[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.

[knome]

having a high profit-per-employee is not the definition of rent seeking.

valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users, and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.

[cubefox]

It's not "high", it's extremely high. They just have a few hundred employees while making several millions of profit per employee. More than Apple. They are printing money.

> valve is certainly not rent-seeking. it offers service that is valuable to users,

A 30% fee just for hosting the game is not valuable.

> and take care of online infrastructure for games published through it, indefinitely, at no running cost to the developer.

The cost is substantial. It costs the developer 30%. That's a huge chunk of the total revenue. Hosting a game is very cheap, and could probably be done with less than a 3% fee. Often Valve will make more profit from a game than the developer itself. Sometimes the developer will lose money (after subtracting development cost) but Valve will still make a big profit with that game.

[kube-system]

Their high profit is indicative of the high level of value they provide. They're far from the only store to buy/sell games in. Steam's users use Steam because they prefer it to the alternatives.

[dugidugout]

While I can't argue whether 30% is actually fair, I do believe you are disregarding some benefits steam brings which may seem trivial. The hosting of online-games and facilitation of sales is not their only service. One that has traceable value that immediately comes to mind is the illusion of a central authority for achievements.

I have personally purchased many titles a second time to register my feats with steam and anecdotally see similar sentiment among older gamers. Achievements feel worthless in isolation but provide fulfillment when socially recognized. These are sales being manifested solely through Steam's position.

Now, back to whether this social permanence is worth the 30% Steam is extracting, I do have my opinions. Steam is technically "rent-seeking" from a strict economic classification, but is this more-so a case of the lighthouse or the railroad?

[8note]

its probably low compare what customers and game developers are willing to pay for it.

hosting a game and running a store nowdays is very easy, but still games launch on steam rather than building their own store or using a steam competitor. if the cost was too high, people would not be using the service

[throw10920]

This is an outright falsehood. "Rent-seeking" involves extracting value without providing any.

Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players.

Steam is a huge success of capitalism. Suggest not using words like "rent-seeking" without knowing what they mean.

[suslik]

Not to mention how much they did for Linux gaming.

[cubefox]

> Steam factually provides a huge amount of value to both developers and to players.

This is an outright falsehood. Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison.

By your definition, any monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism". But it isn't. Just because something is useful, doesn't mean it can't be massively overpriced due to competition not working as it should. Proper market competition should ensure that no company can extract huge profit margins for trivial things. Like hosting games.

[skeaker]

Epic, Steam's only serious competitor currently aside from maybe GoG, just had a bug in their launcher that had all Fortnite players have to redownload their entire 150~ GB game. The cost of hosting aside, the capabilities of these companies to host their own games pales in comparison to Valve, who hasn't had a single bug in downloading or updating any game in the decade and a half I have used their launcher.

Considering how alternative storefronts can't even get automatic updates to work consistently, the most basic functionality of a games storefront (more important than purchasing even, since if you can't get what you purchased, it's useless), it actually doesn't seem obvious to me that other providers can easily host their own games. Even putting aside everything else Valve uses their cut for (hosting a community forum for every game, hosting a mod DB for every game that wants it, metrics tracking, opt-in soft DRM, providing server hosting, maintaining Proton so your game works on Linux), the cut seems almost reasonable even just for hosting when nobody else is able to do it right.

[kube-system]

Steam doesn't control the global distribution of video games. Buyers and sellers are free to use another store, or none at all and buy directly.

Why don't they?

[Scramblejams]

It can be helpful to look at it less in terms of what it costs Valve to run their service and more in terms of what value developers get from Valve for the money.

I'm in the business and I've asked two different heads of large, very well-known AAA studios how they felt about Valve's percentage, and they basically told me the same thing: They had their teams do rigorous analyses of what it would cost them to 'replace' Valve for their games, and concluded it would cost roughly what they were already paying Valve. So they had no incentive to move off the platform. Look at how many publishers have come slinking back to Steam after trying to go solo -- there are good business reasons for that, and it isn't just about the stubborn fact of their huge social graph.

If it costs that much to replace Valve for your game, it's hard to argue that what they're charging isn't fair.

As others have pointed out, Valve does far more than just host. Shipping a multiplayer game and want comprehensive protection from DDoS attacks? Use Valve's datagram network for no additional fee. Don't want to host your own lobby servers? Use Valve's for no additional fee, they'll accommodate hundreds of thousands of players with no complaints. Want to sell your game in a zillion countries? Valve's got you, easy peasy. And discovery is a thing -- Valve sells a whooole lot of games just by putting them in the carousel in front of players. This is huge, huge value.

And as a player, I'm actually really happy, super happy, did I mention how incredibly happy I am with what they're doing with some of their cut: They saved gaming on Linux -- it's often better than Windows -- and I love my SteamDeck. So that cut is benefiting me directly as a consumer because they're spending it on initiatives I'm really passionate about.

Valve delivers a ton of value for the cost. If someone wants to try to do better, Valve's not stopping them, but I can tell you that as a player and a gamedev, none of the other options are remotely enticing to me. In my view, that's not Valve's problem to solve by cratering their own revenue.

[throw10920]

> Other providers could host those games for much less than the 30% fee. Hosting costs are extremely low nowadays. It's basically nothing compared to the development cost of an AAA game. This is often many years and hundreds of people working on a game. The hosting costs are completely minor in comparison.

Steam does far more than just host, and everyone who uses it knows this, so it's clear that you either have no idea what Steam does (in which case you should not be commenting) or you're actively lying about it.

Steam provides payment processing, cloud saves, ratings, game tags, social integration, wishlisting and sale notification, search indexing, game discovery, a bunch of incredibly useful APIs including networking and input, Linux compatibility, and many, many other things.

> By your definition, any Monopoly selling you strongly overpriced stuff would be a "huge success of capitalism".

This is not only false, due to the above value-adds, but intentionally false because I never gave a definition - you made one up and attributed it to me to lie about my positions.

And yes, there is competition - the fact that you don't know this is yet another indicator that you're totally ignorant of anything relevant to the conversation. There's the Epic Games Store, GOG, the EA App, Battle.net, the Xbox one/Windows Store, and more. And you know what the most popular one is, by a large margin, because it provides value to both devs and players? Steam. That's the market at work.

Your comments are false due to your total ignorance of reality, and your malicious lying about my statements indicates that you don't care that they're false - you'll say anything plausible, regardless of truth, to advance whatever agenda you have.

[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.

[charcircuit]

People find value in acquiring things they want. For example if someone wants to have a one letter username on X, there is value for there to be willing to sell one.

[immibis]

This is why I said "new real-world value". An X username does not have real-world value in the same way that potatoes have real-world value.

[BigTTYGothGF]

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