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I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1] Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure,

I bet this is an on-purpose move by Valve, and I view this as a sane action. [1] Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates. It is also smoothing players' frustration and shopping-spree habits in order to obtain a rare item. If you have the ability to trade N rare items for another rare item then you quite surely may obtain any cosmetic item you want for a much lower investment (less boxes to open). The 'grey market' will adapt to this new value. That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn. [1] EDIT: and probably a preemptive protection for any future legal threat (as some countries tend to prohibit money gambling in games)

jackgavigan 1y ago
> That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn. A timely lesson!
gquere 1y ago
They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.
- Bengalilol 1y ago
  Any market maker, such as Valve, is free to establish the rules of its own "reality". I understand your analysis, and I certainly failed to mention that point, but making the overall value less attractive to speculators is not evidence of being "rotten to the core".
  - gquere 1y ago
    They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.
    - Aeolun 1y ago
      Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child. If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That it’s a legitimate investment? The only people spending that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.
      - c048 1y ago
        Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off. People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.
        computerex 1y ago
        I think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.
        cubefox 1y ago
        They take a 30% cut on Steam, i.e. on most PC games. They are printing money. They have an absurdly high profit-per-employee ratio. That's a failure of capitalism, called rent seeking.
        throw10920 1y ago
        This is an outright falsehood. "Rent-seeking" involves extracting value without providing any. Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players. Steam is a huge success of capitalism. Suggest not using words like "rent-seeking" without knowing what they mean.
- Xss3 1y ago
  They warned the gambling sites plenty of times. They tried legal action several times. Those sites were against valves ToS.
  - abejfehr 1y ago
    It seems to me that they (Valve) are complicit. Don't they provide the API that those sites use? I don't think they tried very hard to shut them down, they could be doing a lot more. Edit: based on what I recall from this Coffeezilla video (https://youtu.be/13eiDhuvM6Y?si=GJ_kXOJyXFTogy40&t=476 https://youtu.be/13eiDhuvM6Y?si=GJ_kXOJyXFTogy40&t=476)
    - Hikikomori 1y ago
      Isn't it the same API that users use?
      - walletdrainer 1y ago
        It’s probably fair to assume that more than 90% of trading bots are not the kind of bots valve should support
        Hikikomori 1y ago
        Yeah but its not like vavlve provides an api specifically for them.
        tsimionescu 1y ago
        No one claimed that. The point was that Valve controls the API and can cut access to said API to the gambling sites. This is not like sports betting, where the gambling sites don't need any integration with the actual sport : if Valve wants, they can seriously affect the abity of the sites to function.
        Hikikomori 1y ago
- __alexs 1y ago
  > most trades happened off-platform I thought it was impossible to trade off platform? All item trades happen within Steam, they have an API to facilitate it and everything.
  - Sebb767 1y ago
    It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- sellmesoap 1y ago
  Trades happening off market is also due to valve not having a way to cash out. If you sell your $20,000 item on the steam marketplace that's a lot of games you can buy, but they won't send you money.
  - dpoloncsak 1y ago
    FWIW, people were purchasing Steam Decks with the "Steam Money", then reselling the console for cash. Its still not "cashing out", but I'm sure some made some decent money. I would assume you could sell game keys to those less-than-reputable sites as well? Dunno Agreed overall though, these are just extensions of "happening off-market"
- Hnrobert42 1y ago
  How does this make them rotten to the core? This is a business. They invented the game. They host it. How are they rotten for wanting to make money from it? These aren't real objects. They are entry in a Valve database. I can't understand why people get emotionally, much less financially, invested in it.
  - gquere 1y ago
    Read up on the story, look at the influencers promoting it and the ecosystem that grew around it. Valve is willfully running a casino for underage and have bypassed local laws that protect against this using technicalities. It's frightening.
  - raspasov 1y ago
    Yeah… It’s like NFTs with 100% centralized supply and control, if I’m understanding this niche market correctly. Control, as in, tomorrow Valve might decide that some of those items are “unusable” in their game which would presumably also crash their value.
  - aklein 1y ago
    Humans are social-emotional beings who assign “irrational” value to things for social signaling and emotional (self-)gratification.
daanbread 1y ago
This doesn't explain though "why now?". All of these reasons would make sense, but they've been in legal disputes before in the 13 years since the game came out. And why would they suddenly care about players' frustration? The skins economy isn't wildly different now than previously.
- tecleandor 1y ago
  Well, I don't know their motives, but if we were talking just about legal issues, at least in the EU we're seeing stricter laws about loot boxes this year (and I'm all in about that). https://siege.gg/news/several-eu-countries-have-introduced-stricter-regulations-on-loot-boxes-in-games-in-2025 https://siege.gg/news/several-eu-countries-have-introduced-s...
