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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,
by 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 agoThey're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.
- Aeolun 1y agoAnyone 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 agoConsidering 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 agoI think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.
- cubefox 1y agoThey 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 agoThis 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.
- suslik 1y agoNot to mention how much they did for Linux gaming.
- cubefox 1y ago> Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players. This is an outright falsehood. Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison. By your definition, any monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". But it isn't. Just because something is useful, doesn't mean it can't be massively overpriced due to competition not working as it should. Proper market competition should ensure that no company can extract huge profit margins for trivial things. Like hosting games.
- throw10920 1y ago> Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison. Steam does far more than just host, and everyone who uses it knows this, so it's clear that you either have no idea what Steam does (in which case you should not be commenting) or you're actively lying about it. Steam provides payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things. > By your definition, any Monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions. And yes, there is competition - the fact that you don't know this is yet another indicator that you're totally ignorant of anything relevant to the conversation. There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work. Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.
- gquere 1y agoI didn't downvote you (my account is low reputation) but your argument is weak: that some skins go for absurd amount of money says nothing of the rest of the ecosystem. There can both be children and drug dealers (ab)using the same "gaming" mechanics.
- froggit 1y agoI'd be curious to find out if the overlapping subset, "children that deal drugs," are more likely to do so.
- matsemann 1y ago> If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That you used a straw man. The $20k cosmetics weren't mentioned, and even if some buy these, the thing itself can still very well be targeted as gambling towards children.
- semanticist 1y ago"Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat." They're mentioned right there in the article this is nominally meant to be a discussion thread about.
- matsemann 1y agoBut the argument was "they're running an online casino directed at children", the fact that someone buys the result of the gambling for adult money / $20k doesn't mean it's not, and is basically irrelevant to that statement.
- huimang 1y agoNo, but they incentivize opening cases in order to obtain such valuable prizes, at $2.50 a pop. TF2 does this too, with Unusual rarity hats.
- shawabawa3 1y agoKids buy a $2.50 case in the hope of winning a $20k cosmetic item Then there are the third party gambling sites where you bet items on matches in the hopes of spinning up your cheap items into more expensive ones
- BoorishBears 1y ago> Kids buy a $2.50 case in the hope of winning a $20k cosmetic item This part is already gambling. The 3rd party site is letting them gamble again.
- charcircuit 1y agoVirtual items are legitimate investments.
- bargainbin 1y agoAnything you put money into is a legitimate investment. This doesn’t mean they’re viable investments.
- immibis 1y agoIMO the phrase "legitimate investment" should be reserved for situations where you spend money something (e.g. kitchen equipment) that allows you to create new real-world value (e.g. food) which you can hopefully sell for a profit (it's still a legitimate investment if that fails). It should not be used for Ponzi schemes, gambling, outright fraud, or anything of the sort. Buying something and then hoping its price goes up before you sell it should not be called investing, but gambling - unless it fits in the category I just described.
- charcircuit 1y agoPeople find value in acquiring things they want. For example if someone wants to have a one letter username on X, there is value for there to be willing to sell one.
- immibis 1y agoThis is why I said "new real-world value". An X username does not have real-world value in the same way that potatoes have real-world value.
- BigTTYGothGF 1y agoYou can't even use slurp juice on CS skins.
- temp0826 1y agoI was recently at a lan party for a friend's 40th birthday (something I don't think any of us had done since highschool or so!), most of them are way more into gaming than me and have been consistently since childhood. I was pretty shocked at one point when they went on a loot box binge and I witnessed them drop hundreds on loot boxes etc (I don't know what it's called, the keys or whatever). Definitely didn't seem like the first time. These are adults with children of their own. There is a demographic out there of people I wasn't aware of, not necessarily whales, that have a ton of disposable income for this fluff. And valve has their hooks in them for whatever reason.
- dcow 1y agoI’ve watched grown adults with kids spend hundreds on baseball tickets and beer in one sitting, too. I’m not trying to invalidate your point. But also be careful about making value judgements (“valve has their hooks in them” reads as a negative sentiment to me). People spend money on entertainment and there are worse vices out there.
- kube-system 1y agoGrown adults blowing a couple hundred on some fun doesn't really seem that crazy to me. How is that much different than going out to the bar, sticking a benjamin in a slot machine, or buying some collectables?
