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They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.
by gquere 11mo ago
They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.
- Aeolun 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo agoI think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.
- cubefox 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo agoNot to mention how much they did for Linux gaming.
- cubefox 11mo 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 11mo 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.
- knome 11mo agohaving a high profit-per-employee is not the definition of rent seeking. valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.
- cubefox 11mo agoIt's not "high", it's extremely high. They just have a few hundred employees while making several millions of profit per employee. More than Apple. They are printing money. > valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, A 30% fee just for hosting the game is not valuable. > and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer. The cost is substantial. It costs the developer 30%. That's a huge chunk of the total revenue. Hosting a game is very cheap, and could probably be done with less than a 3% fee. Often Valve will make more profit from a game than the developer itself. Sometimes the developer will lose money (after subtracting development cost) but Valve will still make a big profit with that game.
- dugidugout 11mo agoWhile I can't argue whether 30% is actually fair, I do believe you are disregarding some benefits steam brings which may seem trivial. The hosting of online-games and facilitation of sales is not their only service. One that has traceable value that immediately comes to mind is the illusion of a central authority for achievements. I have personally purchased many titles a second time to register my feats with steam and anecdotally see similar sentiment among older gamers. Achievements feel worthless in isolation but provide fulfillment when socially recognized. These are sales being manifested solely through Steam's position. Now, back to whether this social permanence is worth the 30% Steam is extracting, I do have my opinions. Steam is technically "rent-seeking" from a strict economic classification, but is this more-so a case of the lighthouse or the railroad?
- kube-system 11mo agoTheir high profit is indicative of the high level of value they provide. They're far from the only store to buy/sell games in. Steam's users use Steam because they prefer it to the alternatives.
- gquere 11mo 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 11mo agoI'd be curious to find out if the overlapping subset, "children that deal drugs," are more likely to do so.
- matsemann 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo agoVirtual items are legitimate investments.
- bargainbin 11mo agoAnything you put money into is a legitimate investment. This doesn’t mean they’re viable investments.
- immibis 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo agoYou can't even use slurp juice on CS skins.
- temp0826 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo agoThere's a big difference between 15 and 18 though...
- jsheard 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo agoWell, that’s lootbox mechanics. I don’t see how this most recent iteration changes any of that.
- wincy 11mo 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 11mo agoIts probably because you don't know many under 40 year olds. Its been a popular game for a long time.
- saghm 11mo 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 11mo 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 11mo 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.