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
SwtCyber 1y ago
With increasing scrutiny around gambling mechanics, this might be Valve trying to get ahead of a future headache...
- Maken 1y ago
  The Armory and the new terminal shows they are moving way from loot boxes into a kind of "proof of work" economy, in which price is driven up by grinding and limited availability.
- noxvilleza 1y ago
  My personal theory is that it's related to their planned launch of their new VR headset soon, and want people to be able to buy it using the Steam Store - so deflating the market means there's reduced buying power on the market, reducing ways in which people can get money 'out' of Steam by buying hardware with Steam-bux and selling for real currency.
duxup 1y ago
>Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. They kinda chose that ... a long time ago. Maybe they changed their mind.
masklinn 1y ago
> Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. Valve let that fester for years. Coffeezilla did a multi-part series on the subject late 2024. The legal aspect seems the likely angle, valve either heard rumblings or got approached by a state actor and decided to finally cut the shit.
- aqme28 1y ago
  It was a multi-billion dollar market, which blew my mind. Good on valve for bursting the bubble, but it sounds like it should have happened much sooner.
agentcoops 1y ago
I waded through some Tik Tok comment threads on this change and it was so eye-opening: there are a shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items, thinking it was a retirement portfolio. I fear the crypto era has lead to even further diminished financial literacy at large… Blessed be compound interest and financial regulation.
- mothballed 1y ago
  It's hilarious to US CS items/weapons as a retirement portfolio when you could get pretty damn good and government protected monopoly by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up. These are now being used by actual retirement funds. http://machinegunpriceguide.com/html/german_subguns_0.html http://machinegunpriceguide.com/html/german_subguns_0.html
  - antonymoose 1y ago
    Link to the retirement fund? I’m surprised to hear that bit, there are way too many lawsuits flying around right now in the gun the world to consider that kind of risk. Then again perhaps the fund managers taking on fees are the real point.
    - esseph 1y ago
      There is no profit without risk
  - rhcom2 1y ago
    Relying on the sanity and/or consistency of government policy would keep me up at night.
    - mothballed 1y ago
      I would sleep perfectly soundly if it relied on politicians not wanting the plebs they subjugate to have easier access to machine guns, which is what keeps their value up. As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated. The risk is arguably lower than many single stocks, many of which are bought in retirement portfolio.
Imustaskforhelp 1y ago
> Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates. All the change valve did was make 5 rare items to give a chance/give a extremely rare item Earlier, that wasn't the case and were locked behind only lootboxes with extremly rare chances i guess. So this mechanic was already there from 1000 uncommon -> 10 common -> 1(mythic?) -> rare but now it spread to even extremely rare. The price drop happened because the extremely rare aren't as rare because now it increased the supply as more people created their rares into extremely rares and sold it on the market and more supply, less price, thus the price wipe out and the loss. Also skins are just cosmetics, they have no in game advantage I just searched and you get some skin when you level up but the point I am trying to tell you is that if someone actually plays the game for a long time, they get involved in its community and naturally people would flex their skin etc and they would want to get skins to feel cool as well So its more like people playing -> wants skin / creates money. Instead of wanting money -> people playing games But maybe someone could be playing/grinding for the skins but I genuinely don't think this is why steam did it. Steam did it to show the regulatory power they have in game that they can wipe billions. They are creating their in game store which takes prices from online marketplace so they might tighten the regulations on it in such a way that instead of going to random websites or other parties, steam / valve will try to instead be the middleman and try to capture even more %'s of the trade Another neat point is that if someone wants a skin in the community, they basically got cheaper now 30-40% so it becomes more affordable imo for the people playing but still I think valve wouldn't have predicted the losses to be of billions of dollar in terms of wipeout since they had mentioned it as a small change and it wasn't even their twitter update note iirc I think that a lot of people especially chinese people invested into it and it was a bubble in formation and then people got panicked after this news and the panic made other people panic and thus the insane billions of $ of losses. I recommend atrioc's/ Big A video on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCnQsvdVQ1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCnQsvdVQ1o
PeterStuer 1y ago
"Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go." Vegas begs to differ.
650REDHAIR 1y ago
Hopefully it doesn’t backfire. The trading/gambling websites sponsor a lot of CS content.
lofaszvanitt 1y ago
And they came to this conclusion after how many years of exploitative behaviour?

jackgavigan 1y ago

> That's also a lesson on how a closed economy (and open ones too, to some extent) can collapse based on a single actor controlling the rules. That's fair to learn. A timely lesson!

gquere 1y ago

They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.

