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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

• 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.
      • mlyle 1y ago
        > As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated. There's plenty of ways to not confiscate them but impair their value. Further restrictions on transfer, restrictions on use, disadvantaged tax treatment, requirements for storage, security, insurance, bonding, etc.
        • mothballed 1y ago
          The government has imposed most of those on gold at various times yet it continues to be a component of many investor portfolios.
          • mlyle 1y ago
            There's an international market in gold. NFA firearms have an artificially high value because of the exact set of legal restrictions that the government has put in place: loose enough to not crater legal demand, yet tight enough to restrict legal supply. This market is tied to within US borders. The government can destroy the assumptions behind this market with a stroke of the pen.
            • mothballed 1y ago
              The government can destroy the assumptions on which many businesses are built, that are held as stocks in an investment portfolio. Move the goalposts to relation to international markets, and I will likely find how it applies to some other asset commonly found in investment portfolios, like perhaps the current values of some tax preparation companies.
              • mlyle 1y ago
                Your original assertion was "...by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up" Later you said lower risk than many individual stocks. Maybe, maybe not depending on how we define things. But I do think it's quite possible for the price to go down.
    • agentcoops 1y ago
      I mean, I think they’ve proven over the last century that the single thing they’re good at is protecting the regular payment of dividends (and of course buybacks more recently)… One might not be entirely mistaken to compare expecting much more than that from the modern state to expecting Valve to protect your skin investments.
  • mikkupikku 1y ago
    That market could crash overnight with a single SCOTUS ruling against the NFA.
    • mothballed 1y ago
      NFA for machine guns will never be overruled, never. The odds of Hughes amendment being ruled against, are one iota above nil.
      • the_gipsy 1y ago
        Yea yea, you could have said that about any number of things the current administration did - so far.
        • mothballed 1y ago
          Trump banned bump stocks because he thought they were too close to machine guns. Ron Paul and maybe Massie are about the only politicians of my lifetime that held any real power that I can think of that would even entertain deregulating machine guns.
          • ars 1y ago
            And the supreme court ruled against the bump stock ban. Which is also why the Forced Reset Trigger was not banned - they didn't think they could.
            • mothballed 1y ago
              They could likely get away with banning the FRT and bump stock through amending the definition of the machine gun in congress, just not the executive branch. The ruling on those had nothing to do with overruling any part of the NFA. Only correctly identifying that FRT and bump stocks do not shoot automatically more than one shot by a single function of the trigger, which is what congress said would be the things allowed to be called machine guns.
            • 1y ago
  • wffurr 1y ago
    Wow the home page on that website is a real piece of work. It's amazing to me that someone can honestly believe all those things.
    • lovich 1y ago
      Yea, kinda hard to believe the numbers when the website appears to be run by someone bordering on time cube levels of delusion
    • krapp 1y ago
      Most American conservatives and Trumpists believe most if not all of those things from my experience, and a lot of what's on that site now reflects official American government policy. The only surprise I see there is at least implied pro-Ukraine sentiment.
      • 3626351828272 1y ago
        [flagged]
      • wffurr 11mo ago
        Having it all laid out together like that makes it obvious how inconsistent it all is. The mental gymnastics to actually believe all that stuff must be incredible. I read the other day about a theory on to obviously false beliefs as a form of in-group signaling and I can't read this collection any other way.
• darth_avocado 1y ago
  > shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items If you meant children, with access to parents credit cards, who are addicted to gambling, you’d be more accurate. Children gambling is a huge problem in CS, which created this economy. The players know it, the influencers know it, Valve knows it and pretty much anyone who’s played CS in the recent years knows it. This implosion does nothing more than reset the system for Valve so that they can continue to make money.
  • mikkupikku 1y ago
    How much of the CS player base is actually kids? Maybe wrongly, my view of CS is that it's a legacy game with an audience in their 30s or 40s. And that kids are mostly gambling with roblox or fornite.
    • darth_avocado 1y ago
      CS2 is very much alive. If you look at the pro scene, most players are in the 19-25 range (some outliers are older and younger) which makes sense since it’s much easier to become a pro after 18 than before. But that also implies a healthy pipeline of young players. Obviously the exact breakdown is difficult to estimate, but I’d be inclined to think fewer people in 30s and 40s would have time for CS than in their teens and 20s. I could be wrong.
