. I don't think I even knew you could buy loot boxes for money.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
Also, their primary reason for existence is to add DRM to software.
- ranger207 2y ago
  Well, no, Steam provides a bunch of services to gamedevs that might be tied to an account, like matchmaking or mod support. But if the games don't use that they're not encumbered. I've got a bunch of hours in KSP that aren't on my account because I launched the exe through the CKAN mod manager rather than Steam

doctorpangloss 2y ago

This is a little complicated. There are many companies that sell gambling products. Nothing special about that. The tragedy is when you list your game on Steam and it gets popular, you are paying Valve 30% for the privilege of finding new users for CSGO and DOTA2. That is how they make money.

almatabata 2y ago
And with skin sales. Remember that Valve charges a Tax on every item sale. Every time you sell an Item like a skin on the steam market, valve takes a cut. If they crackdown on the gambling it will impact their bottom line. As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. They are not like EA with their predatory Fifa super team. Still a lot of people, including journalists, find that they could do more to protect against underage gambling.
- SXX 2y ago
  I guess it will sounds like I being Valve advocate here, but it's just not only a bottom line. Valve simply dont have headcount to crackdown on many things and neither they have headcount to do lots of predatory stuff too. Valve is under 400 people and wast majority of them do not work on Steam or specific game like CSGO. Likely each project support team is like 30-50 people at most. To compare numbers for other companies in 2023-2024: * Epic Games - 4000 * Nintendo - 7,724 * Sony Interactive Entertainment - 12,700 * Take-Two Interactive - 12,371 * Electronic Arts - 13,700 * Activision Blizzard - 17,000 * Mircosoft Gaming - 20,100 Might be they do have to go to hire 100 more people to solve this problem and might be it's fully their fault, but expectations many people have of this certainly rich, but small company are not realistic.
  - Ekaros 2y ago
    Also looking at things like pirate sites, it would be never ending process. Close one and lock the their inventories and 3 will popup somewhere else. It is unlikely to be solvable issue.
    - almatabata 2y ago
      Just because you cannot "solve" an issue, does not mean you should do nothing. By that logic valve should not implement VAC, because after all, cheaters will always find a way. They play the anti-cheat game of cat and mouse, because if they do not, users will stop playing. No one wants to play with cheaters unless they are cheating. They could definitely invest some resources into this. But they have no monetarily incentive thus they do nothing. I fully expect legal action or fear of it, will eventually make them do something.
  - almatabata 2y ago
    They can definitely hire 2-5 people to do something, and at least try to crack down.
- jmb99 2y ago
  > As you say, Valve does not directly promote gambling products. Counter strike cases are a gambling product. They cost money to buy, they cost money to open, and they reward with an item worth real money. This is indisputable, and arguing otherwise is either in bad faith or due to ignorance of the platform and surrounding ecosystem. Valve wouldn’t be making over a billion dollars a year on case openings alone if the outcome of opening a case was worthless 100% of the time.
beeflet 2y ago
Yeah the 30% cut is insane, and its surprising to me that game publishers tolerate it under steam. But if you look at the PC games market, you can clearly be successful doing the "self publish" route like Minecraft did. I think just means that valve has turned their DRM into a value-add for the consumer with cloud backups and item trading and such convenience features. And I say this as someone who uses GOG. You look at other competitors like Epic Games Store or EA or whatever and the user interface is bloated and slow, and it is just a pain to use.
- Ekaros 2y ago
  Publishers have discovered that pc gamers prefer Steam over all other platforms. Basically all the big publishers are back on Steam or entering it. After trying to manage outside.
  - softawre 2y ago
    Which is true because people already have large Steam game libraries. I barely game anymore but I must have 3000 games in Steam. Epic is gnawing at the lead, at least with me, as they give out a free game every week. I must have 300 games in Epic - I've even paid for a few.
- ZeWaka 2y ago
  Traditional publishers before Steam took even more - this is why companies tolerate it.
- account42 2y ago
  Minecraft is the exception that proves the rule. You really need to get lucky to make it big without being on Steam.
  - fhars 2y ago
    From what I gather about the game market, you need to get lucky to make it big being on Steam, too.

MonitorBird 2y ago

Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without spending it? In that case isn't the entire game industry guilty of trying to rip money from the credit cards of unsuspecting parents? Isn't the entire modern web just a tool to suck cash out of cards, or try and get your card sucked? What are we talking about here. I cut my teeth on CS:S, but haven't played much after that. I know the newer games have lootbox mechanics, but I assumed it was for items you could potentially grind? Just like.. every other modern online multiplayer money sucking game that exists. Warframe, Fortnite, Roblox, I dunno. Everything these days seems to be a bloodsucker. Steam gets a full pass from me, I'm not a prude.

