> 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

> 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