      • araes 1y ago
        Very much alive. https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/#12y https://steamdb.info/app/730/charts/#12y From mid-2018, CS2 has trended upward at +150,000 players/year. Starting at 500-600,000 that lasted from ~2015 to 2018 with mostly flat rate, after Covid, CS2 has been linearly upward pretty much constantly. The 24hr peak recently was 1,550,265 logged in. One week variance is maybe ~700,000 during low timeframes, and 1,500,000 during peak hours pretty much every single day. Tends to peak yearly in May, with low tides in May and Nov-Dec usually, although last Dec was relatively up. 2020 and 2023 were both large years, 2025's looking similar. On the player age question, the best data I was able to find on a quick search was https://www.hltv.org/ https://www.hltv.org/ Total search over the full range returns 955 entries. Breakdowns by age look like its a pretty heavily 19-24 playerbase. 25-30's also pretty significant. Almost 77% of the player base between them. 13-18, 90, 9.4% 19-24, 460, 48.2% 25-30, 271, 28.4% 31-35, 93, 9.7% 36-40, 41, 4.3% Probably trends really hardcore, since the people listed average 360 (+-140) maps, and 7800 (+-3000) rounds.
• dcow 1y ago
  That anyone would use a game cosmetic as a retirement portfolio is so unbelievable it has to be trolling, right? I think we might just be witnessing the grief process unfold…
  • mikkupikku 1y ago
    It's not trolling. People living paycheck to paycheck, without much in the way of financial literacy, are big consumers of "made to be collectible" widgets because they're desperate for appreciating assets and don't know how to do better when they struggle to save up a few hundred dollars (in no small part, because of their gambling addictions.) Funko pops, baseball cards, knife skins, it's all used this way.
    • mothballed 1y ago
      It's not always instructive to assume people making seemingly bad financial decisions are acting irrationally. People living paycheck to paycheck due to child support orders, alimony, or other judgements taking a giant cut of their paycheck are likely buying collectibles instead of on-paper stocks or commodities because they can actually keep those without the state being able to as easily take them. Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money rather than making some irrational gambling decision.
      • mikkupikku 1y ago
        I know enough people in this kind of circumstance, my own coworkers, who would be in much better financial shape if they stopped gambling. It's very common for them to one day complain that they can't afford lunch, and the next day to come in fuming because they just lost $500 because sportsball team lost. > Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money" I know these people personally, they aren't drug dealers.
        • alexp2021 1y ago
          What are they, then?
• FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
  I have had friends in the 90s and 00s "invest" in Beanie Babies and Legos and make a ton of money... for a while... and then get wiped out. This is not a new thing.
  • agentcoops 1y ago
    Yeah, I was trying to think about that when I wrote my comment. I do think there’s at the very least a scale change between the proliferation of unregulated “markets” these days (crypto, cs skins, Pokémon cards, I’m sure others) and the “your beanie babies will be worth a fortune some day” of the past. Perhaps what’s more surprising, though, is how consumer behavior leads these markets to now actually move up and to the right for remarkably long. My sense is you were always in fact delusional to think your beanie babies would hold value, but perhaps people are not entirely crazy looking at the charts of skin prices over X years and expecting it to continue. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the collectors and too charitable to our contemporaries…
    • FuriouslyAdrift 1y ago
      People love to gamble and delude themselves into thinking bad outcomes are only for someone else.
• SL61 1y ago
  It's been years now, but I used to be involved in the trading market for Team Fortress 2. There were people who did TF2 trading as a full-time job, exploiting arbitrage between markets and holding items that were expected to increase in value (and sometimes using bots to farm items). The Mann vs. Machine update in 2012 added a new game mode that would give players loot as a reward for completing missions. Players who didn't care about the trading market (i.e. the vast majority) would look up trading sites after a gaming session to offload their stuff fast without caring much about the value. People who described themselves as "quickbuyers" would aim for the people who wanted quick and simple transactions and then sell the item elsewhere for a markup. I did this for a while and averaged $5-10 of profit per day, usually 20-30 cents per transaction. Someone treating it as a full-time job could probably have made a lot more, like $20+ per day. That was pretty good money if you a) were a kid with no living expenses, or b) lived in a developing country where the money went farther. I was in group A. Any time I wanted to buy a Steam game, I'd put up my quickbuyer listing on the trading sites and save up the money. But I suspected at the time that most people in the scene were in group B. If I were Valve I'd struggle to pull the trigger on a major change to the in-game economy knowing that it would affect the livelihood of a nontrivial number of people in countries like Venezuela, and maybe that's the reason they seem to have hesitated for so long.
• webdevver 1y ago
  if anything, this re-inforces the crypto thesis: a centralized authority can destroy your life savings at a whim. i should imagine a whole slew of vitalik buterins were just created.
• tonyhart7 1y ago
  "thinking it was a retirement portfolio" before this update, they can prolly just do that lmao its better performing than stocks and people literally made thousands of dollar from CS market its as real as people buying BTC at the end of day
• dcsan 1y ago
  RIP financial regulation. CFPB was hit early on but the dump coins were launched even before that