pityJuke 2y ago
> Underage gambling in the sense of spending real money to redeem things that may be impossible to redeem without spending it? Critically, Valve allows you to trade items. This results in a couple of downstream effects: 1. Items have real-world value because they can be traded for money outside of Steam. Multiple sites exist for people to convert items into real-world money (certain rare items have been sold for >$1m [0]). 2. As these items have value, they can serve as a surrogate for money in casinos, or for sports betting. 3. This can even lead to money laundering [1]. As such, skins should be considered money, but the sites running these services don't. Therefore, it is trivial for a child to walk into a game store, buy Steam credit, use that credit to buy skins, and then spend that money on literal gambling (as very few sites have KYC). I know because I've actively partaken in it as a child. Even cryptocurrency is harder: most legitimate exchanges attempt to do identity validation. Some video resources that might be useful: - Coffeezilla: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=13eiDhuvM6Y - People Make Games: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMmNy11Mn7g [0]: https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-over-1-million https://www.ign.com/articles/counter-strike-skin-sells-for-o... [1]: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50262447 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-50262447
- chipgap98 2y ago
  And Valve should get rid of item trading because it could potentially be used this way? Edit: this is a genuine question. What is the solution here?

beeflet 2y ago

Having played TF2 and such as a kid, the bottleneck was always asking your parents for their credit card or getting steam cards/vanilla credit cards for your birthday. I think it's hard to form a gambling addiction if you don't really have any money for gambling. You learn pretty fast that you get better value trading than gambling. I don't see how its much worse than baseball cards (we also had "top trumps" and pokemon cards and such). Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes. I think the real victims of gambling in games are usually adults who have a much greater ability to dump their life's savings into a game.

johnnyanmac 2y ago
>Looking back on my childhood, I think the effect of internet porn far outweighed the effect of gambling-adjacent stuff like loot boxes. I think that's more because people don't want to teach children about sex, while people do demonstrate what gambling is early on. Ones much more complex and if you're letting a kid find their own answers unguided, that can potentially be disasterous. That's not even mentioning theneffect of instilling shame on your own biological body and treating parts of it as taboo. If parents refuse to talk about something, it can be taken as either a bad thing, a scary thing, or a complicated thing.
- Funes- 2y ago
  >I think that's more because people don't want to teach children about sex Come on now. It's hard to find anything more immediately exciting and alluring than sex, especially for teenagers. The biological imperatives and inclinations are too strong regarding sex for virtually everyone, compared to anything related to gambling. And OP is absolutely right that the barrier to entry is a great deterrent in the case of gambling, as well. Just based on that alone, easy-access, sex-related stuff is always going to have a potentially greater effect on almost anyone, regardless of their previous knowledge about it or warnings received by other people during their childhood. >people do demonstrate what gambling is early on Talk about going out on a limb. What are you basing this affirmation on? I don't see any parents lending any word of advice to their children about gambling-like activities, in any case, as most of them indulge in those themselves, let alone their own kids.

culi 2y ago

Also they still take a huge cut of profits from game sales. That's 30% of each sale going to the platform (compared to 12% by Epic). Indie game devs suffer if people don't opt to buy directly or from platforms like itch.io But they have a near-monopoly on the pc gaming market so selling on Steam is a must

dralley 2y ago
At least they're funding a lot of useful open source development with that money pile.
johnnyanmac 2y ago
It's okay, if you're a AAA company with something like like 25-50m in sales, y9u get a tax cut to 20% When you put it that way, the model makes so much more sense to matching how the US operates.
jsheard 2y ago
In a sense it's worse than that - when the mega-publishers started leaving Steam in favor of their own stores with better margins, Valve conceded by introducing a tiered system where their cut drops to 25% after $10M in sales and again to 20% after $50M in sales. It's deliberately structured to give a discount to the mega-corps which least need it (EA, Ubisoft, etc) while ensuring that indies with no leverage over Valve mostly remain on the 30% bracket. Even more ironically those indies typically use negligible amounts of Steams infrastructure, while the AAA games which enjoy the 20% revenue share are the ones regularly pushing 200GB downloads though Steams servers.
CodeArtisan 2y ago
30% may be a lot but you get more than a store page; - anticheat - voice chat, friend list, ... - matchmaking - marketplace for mods, maps, skins, ... - clips and videos - forums/ discussion board - cloud saves - rankings An indie would have to implement and host those by itself or rely on third party services. https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/ https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/features/
- 2y ago

kibwen 2y ago

Especially relevant to this conversation is that TF2 is the game that single-handedly popularized the lootbox model outside of Korea.

rightbyte 2y ago
Ye it was unfortunate. I remember at the time I thought it was silly but innocent. I don't think I even knew you could buy loot boxes for money.

thaumasiotes 2y ago

Also, their primary reason for existence is to add DRM to software.

ranger207 2y ago
Well, no, Steam provides a bunch of services to gamedevs that might be tied to an account, like matchmaking or mod support. But if the games don't use that they're not encumbered. I've got a bunch of hours in KSP that aren't on my account because I launched the exe through the CKAN mod manager rather than Steam