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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 throu

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

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