Valve doesn’t run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.
Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can’t make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can’t make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn’t need to include these staffers in its accounting books.
Valve is directly responsible for skins in Counter Strike which are gotten with 100% gambling mechanics. The fact that they can be sold for real life cash adds to this. I’m not saying its only Valve doing this, plenty of other games on Steam as well, but they certainly have a horse in the race.
Agreed, we should not make it seem like Valve has no responsibility just because it doesn’t directly own the casinos, gambling sites, etc. They benefit financially from the way the whole system is set up and they know it. Every round and transaction directly benefits Valve financially. The more underage people get addicted to the casino system they have going on, the more money Valve gets.
I mean, who made the GUI a copy of a slot machine?
They could end this whole thing tomorrow if they wanted to.
The government need to get involved and relegate MTX. I agree they are responsible for hosting the platform and developing the systems in the case of CS skins. It’s ugly but Valve are behaving as a rational business actor in this scenario.
Plenty of Gacha Games are more predatory than CS:GO. Valve is happy to host them all. CS:GO is a big money maker precisely because it has a large and enduring user base that isn’t fixated on Pay2Win game mechanics. Compare that to SummonerWars or Diablo Immortal or even just Candy Crush. There’s no contest.
No, there’s companies that abuse valves market for their underground casinos.
I honestly don’t get why you are mad at valve when they are not even in the slighest involved in that process apart from offering the market system. That’s like being mad at cloudflare or AWS because a website that scams you uses it.
It’s because Epic Games is spending a shitload of money astroturfing these idiots into believing that Valve is personally running a massive counter strike casino and you need to THINK OF THE CHIILLLLDREEEEEEEN.
Which is ironic because fortnite is specifically tailored to children/teens and has had lootboxes until they got sued, had to remove it and were like: “Oh actually we always though lootboxes were stupid :( so we removed them :( pls like us :(.”
Now they’re probably trying to harm valve this way, which is dumb because counter strike is rated 18+.
And yeeees, no kid gives a shit about age rating - well aware of that. But I’m not sueing porn sites because kids can access porn with just clicking “Yes” on the popup.
I like lootboxes, if they’re done the way Heroes of the Storm does them.
You can’t buy them with real money, you can only get by playing the game, they can contain any random item from the game’s cash shop, and if you want to just buy the item outright instead of hoping it drops in a loot box…
Aren’t the kids mostly playing Fortnite and not Counter Strike? Doesn’t Fortnite outright advertise to children, have FOMO practices design to keep people addicted and spending money, and promote gun violence.
Well we need to see Valve in court over this how dare they make, host, and promote Fortnite!
Wait… Valve doesn’t make, promote or host Fortnite…
But why would they? Trading skins is a big part of the game. I enjoy trading/selling/buying skins every now and then. There is nothing bad about being able to trade stuff.
The problem occurs when third party sellers abuse your platform - but why you would be mad at valve instead of those sellers is beyond me.
I was throwing out a nuclear option showing that there are options. This is valve where best of the best work here, and implementing locked down trading can work to thr point they cut out the external trades or make it so hard to move the trade of thr platform that it would effectively kill the casino portion. Albeit this would hurt their earnings.
Nuclear options rarely are the best ones, especially in a case where the harm caused doesn’t even remotely warrant it.
Parents should keep an eye on their kids so this can’t happen. That’s what parents are supposed to do. Removing a good feature because “MUUUH THINK OF THE KIDS” is wrong.
Lootboxes are literally gambling and redeeming them even look like slots.
Allowing the selling/trading of skins allows for a black market to emerge to convert them to currency. Valve created the conditions for this exploitive system to emerge and does nothing to stop it. You can debate whether valve has a duty to stop it but they are forever a black eye on gaming in my eyes. Just because they sell cheap games twice a year doesn’t white wash them
Yes eBay and Amazon is responsible for not vetting sellers and buyers on their platforms and why the experience is so terrible for honest sellers.
The other examples aren’t applicable because Ferrari, wüsthof, or local taxpayers don’t make money off of vehicular manslaughter, murder, or war crimes.
Sorry to say but I’m not sure if you’re just dishonest as fuck right now or really stupid.
You pull random items out of cases and can sell these items - if you feel like it, you can buy specific items on the market. I don’t see the casino functionality.
First of all, you don’t really get “real life money” - you get steam credits. There is no way to convert skins into real money without somehow using a third party sites which is already circumventing steams market. In a casino, if you gamble, you get either money directly or you get credits that you can exchange back to money after you leave.
So yes, I do call him stupid or dishonest for considering it gambling. Valves system is in no way, shape or form worse than stuff like yugioh, magic the gathering or pokemon TCGs that have been available for over 20 years now and much more easiely available aswell to children or even specifically marketed to them.
