7 ms·

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

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.

uvaursi 1y ago
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?
- jayd16 1y ago
  Its about showing off to other players. You can still do local game mods just fine but that's not what people are after.
  - ehnto 1y ago
    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.
    - eru 1y ago
      And making it cheaper wouldn't fix anything, I guess?
      - close04 1y ago
        Making status symbols cheaper means they're no longer exclusive or grant status. So people go looking for other exclusive status symbols.
      - ehnto 1y ago
        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.
    - friedtofu 1y ago
      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.
      - ehnto 1y ago
        Huh, I wonder what my steamID length was. I would have signed up very early. I will have to check!
    - jayd16 1y ago
      > Which is an easy technical problem to solve Where do people get this impression? It's not trivial to build user comments on a web page let alone a proper chat app but people think it's easy to share game assets for some reason.
      - ehnto 1y ago
        It's really not that crazy. You log onto a server, the server communicates your skins to the other clients. Counter strike itself literally did this in the 2000s, it was removed. Modders for other games working for free figured it out. Games used to automatically download maps and skins in a bunch of Valve games as well as other games. I would also consider building comments into a webpage pretty trivial, it was like the second thing I did when teaching myself web applications years ago. I bet it's harder in modern frameworks than it used to be, but that doesn't make it a hard problem, we just surrounded an easy problem with more difficult but unrelated problems.
  - formerly_proven 1y ago
    So-called skin changers (which modify what skins you yourself see in-game) are actually considered bannable cheats.
    - _cenw 1y ago
      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.
      - close04 1y ago
        > 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.
        _cenw 1y ago
        sv_pure specifically actually allows the server admin to allow selective model/material swaps.
        close04 1y ago
        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.
        _cenw 1y ago
        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.
    - 1y ago
  - bravetraveler 1y ago
    > 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.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- renewiltord 1y ago
  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.
- nottorp 1y ago
  It really depends on playing the games for fun or to replace social interaction. Most lootbox gambling apps are targeted towards the latter use.
- bilekas 1y ago
  > 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.
  - justacrow 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - bilekas 1y ago
      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.
      - computerex 1y ago
        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.
        rightbyte 1y ago
        > 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?
- lolitsobvious 1y ago
  [flagged]
- sundarurfriend 1y ago
  I see people doing this a lot in Deadlock, Valve's next game that's in pre-release stage now. There are all sorts weird and fun skins people play with through mods, some of them definitely not copyright-friendly. I wonder how Valve will handle this once the game is ready to be released - will they just blanket ban the mods? (seems likely, and the community is even probably ready for it so will not be too pissed off at the move.) Or will their monetization route be something else this time, not "hats" like usual? (I'm hoping so, although I can't imagine what else it could be without being pay2win.)
  - skeaker 1y ago
    All Source games, not just Deadlock, did and still somewhat do have a strong modding scene. The way it's handled now is that official Valve-hosted servers have a config option called sv_pure set that prevents most mod .vpk files from loading on connecting clients (though some things like custom HuDs are whitelisted by this system). Once Deadlock gets paid cosmetics you can expect sv_pure to be turned on for Valve servers, which 99% of the playerbase will exclusively play on.
    - sundarurfriend 1y ago
      What's the other 1%? For eg., in Dota 2, if I create a private lobby, would that allow the mod vpk files? Or only for local bot matches? Or some other more involved scenario?
      - skeaker 1y ago
        Not sure about Dota specifically but for e.g. TF2 any non-Valve-server game had pure off by default. That does mean bot matches or private lobbies. You could hop into a community server and run your mods fine right now if you wanted.
- dataangel 1y ago
  That era was nice but it has a different problem. People will pearl clutch about kids getting exposed to someone's custom skin making their character nude, or putting curse words on the side of a gun or whatever.
- Cthulhu_ 1y ago
  > Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections? Isn't most of this trading done on 3rd party services though? I mean sure, Valve is indirectly responsible for allowing trading of rewards like this, but they don't control the market values themselves and only profit indirectly from it. Which does make me wonder about their other popular collectible game, TF2 - they don't update it, like, ever, but it's still popular and they can potentially make huge amounts of money from it. But they can from the Half-Life franchise too. TL;DR I don't really understand Valve, but it doesn't really matter because they're swimming in money regardless.
- drchickensalad 1y ago
  That doesn't get shown publicly for everyone else watching you.
