[order-matters]

to be fair, every gaming company nowadays is also doing this and still choosing go nickel and dime the adults and not do anything positive for the community

Steam lets you trade your items with others. with all the copycats that came out, im not sure any of them allow for you to trade things you bought with other players within the same game, let alone letting them buy it off you for virtual currency you could use to buy other games with

[odo1242]

To be fair, the trading feature is part of what enables the gambling system to work (i.e. selling weapon skins). Most game companies will explicitly try to not have a trading system on any items that are obtained by random chance because, well, gambling.

[order-matters]

except a lack of trading features encourages more gambling because youre not allowed to directly purchase or trade for items you want that are only dropped through random chance and are thus forced to gamble for them.

without trading they effectively remove everything about exchanging money for goods except the gambling part. and for regular microtransaction stores without gambling, it just kills the second hand market for sake of profits

steams dollar system is very clearly 1 directional as well. you put money into steam and it never comes out without violating their terms of service

the point isnt to eliminate gambling. the point is to make sure the people gambling are doing it responsibly. and if you do that and enable trading then you have other benefits to the ecosystem and make it easier to engage with it however you want, even if it's just to only buy old unpopular items for cheap. because if thats all you want to do, you are forced to pay for fewer "fresh" items from the shop in other games or gamble a little bit and live with whatever you get (which will also likely be less total items for same price in addition to likely not being the unpopular items you would have selected)

so i have a hard time believing the companies that dont have a trading system are doing so for any reason other than try to squeeze more money out of normal users who would have otherwise spent less in a more robust market system.

[odo1242]

Hmmmm, I suppose that makes sense