You can’t directly convert steam credits into legal tender without third-party services. But you can buy products and then sell yhose if you wanted to for legal tender. Using CSGO2 + Steam Marketplace and Store , you could sell enough skins to buy Valve’s products, including hardware such as the Steam Deck and their VR headset. So yes, there are ways to convert the skins into value irl.
We should also keep in mind that Valve has behavioral psychologists from the casino industry working on this system. I wonder why.
But you can buy products and then sell yhose if you wanted to for legal tender.
In league of legends, I can get random essence from the chests. If I get enough of those, I can buy stuff from the store I could also buy for real money.
The only difference with valve is that they just show the outright amount instead of hiding it behind vbucks or some other fictional currency.
you could sell enough skins to buy Valve’s products, including hardware such as the Steam Deck and their VR headset
Yes, but to me, this is even an upside. Playing CS:GO for years and being able to sell all the skins you collected and converting them into enough money for a steamdeck seems to be a great deal and awesome functionality. If I stop league of legends, all the skins I earned in the game are basically lost.
Is your critique solely because of loot boxes or something else? Because I feel we mess up two topics: Lootboxes being immoral (something I would agree with, but with much worse offenders) and third-party sites offering an illegal casino on valves platform. I just don’t see valve responsible for that but rather the third party sites.
Its not just software that you can buy as in the case of LoL and essence. You can also buy highly expensive hardware produced by Valve itself which you can either keep or sell irl just like you would sll your phone or laptop. I.e. there are accessible ways to convert into irl value. I’m not intimately familiar with LoL, but can you convert essence into a VR headset or something similar? Afaik, the answer is “no”.
It might be something you personally like but that’s not the issue. The issue is whether the system is similar enough to gambling to warrant similar regulation. And there are a lot of arguments in favour of regulation. Understandby, this is relatively low on lawmakers’ priorities. However, some EU countries have already moved in that direction, ouright banning games with gambling systems if they fail to uphold laws.
You can’t convert steam credits to cash directly, that’s true. But if you put all the necessary systems in place to be a casino, but then just rely on 3rd parties to launder the credits to cash/crypto, I don’t consider that an real distinction even if it is a legal loophole. It’s just the same as a pachinko parlor.
I guess that makes it more on the level of Dave and Busters or Chuck E. Cheese, except nobody is really serious about exchanging prize tickets from those places to cash/crypto like they are on steam. I suspect if they had a black market like skin gambling in CS:GO does though, there would be a similar push back as there is vs Valve in this scenario.
I do agree with your point about TCGs, they get by on the fact that commons technically allow you to play the game but they are similarly exploitative.
But if you put all the necessary systems in place to be a casino
I don’t even see that.
What I see is valve offering random items in chests and third party sites gambling your skins away. But these things are not linked in the slightest. I just don’t see how valve is responsible for third parties misusing their platform.
In general, I much prefer the valve system because if I pull an item from a chest that I don’t like I can sell it and potentially get something I need instead of having a dead skin lying around (and therefore literally losing money).
I don’t think we are going to convince each other, I am glad that you find value in being able to sell skins that you don’t want on the marketplace for credit. That is why the system was designed, not for it to be abused by others for gambling.
I more-so have problems with how the system is rife for abuse, and I think that it should be up for debate whether valve should have to do anything about it.
I actually don’t think they should have too, I think more responsibility should be on the individual and responsibility on the parents for minors.
I do think that we should expect easier parental controls with more granular settings to be able to allow parents to protect their kids from risky trades rather than basically just enable or disable the entire social features.
Dude the whole thing is a casino lmao anyone can see it you have to be blind now too what are you talking about? Have you played csgo lmao? It’s built exactly like a casino and kids know exactly how to turn money to skins to money.
Fucking lol. The lengths you things go to. Just shaking my head at how fucking stupid you must think the average person is. What an incredibly hostile world you have to live in.
A great deal of that money comes Valve running an illegal underage casino, and getting young kids addicted to gambling.
Valve doesn’t run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.
Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can’t make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can’t make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn’t need to include these staffers in its accounting books.
Valve is directly responsible for skins in Counter Strike which are gotten with 100% gambling mechanics. The fact that they can be sold for real life cash adds to this. I’m not saying its only Valve doing this, plenty of other games on Steam as well, but they certainly have a horse in the race.
Agreed, we should not make it seem like Valve has no responsibility just because it doesn’t directly own the casinos, gambling sites, etc. They benefit financially from the way the whole system is set up and they know it. Every round and transaction directly benefits Valve financially. The more underage people get addicted to the casino system they have going on, the more money Valve gets.
I mean, who made the GUI a copy of a slot machine?
They could end this whole thing tomorrow if they wanted to.