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  Still doable. Here's modded Morrowind in 2025 running on the FOSS OpenMW engine[0]. Enemy Territory is also still going with ET: Legacy. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I
cornholio 1y ago
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.
- tetrisgm 1y ago
  They crashed the premium market and resell value. Prices down. It’s a side effect, but the direct effect to the user.
  - cornholio 1y ago
    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.
    - tetrisgm 1y ago
      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.
Giorgi 1y ago
Is not that their parent's job?
- phatfish 1y ago
  Society raises children, it's not fair to expect parents to police everything their child does. I agree often parents should be more responsible and not always take the easy way out. But expecting them to individually fight billion dollar corporations that deliberately court children with damaging addictive services is asking too much.
  - lanfeust6 1y ago
    You can monitor and restrict Steam usage with parental controls. This is no more unfeasible than WiFi and device time limits, and last I checked, children don't carry a credit card. What's the mystery here? An 8 year old is not accruing bitcoin to buy skins. Meanwhile you have users here that will tell you that refusing to give their kids smartphone or even any video game is not that hard, but it seems needsly restrictive.
    - gquere 1y ago
      AFAIK you don't need a credit card linked to the account, you can get in-store credit from selling the guaranteed drop items from playing a few matches, this is enough to get you started trading.
      - lanfeust6 1y ago
        That sounds like a pittance. Either way they would be playing with money they didn't put in themselves.
        mrguyorama 1y ago
        It isn't a pittance. It's literally "The first hit is free". The sketchy gambling sites spot you bonus skins and stuff for the same reason. It doesn't matter, they don't actually have to ever pay out, so they can just give you fake money to get you addicted.
pryce 1y ago
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.
- pprotas 1y ago
  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
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    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).
- breppp 1y ago
  Probably the biggest possible investment for quantum computing today is all the abandoned bitcoins wallets ripe for taking
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    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.
    - toenail 1y ago
      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.
gquere 1y ago
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.
frenzcan 1y ago
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.
- wildzzz 1y ago
  The quickest way to end it would be to ban gifting skins. You'd be allowed to buy and sell skins in the Valve marketplace where market caps could be in place but no more private sales. Of course you could privately buy an account that has possession of the skins you want but that would add substantial obstacles to the private market.
GeoAtreides 1y ago
>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.
- tetrisgm 1y ago
  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
  - GeoAtreides 1y ago
    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.
    - tetrisgm 1y ago
      Same as Roblox, Fortnite, Angry Birds, and every other F2P game
      - GeoAtreides 1y ago
        Yeah, well, fuck them too.
  - kakacik 1y ago
    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.
nubinetwork 1y ago
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.
crossroadsguy 1y ago
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)
- ndriscoll 1y ago
  CS 1.6 ran just fine for me just now on NixOS. Literally just clicked install in Steam and ran it. Aren't Macs incapable of running most games? Get a $150-200 n150 mini PC and install Linux and it should run most things before like 2010 (and probably later) at 4k 60 fps while sipping like 10 W and running completely silently.
  - crossroadsguy 1y ago
    Thing is I don’t buy devices more than I absolutely need so that’s just a phone and a laptop. I will try this with NixOS because I have never tried NixOS in the first place. Brew has been enough so never tried anything else and also a lot of FOSS tools I use on my mac pro treat Brew as some kind of standard so that’s there.
    - ndriscoll 1y ago
      FYI NixOS is more of a power user distribution (the draw is it's driven by declarative configuration management). Something like Bazzite is more targeted for e.g. gamers and may be more appropriate if you want a more off the shelf experience (I don't have experience with it but see it discussed a lot). If you only have a mac you might not have much luck though. The n150 mini PC suggestion is because they really punch above their weight for being so cheap if you otherwise don't have usable hardware and want to play older/less demanding games anyway. They also make for extremely snappy workstations (on Linux. They come with Windows 11 which is super laggy). And they're like 2 inches * 2 inches * 1 inch, so tiny. If you're doing anything other than AI or something like video editing, they're a fantastic value.
SwtCyber 1y ago
Bringing prices down and making rare items more accessible feels like a step toward re-centering the game around, well… the GAME
ho_schi 1y ago
Same here. I play the game happily. I would prefer to switch back to the good old "This games costs 50 $" which will also harm cheating. Maintain it and release sometimes an upgrade for a fair sum, keep the old one playable. It shall not be a marketplace for gambling and cheaters.
grapesodaaaaa 1y ago
I have been playing since 1.5 and agree. I personally don’t care at all about skins, and just want to play the game. It’s fine to have some cosmetics, but the economy Valve had created brought so much toxicity to the game.

