[ED_Radish]

Valve pioneered most of that stuff, just that they sorta let go of the accelerator at some point and let other companies who were initially following their lead surpass them in exploitativeness so theyre not too associated with it nowadays.

Although I suppose its dubious whether real world money gambling (valve) is more or less exploitative than the gambling directly implemented into game design that the rest of the industry took up.

[sangnoir]

I have a hard time accepting TF2 hats were exploitative. The cosmetic items have no impact on gameplay, and I played the game while completely ignoring trading items. It never felt like gambling, unlike in EA games.

[solardev]

Isn't there a pretty big difference between gambling for cosmetics and gambling for gameplay advantage? The former is like buying clothes... sure, you can spend as much money as you want on them, but it doesn't really affect anyone else. Whereas P2W gambling totally screws up game balance for all the other players because it monetizes the power curve.