[gquere]

They did this to take a bigger cut of the market because most trades happened off-platform. This new update ensures that they will sell more of their new items through their shop (contract cases) because it's going to be the only way to get the red items to fuses into "valuable" knives. They're rotten to the core.

[Bengalilol]

Any market maker, such as Valve, is free to establish the rules of its own "reality".

I understand your analysis, and I certainly failed to mention that point, but making the overall value less attractive to speculators is not evidence of being "rotten to the core".

[gquere]

They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.

[Dead_Lemon]

The 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.

[armonster]

But is the game rated mature due to violence, or due to gambling? I might be okay with my kid playing a game just because it has violence, but that doesn't mean I'm wanting to sign them up for gambling, but I'm curious if the mature rating even covers that since it's more of a meta-game thing and not actually part of the "game" itself.

[Our_Benefactors]

It’s been rated M since the 90s, well before loot crates were a thing.

[catmanjan]

There's a big difference between 15 and 18 though...

[jsheard]

I 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]

The 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.

[CaptainOfCoit]

Typically 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.

[averageRoyalty]

I can't speak for your country, but in Australia it's illegal to sell MA15+ rated material to an under 15, and R18+ material to an under 18. CS is MA15+.

[the_sleaze_]

Is there?

[saghm]

From an objective legal standpoint in some jurisdictions, the answer is clearly yes

[BigTTYGothGF]

By and large, yeah.

[reaperducer]

Found the 14-year-old.

[rplnt]

You don't need to play the game to gamble.

[seanclayton]

How many kids do you have?

[Aeolun]

Anyone 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.

[shawabawa3]

Kids 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]

> 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.

[temp0826]

I 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]

I’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]

Grown 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]

I 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

[huimang]

No, 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.

[gquere]

I 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]

I'd be curious to find out if the overlapping subset, "children that deal drugs," are more likely to do so.

[matsemann]

> 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]

"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]

But 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.

[c048]

Considering 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]

I think people have a hard time viewing Valve as “evil” given what they have done in the gaming industry.

[cubefox]

They 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.

[charcircuit]

Virtual items are legitimate investments.

[bargainbin]

Anything you put money into is a legitimate investment.

This doesn’t mean they’re viable investments.

[immibis]

IMO 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.

[BigTTYGothGF]

You can't even use slurp juice on CS skins.

[lolitsobvious]

Damn 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]

Well, that’s lootbox mechanics. I don’t see how this most recent iteration changes any of that.

[saghm]

I 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]

As 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]

It 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.

[wincy]

I 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]

Its probably because you don't know many under 40 year olds. Its been a popular game for a long time.

[cturner]

Valve is not the market-maker here, they are the exchange.

[raspasov]

Don’t they also 100% control the supply though?

[cturner]

Yes, Valve controls supply. That strengthens my point.

Market makers do not control the supply of goods. They provide resting liquidity for pre-existing goods.

Similarly, market makers do not get to establish rules of the of their own "reality". Market makers are participants in a venue. It is the venue/exchange that sets the rules.

User Bengalilol seems to have inferred that because Valve made the venue, he can refer to them as the "market maker". This is not correct. Words have meaning. The meaning of market-maker is well-established in the context of exchanges. Market maker is incorrect terminology for Valve’s role.

[sellmesoap]

Trades happening off market is also due to valve not having a way to cash out. If you sell your $20,000 item on the steam marketplace that's a lot of games you can buy, but they won't send you money.

[dpoloncsak]

FWIW, people were purchasing Steam Decks with the "Steam Money", then reselling the console for cash.

Its still not "cashing out", but I'm sure some made some decent money. I would assume you could sell game keys to those less-than-reputable sites as well? Dunno

Agreed overall though, these are just extensions of "happening off-market"

[Xss3]

They warned the gambling sites plenty of times. They tried legal action several times. Those sites were against valves ToS.

[abejfehr]

It seems to me that they (Valve) are complicit. Don't they provide the API that those sites use?

I don't think they tried very hard to shut them down, they could be doing a lot more.

Edit: based on what I recall from this Coffeezilla video (https://youtu.be/13eiDhuvM6Y?si=GJ_kXOJyXFTogy40&t=476)

[Hikikomori]

Isn't it the same API that users use?

[walletdrainer]

It’s probably fair to assume that more than 90% of trading bots are not the kind of bots valve should support

[Hikikomori]

Yeah but its not like vavlve provides an api specifically for them.

[walletdrainer]

But they kind of do, there aren’t many other uses for the trading API

[tsimionescu]

No one claimed that. The point was that Valve controls the API and can cut access to said API to the gambling sites. This is not like sports betting, where the gambling sites don't need any integration with the actual sport : if Valve wants, they can seriously affect the abity of the sites to function.

[__alexs]

> most trades happened off-platform

I thought it was impossible to trade off platform? All item trades happen within Steam, they have an API to facilitate it and everything.

[Sebb767]

It would be more correct to say that most _payments_ happen off-platform. They still use the Steam API for trades, but it's just bots trading with players for nothing and payment is facilitated offsite.

[Hnrobert42]

How does this make them rotten to the core?

This is a business. They invented the game. They host it. How are they rotten for wanting to make money from it?

These aren't real objects. They are entry in a Valve database. I can't understand why people get emotionally, much less financially, invested in it.

[gquere]

Read up on the story, look at the influencers promoting it and the ecosystem that grew around it. Valve is willfully running a casino for underage and have bypassed local laws that protect against this using technicalities. It's frightening.

[raspasov]

Yeah… It’s like NFTs with 100% centralized supply and control, if I’m understanding this niche market correctly.

Control, as in, tomorrow Valve might decide that some of those items are “unusable” in their game which would presumably also crash their value.

[aklein]

Humans are social-emotional beings who assign “irrational” value to things for social signaling and emotional (self-)gratification.