uvaursi 1y ago

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?

jayd16 1y ago
Its about showing off to other players. You can still do local game mods just fine but that's not what people are after.
- ehnto 1y ago
  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.
  - eru 1y ago
    And making it cheaper wouldn't fix anything, I guess?
    - close04 1y ago
      Making status symbols cheaper means they're no longer exclusive or grant status. So people go looking for other exclusive status symbols.
    - ehnto 1y ago
      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.
  - friedtofu 1y ago
    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.
    - ehnto 1y ago
      Huh, I wonder what my steamID length was. I would have signed up very early. I will have to check!
  - jayd16 1y ago
    > Which is an easy technical problem to solve Where do people get this impression? It's not trivial to build user comments on a web page let alone a proper chat app but people think it's easy to share game assets for some reason.
    - ehnto 1y ago
      It's really not that crazy. You log onto a server, the server communicates your skins to the other clients. Counter strike itself literally did this in the 2000s, it was removed. Modders for other games working for free figured it out. Games used to automatically download maps and skins in a bunch of Valve games as well as other games. I would also consider building comments into a webpage pretty trivial, it was like the second thing I did when teaching myself web applications years ago. I bet it's harder in modern frameworks than it used to be, but that doesn't make it a hard problem, we just surrounded an easy problem with more difficult but unrelated problems.
- formerly_proven 1y ago
  So-called skin changers (which modify what skins you yourself see in-game) are actually considered bannable cheats.
  - _cenw 1y ago
    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.
    - close04 1y ago
      > 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.
      - _cenw 1y ago
        sv_pure specifically actually allows the server admin to allow selective model/material swaps.
        close04 1y ago
        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.
        _cenw 1y ago
        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.
  - 1y ago
- bravetraveler 1y ago
  > 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.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
renewiltord 1y ago
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.
nottorp 1y ago
It really depends on playing the games for fun or to replace social interaction. Most lootbox gambling apps are targeted towards the latter use.
bilekas 1y ago
> 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.
- justacrow 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - bilekas 1y ago
    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.
    - computerex 1y ago
      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.
      - rightbyte 1y ago
        > 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?
lolitsobvious 1y ago
[flagged]
sundarurfriend 1y ago
I see people doing this a lot in Deadlock, Valve's next game that's in pre-release stage now. There are all sorts weird and fun skins people play with through mods, some of them definitely not copyright-friendly. I wonder how Valve will handle this once the game is ready to be released - will they just blanket ban the mods? (seems likely, and the community is even probably ready for it so will not be too pissed off at the move.) Or will their monetization route be something else this time, not "hats" like usual? (I'm hoping so, although I can't imagine what else it could be without being pay2win.)
- skeaker 1y ago
  All Source games, not just Deadlock, did and still somewhat do have a strong modding scene. The way it's handled now is that official Valve-hosted servers have a config option called sv_pure set that prevents most mod .vpk files from loading on connecting clients (though some things like custom HuDs are whitelisted by this system). Once Deadlock gets paid cosmetics you can expect sv_pure to be turned on for Valve servers, which 99% of the playerbase will exclusively play on.
  - sundarurfriend 1y ago
    What's the other 1%? For eg., in Dota 2, if I create a private lobby, would that allow the mod vpk files? Or only for local bot matches? Or some other more involved scenario?
    - skeaker 1y ago
      Not sure about Dota specifically but for e.g. TF2 any non-Valve-server game had pure off by default. That does mean bot matches or private lobbies. You could hop into a community server and run your mods fine right now if you wanted.
dataangel 1y ago
That era was nice but it has a different problem. People will pearl clutch about kids getting exposed to someone's custom skin making their character nude, or putting curse words on the side of a gun or whatever.
Cthulhu_ 1y ago
> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections? Isn't most of this trading done on 3rd party services though? I mean sure, Valve is indirectly responsible for allowing trading of rewards like this, but they don't control the market values themselves and only profit indirectly from it. Which does make me wonder about their other popular collectible game, TF2 - they don't update it, like, ever, but it's still popular and they can potentially make huge amounts of money from it. But they can from the Half-Life franchise too. TL;DR I don't really understand Valve, but it doesn't really matter because they're swimming in money regardless.
drchickensalad 1y ago
That doesn't get shown publicly for everyone else watching you.
ndriscoll 1y ago
Still doable. Here's modded Morrowind in 2025 running on the FOSS OpenMW engine[0]. Enemy Territory is also still going with ET: Legacy. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9Hv-46CCd9I

cornholio 1y ago

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.

tetrisgm 1y ago
They crashed the premium market and resell value. Prices down. It’s a side effect, but the direct effect to the user.
- cornholio 1y ago
  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.
  - tetrisgm 1y ago
    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.