- Aeolun 1y agoI mean, if you have the disposable income for it, more power to you. I think it’s a massive waste of money. The only thing I ever spent money on was League of Legends skins/heroes, but those were always guaranteed. My son keeps asking why I won’t buy robux for him, but those are an even bigger waste of money than some of these lootboxes xD
- Dead_Lemon 1y agoThe game does have a mature rating, so parents should be vetting their activity. I would still contend and say the gambling aspect, with real money, is a net negative to the community.
- catmanjan 1y agoThere's a big difference between 15 and 18 though...
- jsheard 1y agoI think most countries have much stricter enforcement for gambling age limits, too. If you sell a kid a copy of GTA5 that's their parents problem, but if you allow kids into your casino it's your problem.
- josefx 1y agoThe problem is defining what falls under those laws. Companies sell trading card boxes with random contents. McDonalds had its Monopoly game. There are many more examples of things that are gambling with money, accessible to kids and still allowed in most countries.
- dcow 1y agoMcDonald’s at least has AMOE and you don’t have to spend a cent to play. It’s certainly the less convenient path, purposely, though.
- voxic11 1y agoMcDonalds Monopoly game was a sweepstakes, you could get game pieces for free by simply asking, which is why it doesn't fall afoul of gambling laws.
- CaptainOfCoit 1y agoTypically legal gambling has age limits by law, while the age recommendation for video games is just that, an recommendation. It isn't illegal for a 14 year old to play a game recommended to 18 year olds. Don't know how it works in the US specifically, at least how it works in other places. I'm guessing the video games industry's attempt at self-regulating with PEGI and similar efforts actually paid off.
- lolitsobvious 1y agoDamn you’re trying to tell me that people will abandon all morality just to make billions of dollars? Who would of thought that something like that could be possible.
- solsane 1y agoWell, that’s lootbox mechanics. I don’t see how this most recent iteration changes any of that.
- wincy 1y agoI quite honestly don’t know anyone under 40 that plays Counterstrike. It seems like an old guy’s game at this point. It isn’t 2003 anymore.
- snake42 1y agoIts probably because you don't know many under 40 year olds. Its been a popular game for a long time.
- saghm 1y agoI honestly don't understand the logic behind policies like this. As a kid, my friends and I loved to buy Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a few years, and while I think most adults thought it was pretty silly, I don't recall anyone ever claiming that this was somehow equivalent to gambling for children despite it basically the same mechanism as loot boxes; most booster packs were essentially not worth the value once opened because with the exception of a few specific rare cards in each set, the cards were not very valuable even to a collector or player of the game. I could see an argument that there's an issue with closed ecosystems where value of an item can be changed after someone has obtained it due to control by a centralized provider, but that's completely different concern to the idea of gambling being harmful.
- Retric 1y agoAs a kid I viewed MtG, baseball cards, etc as gambling and often heard them referred to as such. The loot box issue is in part how easy it is to take this stuff to excess. My 8 year old niece racked up ~1,500$ worth of charges in a game when AT&T messed up permissions after a cellphone upgrade. It’s shockingly easy for people to blow arbitrary money on this stuff as the industry is optimized to be predatory as whales make up the bulk of profits. So I suspect physical stores being really skeptical if an 8 year old showed up to buy a grand of Pokémon cards likely tampered the backlash.
- pessimizer 1y agoIt absolutely was and is gambling, and plenty of people complain about it. I've always thought it was disgusting to make a living off of pay-to-play games targeted at children. Morally somewhere around the level of being a pimp. I don't even like it when targeted at adults, but we allow adults to do far worse when it comes to gambling. A lot of our hollow economies depend on it. But you really have to be a moral sewer to pay your rent from kids hoping to open the right bag to hopefully energize their often very narrow, often very autistic social lives. At best you're a carnie. So there's one data point, take it as you will.
- cturner 1y agoValve is not the market-maker here, they are the exchange.
- raspasov 1y agoDon’t they also 100% control the supply though?
- cturner 1y agoYes, Valve controls supply. That strengthens my point. Market makers do not control the supply of goods. They provide resting liquidity for pre-existing goods. Similarly, market makers do not get to establish rules of the of their own "reality". Market makers are participants in a venue. It is the venue/exchange that sets the rules. User Bengalilol seems to have inferred that because Valve made the venue, he can refer to them as the "market maker". This is not correct. Words have meaning. The meaning of market-maker is well-established in the context of exchanges. Market maker is incorrect terminology for Valve’s role.