Bengalilol 1y ago
Any market maker, such as Valve, is free to establish the rules of its own "reality". I understand your analysis, and I certainly failed to mention that point, but making the overall value less attractive to speculators is not evidence of being "rotten to the core".
- gquere 1y ago
  They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.
  - Aeolun 1y ago
    Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child. If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That it’s a legitimate investment? The only people spending that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.
    - c048 1y ago
      Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off. People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.
      - computerex 1y ago
        I think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.
        cubefox 1y ago
        They take a 30% cut on Steam, i.e. on most PC games. They are printing money. They have an absurdly high profit-per-employee ratio. That's a failure of capitalism, called rent seeking.
        throw10920 1y ago
        This is an outright falsehood. "Rent-seeking" involves extracting value without providing any. Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players. Steam is a huge success of capitalism. Suggest not using words like "rent-seeking" without knowing what they mean.
Xss3 1y ago
They warned the gambling sites plenty of times. They tried legal action several times. Those sites were against valves ToS.
- abejfehr 1y ago
  It seems to me that they (Valve) are complicit. Don't they provide the API that those sites use? I don't think they tried very hard to shut them down, they could be doing a lot more. Edit: based on what I recall from this Coffeezilla video (https://youtu.be/13eiDhuvM6Y?si=GJ_kXOJyXFTogy40&t=476 https://youtu.be/13eiDhuvM6Y?si=GJ_kXOJyXFTogy40&t=476)
  - Hikikomori 1y ago
    Isn't it the same API that users use?
    - walletdrainer 1y ago
      It’s probably fair to assume that more than 90% of trading bots are not the kind of bots valve should support
      - Hikikomori 1y ago
        Yeah but its not like vavlve provides an api specifically for them.
        tsimionescu 1y ago
        No one claimed that. The point was that Valve controls the API and can cut access to said API to the gambling sites. This is not like sports betting, where the gambling sites don't need any integration with the actual sport : if Valve wants, they can seriously affect the abity of the sites to function.
        Hikikomori 1y ago
__alexs 1y ago
> most trades happened off-platform I thought it was impossible to trade off platform? All item trades happen within Steam, they have an API to facilitate it and everything.
- Sebb767 1y ago
  It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
sellmesoap 1y ago
Trades happening off market is also due to valve not having a way to cash out. If you sell your $20,000 item on the steam marketplace that's a lot of games you can buy, but they won't send you money.
- dpoloncsak 1y ago
  FWIW, people were purchasing Steam Decks with the "Steam Money", then reselling the console for cash. Its still not "cashing out", but I'm sure some made some decent money. I would assume you could sell game keys to those less-than-reputable sites as well? Dunno Agreed overall though, these are just extensions of "happening off-market"
Hnrobert42 1y ago
How does this make them rotten to the core? This is a business. They invented the game. They host it. How are they rotten for wanting to make money from it? These aren't real objects. They are entry in a Valve database. I can't understand why people get emotionally, much less financially, invested in it.
- gquere 1y ago
  Read up on the story, look at the influencers promoting it and the ecosystem that grew around it. Valve is willfully running a casino for underage and have bypassed local laws that protect against this using technicalities. It's frightening.
- raspasov 1y ago
  Yeah… It’s like NFTs with 100% centralized supply and control, if I’m understanding this niche market correctly. Control, as in, tomorrow Valve might decide that some of those items are “unusable” in their game which would presumably also crash their value.
- aklein 1y ago
  Humans are social-emotional beings who assign “irrational” value to things for social signaling and emotional (self-)gratification.

daanbread 1y ago

This doesn't explain though "why now?". All of these reasons would make sense, but they've been in legal disputes before in the 13 years since the game came out. And why would they suddenly care about players' frustration? The skins economy isn't wildly different now than previously.

tecleandor 1y ago
Well, I don't know their motives, but if we were talking just about legal issues, at least in the EU we're seeing stricter laws about loot boxes this year (and I'm all in about that). https://siege.gg/news/several-eu-countries-have-introduced-stricter-regulations-on-loot-boxes-in-games-in-2025 https://siege.gg/news/several-eu-countries-have-introduced-s...

