[mopenstein]

Everybody on the planet knows that the modern cellphone is really just a portable vacuum connected directly to people's wallets and steam doesn't want a piece of that action?

They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.

[haunter]

>They must be raking in the dough if they are ignoring that opportunity.

They have monopoly on the whole unregulated digital gambling market which makes much much more

[daedrdev]

Gacha are also unregulated digital gambling, I think steam was simply the first

[haunter]

You can't make money from gacha that's the difference.

I can put real money into Genshin Impact but it's just a sink.

In Steam you can actually make money with the skin gambling or just by simply day trading. I've built my first gaming PC back in 2017 from selling CS cases alone (~$800 back then)

I just bought low and sold high and I already had some older cases that were going up in price.

Once I had my target achieved, in my case that was +$700 at least in my Steam account, I bought some very popular CS knives, iirc 3 with each of them going +$250

Then moved those knives to a 3rd party gambling/trading site (thanks to the SteamAPI provided by Valve).

And then sold the knives there for real money and cashed out with simple bank transfer.

Few days later bought my first gaming PC.

Nothing have changed ever since and you can still turn your Steam account money into real cash with 3rd party sites.

[steelbrain]

I’m out of the loop here. What does gambling here refer to? Is it the Steam trading cards?

[haunter]

Counter Strike skins https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skin_gambling

It's the whole ecosystem, Valve selling keys (making $1b in 2023 alone [0]) and the numbers are only going up since [1]

On top of that they take a cut form every single transaction so even just people selling cases between each other makes Valve a fuckton of money.

And there are the 3rd party sites which are running on the SteamAPI where people can bet these cases, keys, and skins on CS matches. It's an insane system running freely without any oversight from anyone

0, https://insider-gaming.com/valve-cs-cases-earnings/

1, https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-insane-a...

[haiku2077]

And the 3rd party sites mostly target children who can't gamble at a regulated casino but can get keys through gameplay/steam gift cards

[wlesieutre]

I would think “loot boxes” but Steam doesn’t have anything close to a monopoly on that

[some_random]

Loot boxes are nothing next to the CS:GO (and others) item marketplace

[Ekaros]

I think it is reasonable option to not compete in those markets largely controlled by existing players.

Especially when they really are rolling in money from selling desktop games. Taking 20% and courts most likely won't stop them as they do not control the platforms.

[Farbklex]

Yeah, that is strange, especially since we now have the technology to actually play full blown PC versions via abstraction layers on Android phones. A steam store with existing games on mobile is now possible.