I watched my cousin get suckered by one of those a few years ago.
£50 Steam voucher in, fuck all out. Hooray for letting 14 year olds gamble their Christmas presents away…
Lets hope your cousin learned his lesson then.
He seems to have done. I think he’s a trainee accountant now and plays crown green bowling.
The government need to get involved and relegate MTX. I agree they are responsible for hosting the platform and developing the systems in the case of CS skins. It’s ugly but Valve are behaving as a rational business actor in this scenario.
With Trump in office soon you can forget about regulation.
And in any case, it’s tech-adjacent so legislators have zero idea how any of this works.
The EU and Australia seem to be inching towards serious legislation relating to MTX. Hopefully they can serve as an example.
I’m specifically talking about CS:GO, which is the most predatory and developed by Valve to be so.
Plenty of Gacha Games are more predatory than CS:GO. Valve is happy to host them all. CS:GO is a big money maker precisely because it has a large and enduring user base that isn’t fixated on Pay2Win game mechanics. Compare that to SummonerWars or Diablo Immortal or even just Candy Crush. There’s no contest.
It’s not just the tactics that make it the most predatory. It’s the massive platform and promotion that it gets by being a valve product.
No, there’s companies that abuse valves market for their underground casinos.
I honestly don’t get why you are mad at valve when they are not even in the slighest involved in that process apart from offering the market system. That’s like being mad at cloudflare or AWS because a website that scams you uses it.
It’s because Epic Games is spending a shitload of money astroturfing these idiots into believing that Valve is personally running a massive counter strike casino and you need to THINK OF THE CHIILLLLDREEEEEEEN.
Which is ironic because fortnite is specifically tailored to children/teens and has had lootboxes until they got sued, had to remove it and were like: “Oh actually we always though lootboxes were stupid :( so we removed them :( pls like us :(.”
Now they’re probably trying to harm valve this way, which is dumb because counter strike is rated 18+.
And yeeees, no kid gives a shit about age rating - well aware of that. But I’m not sueing porn sites because kids can access porn with just clicking “Yes” on the popup.
I like lootboxes, if they’re done the way Heroes of the Storm does them.
You can’t buy them with real money, you can only get by playing the game, they can contain any random item from the game’s cash shop, and if you want to just buy the item outright instead of hoping it drops in a loot box…
https://youtu.be/BvK6KsLkPUs
Aren’t the kids mostly playing Fortnite and not Counter Strike? Doesn’t Fortnite outright advertise to children, have FOMO practices design to keep people addicted and spending money, and promote gun violence.
Well we need to see Valve in court over this how dare they make, host, and promote Fortnite!
Wait… Valve doesn’t make, promote or host Fortnite…
Curious
Tbh valve could stop this by making it only tradeble to your friends or make the skins non tradable so they are just that, skins for you.
But why would they? Trading skins is a big part of the game. I enjoy trading/selling/buying skins every now and then. There is nothing bad about being able to trade stuff.
The problem occurs when third party sellers abuse your platform - but why you would be mad at valve instead of those sellers is beyond me.
I was throwing out a nuclear option showing that there are options. This is valve where best of the best work here, and implementing locked down trading can work to thr point they cut out the external trades or make it so hard to move the trade of thr platform that it would effectively kill the casino portion. Albeit this would hurt their earnings.
Nuclear options rarely are the best ones, especially in a case where the harm caused doesn’t even remotely warrant it.
Parents should keep an eye on their kids so this can’t happen. That’s what parents are supposed to do. Removing a good feature because “MUUUH THINK OF THE KIDS” is wrong.
Lootboxes are literally gambling and redeeming them even look like slots.
Allowing the selling/trading of skins allows for a black market to emerge to convert them to currency. Valve created the conditions for this exploitive system to emerge and does nothing to stop it. You can debate whether valve has a duty to stop it but they are forever a black eye on gaming in my eyes. Just because they sell cheap games twice a year doesn’t white wash them
So amazon or ebay are responsible for a merchant scamming you?
Wüsthof is responsible for people being stabbed with their knives?
Ferrari is responsible for people driving too fast and crashing with their cars?
Or if we extend it into absurdity: Are you responsible for paying taxes that your country uses for bad purposes?
Yes eBay and Amazon is responsible for not vetting sellers and buyers on their platforms and why the experience is so terrible for honest sellers.
The other examples aren’t applicable because Ferrari, wüsthof, or local taxpayers don’t make money off of vehicular manslaughter, murder, or war crimes.
Guess we fundamentally disagree on this point then.
TCGs did it first. Shake your fist at Magic.
Counter Strike is 100% a Valve-operated casino for kids.
Sorry to say but I’m not sure if you’re just dishonest as fuck right now or really stupid.