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

SwtCyber 1y ago

With increasing scrutiny around gambling mechanics, this might be Valve trying to get ahead of a future headache...

Maken 1y ago
The Armory and the new terminal shows they are moving way from loot boxes into a kind of "proof of work" economy, in which price is driven up by grinding and limited availability.
noxvilleza 1y ago
My personal theory is that it's related to their planned launch of their new VR headset soon, and want people to be able to buy it using the Steam Store - so deflating the market means there's reduced buying power on the market, reducing ways in which people can get money 'out' of Steam by buying hardware with Steam-bux and selling for real currency.

duxup 1y ago

>Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. They kinda chose that ... a long time ago. Maybe they changed their mind.

masklinn 1y ago

> Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. Valve let that fester for years. Coffeezilla did a multi-part series on the subject late 2024. The legal aspect seems the likely angle, valve either heard rumblings or got approached by a state actor and decided to finally cut the shit.

aqme28 1y ago
It was a multi-billion dollar market, which blew my mind. Good on valve for bursting the bubble, but it sounds like it should have happened much sooner.

agentcoops 1y ago

I waded through some Tik Tok comment threads on this change and it was so eye-opening: there are a shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items, thinking it was a retirement portfolio. I fear the crypto era has lead to even further diminished financial literacy at large… Blessed be compound interest and financial regulation.

mothballed 1y ago
It's hilarious to US CS items/weapons as a retirement portfolio when you could get pretty damn good and government protected monopoly by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up. These are now being used by actual retirement funds. http://machinegunpriceguide.com/html/german_subguns_0.html http://machinegunpriceguide.com/html/german_subguns_0.html
- antonymoose 1y ago
  Link to the retirement fund? I’m surprised to hear that bit, there are way too many lawsuits flying around right now in the gun the world to consider that kind of risk. Then again perhaps the fund managers taking on fees are the real point.
  - esseph 1y ago
    There is no profit without risk
- rhcom2 1y ago
  Relying on the sanity and/or consistency of government policy would keep me up at night.
  - mothballed 1y ago
    I would sleep perfectly soundly if it relied on politicians not wanting the plebs they subjugate to have easier access to machine guns, which is what keeps their value up. As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated. The risk is arguably lower than many single stocks, many of which are bought in retirement portfolio.

Imustaskforhelp 1y ago

> Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go. If the game is fun, then players will keep on playing it. It may also keep some money thirsty (sometimes very toxic) people at the gates. All the change valve did was make 5 rare items to give a chance/give a extremely rare item Earlier, that wasn't the case and were locked behind only lootboxes with extremly rare chances i guess. So this mechanic was already there from 1000 uncommon -> 10 common -> 1(mythic?) -> rare but now it spread to even extremely rare. The price drop happened because the extremely rare aren't as rare because now it increased the supply as more people created their rares into extremely rares and sold it on the market and more supply, less price, thus the price wipe out and the loss. Also skins are just cosmetics, they have no in game advantage I just searched and you get some skin when you level up but the point I am trying to tell you is that if someone actually plays the game for a long time, they get involved in its community and naturally people would flex their skin etc and they would want to get skins to feel cool as well So its more like people playing -> wants skin / creates money. Instead of wanting money -> people playing games But maybe someone could be playing/grinding for the skins but I genuinely don't think this is why steam did it. Steam did it to show the regulatory power they have in game that they can wipe billions. They are creating their in game store which takes prices from online marketplace so they might tighten the regulations on it in such a way that instead of going to random websites or other parties, steam / valve will try to instead be the middleman and try to capture even more %'s of the trade Another neat point is that if someone wants a skin in the community, they basically got cheaper now 30-40% so it becomes more affordable imo for the people playing but still I think valve wouldn't have predicted the losses to be of billions of dollar in terms of wipeout since they had mentioned it as a small change and it wasn't even their twitter update note iirc I think that a lot of people especially chinese people invested into it and it was a bubble in formation and then people got panicked after this news and the panic made other people panic and thus the insane billions of $ of losses. I recommend atrioc's/ Big A video on this topic. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCnQsvdVQ1o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fCnQsvdVQ1o

PeterStuer 1y ago

"Having a game where some players only play in order to win money is, for sure, a no go." Vegas begs to differ.

650REDHAIR 1y ago

Hopefully it doesn’t backfire. The trading/gambling websites sponsor a lot of CS content.

lofaszvanitt 1y ago

And they came to this conclusion after how many years of exploitative behaviour?