That their games aren't filled with Pay To Win microtransactions and Day 1 DLC is yet another reason to love Valve. If someone wants to spend a few bucks to buy a hat in TF2, that's fine by me.
Conversely, CSGO and DOTA 2 has facilitated real money gambling among the youth on third party sites for years. Valve has attempted to crack down on gambling sites, however it's still possible for a fourteen year old to insert credit card details and lose real money gambling for virtual skins.
And Artifact has card packs that are effectively loot boxes, and a whole marketplace to facilitate selling/buying them. I don't know how much/if they made any cut from the marketplace, but it's certainly a form of "play to win".
Which could easily be fixed if Valve decided to put a hard-cap by selling skins for a fixed price, even if they were only for sale a couple weeks a year.
They'd also pocket all that money, but I guess they don't want people who spent more than said cap to get their skins. But people who are spending 100+ on skins should know they are playing the NFT game.
They should kill their RNG skin distribution and open a normal cash shop like everyone else. I find this cosmetic market where people pay hundreds or even thousands for items they want skeevy as hell. It's a big black mark on Valve's otherwise exceptional reputation.
2) Unlike basically every other game with paid skins, Valve games let you sell them to other players on an open market for Steam credit.
Valve takes 5% of each market transaction and many skins hold their value quite well so using a $200 knife for years and years could only end up costing $10 (+ opportunity cost) or so assuming the market stays flat and you will eventually buy $200 of games in the future.
The real losers in the system are the people with gambling addictions opening cases and hoping to get something really good for less than market price. Cases are free drops but cost $2.50 to open and the average market value of what you win is usually less than (value of the case)+$2.50. Because the cases can be sold there's no limit to the amount of gambling one person can do.
... on their own community market platform. Valve supports third party stores that don't have a Valve cut, and they freely provide the ability for users to trade items for items with no fees to allow third party stores to work. These systems kick off a whole third angle of businesses being propped up around the exchange of these items and of people doing speculative trades on certain items.
The market where Valve takes a cut of all cosmetics sold also incentivises them to maintain an extreme level of artificial scarcity for the most desirable cosmetics in the game.
To me this is infinitely worse than just having a skin shop and/or battlepass.
It's difficult to come up with an informed opinion on this sort of thing because it's nigh-impossible to talk to the people involved. I certainly don't know anyone who spends thousands of dollars on TF2 hats.
One possibility is that they're gambling addicts in countries where gambling is heavily restricted, and buying "loot boxes" containing random items is the closest they can get to playing a casino slot machine.
Or perhaps they think of themselves as clever investors in collectables, which they hope to sell on at a profit later on. You and I might think they're buying the equivalent of tulips or beanie babies - but they think their purchases are more like fine wines or rare postage stamps.
Perhaps the big spenders actually only spend big five bucks at a time, and they're merely poor at managing their personal finances - spending five bucks a day for five years, unaware of how it's adding up.
Or it could be money laundering - perhaps there's some criminal scheme where bank transfers are heavily monitored by the cops, but transfers of rare TF2 hats aren't.
Perhaps the big money transactions are actually fake, aiming to pump up prices or make people spending mere hundreds of dollars feel better about it because at least they're not spending thousands.
Yet another option is that they're super-successful billionaires, and a thousand bucks is nothing to them, not even worth bending down to pick up if they saw it in the street.
People who make games with microtransactions for a living probably find it a lot easier to sleep at night if they think all their whales are billionaires.
Or, maybe they just value the skins? Maybe they want to contribute financially to a game they really like in the hopes of keeping it healthy? I do know people that buy every new cosmetic that's released and they enjoy doing it. They aren't even millionaires. So what?
The people I know who have thousands of dollars in TF2 hats, have played the game for thousands of hours and so want to show off a little bit with cool looking items while doing so.
They have a fair amount of disposable income, but certainly aren't billionaires.
Depends on how you define tricked. The whole practice relies heavily on FOMO driven by artificial scarcity. It's all psychological manipulation, that many of us are susceptible to even if we think we aren't.
I bring it up because games like Overwatch 2 get regularly shit on for introducing things like a battle pass and paid skin shop. Those rely on FOMO as well, but not nearly to the same extent. There are no gambling mechanics, and there is no Blizzard-sanctioned auction house where the most desirable items sell for thousands of dollars. The most desirable cosmetics in the game can be had for 10 dollars plus spending some time playing the game.
As a player, it also just feels really shitty that customizing my character the way I want is reliant entirely on blind luck through gambling mechanics or spending obscene amounts of money.
So if Blizzard is gonna take heat for this (and they do deserve at least some of it), then Valve absolutely should get raked over the coals for their far worse system.
Pokemon as an entire game relies on artificial scarcity and psychological manipulation. It's just a fixed cost up front for the game (and arguably not even strictly so these days with Pokemon Go). Same with any game ever that has loot and drop tables. Allowing people to pay more money to get more drops is the only thing that's really changed. And honestly it seems the feedback depends entirely on how "sleazy" the game studio's street reputation is. Dota2 cosmetics are considered tasteful while Genshin Impact is "gacha". But heh even Genshin gets a pass because it's such a good game and not one of those mobile penguin island simulators (which even get a good rap in many circles for being cute and fun to play).
My new thesis is: if "winning" is "looking cool by getting good loot", then allowing people to pay for drops is effectively pay to win. I think this nuance is often skipped over in the conversation about whether some new game's micro-transaction framework is sleazy or not.
Yes. They sell items via loot boxes where you don't know what you're buying until you've already opened it. It's gambling. Distributing purchases this way is well known to increase spending and hurt people. It's why they do it.
The stock market is also gambling. Plenty of informed consenting adults visit casinos all the time. What's the "responsible adult" way to spend your discretionary entertainment budget these days? NFTs? Disney+? Binge drinking at cocktail bars after work? High yield savings accounts? I mean seriously I'm not pro psychologically damage people with manipulative feedback spirals. But let's not ignore the fact that 1) owning a cool cosmetic and looking good stomping noobs is fun, and 2) that people are willing to pay purely for entertainment.
As someone who played a lot of CSGO as a 15-16 year old back in 2015, it's all psychological. Why does anyone become addicted to gambling? The thrill releases enormous amounts of dopamine. Satisfy this over and over, and the threshold for the same euphoria becomes higher and higher. That's how yo end up with people, and particularly teens and young adults spending massive amounts of money for 'some pixels'. I think I sank about 1.5k into it in total over the years. When Belgium decided to ban such loot boxes I was happy to see the addiction forcibly ended.
They just need to repeat it for predatory battlepasses and the likes.
Because they value the content. Might not be your style, but participating in battle passes and cosmetic drops is enjoyable for many people. What else should they be spending their discretionary income on? Stonks?