You pull random items out of cases and can sell these items - if you feel like it, you can buy specific items on the market. I don’t see the casino functionality.
You acquire items of arbitrary values for real life money by random chance and call the other guy stupid or dishonest for considering it gambling?
First of all, you don’t really get “real life money” - you get steam credits. There is no way to convert skins into real money without somehow using a third party sites which is already circumventing steams market. In a casino, if you gamble, you get either money directly or you get credits that you can exchange back to money after you leave.
So yes, I do call him stupid or dishonest for considering it gambling. Valves system is in no way, shape or form worse than stuff like yugioh, magic the gathering or pokemon TCGs that have been available for over 20 years now and much more easiely available aswell to children or even specifically marketed to them.
Not exactly.
You can’t directly convert steam credits into legal tender without third-party services. But you can buy products and then sell yhose if you wanted to for legal tender. Using CSGO2 + Steam Marketplace and Store , you could sell enough skins to buy Valve’s products, including hardware such as the Steam Deck and their VR headset. So yes, there are ways to convert the skins into value irl.
We should also keep in mind that Valve has behavioral psychologists from the casino industry working on this system. I wonder why.
In league of legends, I can get random essence from the chests. If I get enough of those, I can buy stuff from the store I could also buy for real money.
The only difference with valve is that they just show the outright amount instead of hiding it behind vbucks or some other fictional currency.
Yes, but to me, this is even an upside. Playing CS:GO for years and being able to sell all the skins you collected and converting them into enough money for a steamdeck seems to be a great deal and awesome functionality. If I stop league of legends, all the skins I earned in the game are basically lost.
Is your critique solely because of loot boxes or something else? Because I feel we mess up two topics: Lootboxes being immoral (something I would agree with, but with much worse offenders) and third-party sites offering an illegal casino on valves platform. I just don’t see valve responsible for that but rather the third party sites.
I think I didn’t explain it well enough.
Its not just software that you can buy as in the case of LoL and essence. You can also buy highly expensive hardware produced by Valve itself which you can either keep or sell irl just like you would sll your phone or laptop. I.e. there are accessible ways to convert into irl value. I’m not intimately familiar with LoL, but can you convert essence into a VR headset or something similar? Afaik, the answer is “no”.
It might be something you personally like but that’s not the issue. The issue is whether the system is similar enough to gambling to warrant similar regulation. And there are a lot of arguments in favour of regulation. Understandby, this is relatively low on lawmakers’ priorities. However, some EU countries have already moved in that direction, ouright banning games with gambling systems if they fail to uphold laws.
You can’t convert steam credits to cash directly, that’s true. But if you put all the necessary systems in place to be a casino, but then just rely on 3rd parties to launder the credits to cash/crypto, I don’t consider that an real distinction even if it is a legal loophole. It’s just the same as a pachinko parlor.
I guess that makes it more on the level of Dave and Busters or Chuck E. Cheese, except nobody is really serious about exchanging prize tickets from those places to cash/crypto like they are on steam. I suspect if they had a black market like skin gambling in CS:GO does though, there would be a similar push back as there is vs Valve in this scenario.
I do agree with your point about TCGs, they get by on the fact that commons technically allow you to play the game but they are similarly exploitative.
I don’t even see that.
What I see is valve offering random items in chests and third party sites gambling your skins away. But these things are not linked in the slightest. I just don’t see how valve is responsible for third parties misusing their platform.
In general, I much prefer the valve system because if I pull an item from a chest that I don’t like I can sell it and potentially get something I need instead of having a dead skin lying around (and therefore literally losing money).
I don’t think we are going to convince each other, I am glad that you find value in being able to sell skins that you don’t want on the marketplace for credit. That is why the system was designed, not for it to be abused by others for gambling.
I more-so have problems with how the system is rife for abuse, and I think that it should be up for debate whether valve should have to do anything about it.
I actually don’t think they should have too, I think more responsibility should be on the individual and responsibility on the parents for minors.
I do think that we should expect easier parental controls with more granular settings to be able to allow parents to protect their kids from risky trades rather than basically just enable or disable the entire social features.
Dude the whole thing is a casino lmao anyone can see it you have to be blind now too what are you talking about? Have you played csgo lmao? It’s built exactly like a casino and kids know exactly how to turn money to skins to money.
Idk if you unironically think that csgo is built like a casino you either never touched csgo or never set foot in a casino ngl.
Yeah. Valve runs the loot box system and the marketplace in which the winnings from those loot boxes are sold.
You pay Valve for a random chance at a rare item you can sell (with Valve taking a cut).
Fucking lol. The lengths you things go to. Just shaking my head at how fucking stupid you must think the average person is. What an incredibly hostile world you have to live in.
What?