Giorgi 1y ago

Is not that their parent's job?

phatfish 1y ago
Society raises children, it's not fair to expect parents to police everything their child does. I agree often parents should be more responsible and not always take the easy way out. But expecting them to individually fight billion dollar corporations that deliberately court children with damaging addictive services is asking too much.
- lanfeust6 1y ago
  You can monitor and restrict Steam usage with parental controls. This is no more unfeasible than WiFi and device time limits, and last I checked, children don't carry a credit card. What's the mystery here? An 8 year old is not accruing bitcoin to buy skins. Meanwhile you have users here that will tell you that refusing to give their kids smartphone or even any video game is not that hard, but it seems needsly restrictive.
  - gquere 1y ago
    AFAIK you don't need a credit card linked to the account, you can get in-store credit from selling the guaranteed drop items from playing a few matches, this is enough to get you started trading.
    - lanfeust6 1y ago
      That sounds like a pittance. Either way they would be playing with money they didn't put in themselves.
      - mrguyorama 1y ago
        It isn't a pittance. It's literally "The first hit is free". The sketchy gambling sites spot you bonus skins and stuff for the same reason. It doesn't matter, they don't actually have to ever pay out, so they can just give you fake money to get you addicted.

pryce 1y ago

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.

pprotas 1y ago
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
- rkomorn 1y ago
  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).
breppp 1y ago
Probably the biggest possible investment for quantum computing today is all the abandoned bitcoins wallets ripe for taking
- rkomorn 1y ago
  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.
  - toenail 1y ago
    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.

gquere 1y ago

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.

frenzcan 1y ago

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.

wildzzz 1y ago
The quickest way to end it would be to ban gifting skins. You'd be allowed to buy and sell skins in the Valve marketplace where market caps could be in place but no more private sales. Of course you could privately buy an account that has possession of the skins you want but that would add substantial obstacles to the private market.

GeoAtreides 1y ago

>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.

tetrisgm 1y ago
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
- GeoAtreides 1y ago
  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.
  - tetrisgm 1y ago
    Same as Roblox, Fortnite, Angry Birds, and every other F2P game
    - GeoAtreides 1y ago
      Yeah, well, fuck them too.
- kakacik 1y ago
  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.

nubinetwork 1y ago

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.

crossroadsguy 1y ago

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)

ndriscoll 1y ago
CS 1.6 ran just fine for me just now on NixOS. Literally just clicked install in Steam and ran it. Aren't Macs incapable of running most games? Get a $150-200 n150 mini PC and install Linux and it should run most things before like 2010 (and probably later) at 4k 60 fps while sipping like 10 W and running completely silently.
- crossroadsguy 1y ago
  Thing is I don’t buy devices more than I absolutely need so that’s just a phone and a laptop. I will try this with NixOS because I have never tried NixOS in the first place. Brew has been enough so never tried anything else and also a lot of FOSS tools I use on my mac pro treat Brew as some kind of standard so that’s there.
  - ndriscoll 1y ago
    FYI NixOS is more of a power user distribution (the draw is it's driven by declarative configuration management). Something like Bazzite is more targeted for e.g. gamers and may be more appropriate if you want a more off the shelf experience (I don't have experience with it but see it discussed a lot). If you only have a mac you might not have much luck though. The n150 mini PC suggestion is because they really punch above their weight for being so cheap if you otherwise don't have usable hardware and want to play older/less demanding games anyway. They also make for extremely snappy workstations (on Linux. They come with Windows 11 which is super laggy). And they're like 2 inches * 2 inches * 1 inch, so tiny. If you're doing anything other than AI or something like video editing, they're a fantastic value.

SwtCyber 1y ago

Bringing prices down and making rare items more accessible feels like a step toward re-centering the game around, well… the GAME

ho_schi 1y ago

Same here. I play the game happily. I would prefer to switch back to the good old "This games costs 50 $" which will also harm cheating. Maintain it and release sometimes an upgrade for a fair sum, keep the old one playable. It shall not be a marketplace for gambling and cheaters.

grapesodaaaaa 1y ago

I have been playing since 1.5 and agree. I personally don’t care at all about skins, and just want to play the game. It’s fine to have some cosmetics, but the economy Valve had created brought so much toxicity to the game.