I play CS. This is good. The gambling economy and the creator economy of people pumping their marketplaces and gambling sites is really toxic. It extracts money from kids, all for a nice skin. Making them more affordable is going to make this more fair and sensible.
Remember back in the day when we just downloaded skin packs from some random Geocities website with obnoxious red text on black background and after going through the install.txt written in broken English/Italian, lo and behold your AK47 now had a proper arctic camo skin and it was so much cooler?
What was wrong with that? Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
Steam is still a business, but of all the gaming industry, Gaben is one of the highlights, steam try hard to be extremely pro consumer. Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game, requiring publisher and developers to explicitly state the AI generated content thats in the game to name just 2.
> Refunds with no questions asked if you've played less than 2 hours of the game,
Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously), and (much) weaker than GOGs refund: 1 month after purchase, no playtime restriction.
I believe they explicitly called out the equivalent for physical stores and european consumer protection in general when they announced the policy and lack of restrictions. Which is an indirect call out at Steam, which hasn't cared in the slightest and continues to have a worse policy.
I don't know if this has changed since the last time I bought shrink-wrapped software at a retail store, but the return policy on games and software was always that they couldn't be returned once opened, at least at the bigbox retailers in the US. I'm sure stores occasionally made exceptions, but I very clearly remember buying a copy of Oblivion and not being able to install it due to minimum specs and the store not accepting a return. I just had to hang onto the copy until I built a new PC.
This is probably a US vs Europe difference in consumer protections though.
Standard policy is I think mostly the same, but in Europe there's been arguments that those policies don't follow the actual consumer protection laws, which is a whole thing that I don't think really resolved one way or another.
It varies with country but I believe a number of protection laws specify normal use/testing a product is allowed, so you can open boxes and test functionality (norwegian law does this for sure). Excepting videogames from this is arbitrary, the argument from consumer protection agencies goes.
I believe in practice a number of games did get refunded when threatened with formal complaints along these lines, but that's far from a guaranteed thing.
Anyway, GOG decided to go with the generous interpretation (and the one all kinds of electronic goods except games and CDs/DVDs have), which is nicer for everyone, really
> Weaker than standard physical store consumer protections (no playtime restriction on returns, obviously)
Huh, we have different laws and physical stores. Here, no store will take your game back if you opened the box. Maybe that changed, but in the past any game opened couldn't be returned because you could have either copied the disk, or copied to key and activated it.
I believe there were some pushes to get rid of opened box = no refund policies as being against standard 14-day returns in Norway, because the law explicitly says the consumer may (paraphrase) "reasonably test the use of a product" which allows you to open the box on other goods. But keys being consumable puts them in another category of goods (like food, which obviously can't be returned after "use"), so that doesn't apply.
2 hour return policy can already be a problem for a very short indie game. There was one which you could beat in 2 hours and refund and people did that.
GOG gets away with their policy because only people who believe in GOG ideallogy go there, and they won't refund a good game. If steam did that, abuse would skyrocket.
And in my country, unless explicitly stated otherwise, most physical goods can't be returned if they are used.
In some sense, GOGs entire existence is testing the hypothesis that it's impossible to run a consumer friendly digital store due to abuse.
If you took the common sense publisher view then no DRM = everything you make is instantly pirated and the whole store fails instantly. But GOG is a viable storefront, so that's demonstrably wrong.
The evidence is no better for Steam's refund policy than it was for DRM being necessary.
It’s far easier to just pirate (nearly all?) GOG games. Like there are torrents with big chunks of their entire store on them, and I’ve seen allusions to an unofficial “store” that just has all(?) their games on it for free. I doubt many people are abusing the refund system because going through those steps is more work than piracy.
sadly they don't do regional pricing at all, so steam price is almost half the GoG and maybe even lower. But yeah if you can buy GoG, it's better due to no DRM
While those statements are true, it is much easier to be pro-consumer when you are running a few morally dubious casinos and marketplaces to keep the bottom line healthy. Would Steam have grown into a position where it can comfortably act like this without the cash cows in the background? We'll never know.
The general market is so distorted that being seen as anti-large corporate behaviours on some policies is seen as enough to be considered pro-consumer.
That's sad if that's your bad. They were fined $3m only a few years ago for failing to comply with Australian consumer law and illegally witholding refunds. They didn't even bother getting legal advice.
I'm not anti-valve, but "complying with consumer laws in a country you make sales in" should be a minimum standard at least.
The game is rated as 'Mature 17+', and Steam has an age confirmation page before accessing the store page of the game. Are you expecting Valve to add ages verification based on ID like the new UK law to block all the kids?
I thought we had parents for you know, parenting. It shouldn't fall into a company to manage what a kid is doing when the product is not for kids.
It's not that simple. The real problem is that Valve allows items to be sold in markets outside of Valve's control which allows third party gambling websites to operate. And you guessed right, they basically don't care about your age. Valve of course knows this but won't do anything, because they make profits off all transactions happening in third party markets. Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos. Coffeezilla did an in-depth piece on this: https://youtu.be/q58dLWjRTBE
> Plus the whole professional CS tournament scene is sponsored by these predatory casinos
I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
(Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
I think gambling came in more in later waves. The first wave of popularity (mostly StarCraft, LoL and fighting games) tended more towards funding from sponsors, and not gambling ones (red bull, monster energy, gaming peripheral makers, the game devs themselves, mobile games).
I don’t know much about lol or fighting games but the starcraft pro scene exploded after a gambling/match fixing scandal back in 2010! The first wave absolutely had this problem
> I once had a glimpse behind the scenes of the online sports gambling industry (only for a few months—turns out that was my limit of how utterly disgusting an industry I could participate in and still, literally, sleep at night!) and it answered a question for me.
I worked in online gambling for about 10 years in the UK. I found how charities and local/national government worked far worse and I was far more frustrated with their attitudes.
e.g. I found an SQL Injection vulnerability with dynamic SQL in a large UK charity (I won't say which one). I reported this to my boss. He kinda just shrugged his shoulders. Similar attitudes were present in local government. The gambling industry was the complete opposite and took security very seriously.
What bothered me the most about charities and government was that on the outside they were giving the impression of having a virtuous purpose. Whereas the gambling sites didn't, it was simply "Try to win some cash".
As a former addict (alcohol), I don't have much sympathy for people that blame the companies for the problems of addicts. The problem ultimately lies with the individual. I was the one that choose to drink. The brewary, the bar, or the off-license never forced the drink down my throat. People choose to go to the casino, in the same way they choose to go to the bar.
> The question was: “How did professional gaming get so incredibly big so very fast?” Its quick rise seemed to me to have started well before the broad normalization and rise of gaming in mainstream pop culture, so had always seemed to me like the cart coming before the horse, and I’d never been able to figure out how or why it’d happened that way.
Many of the classic videos games were made to relieve you of change in Arcades. Nearby to where I live there are still classic seaside arcade. They still have machines similar to Sega Rally and Time Crisis there. Video gaming and quasi-gambling have been intertwined since the birth of the industry.
> The answer was gambling. Professional video gaming is all but completely a gambling industry. That’s where the money and promotion came from. Sponsorships, sure, but that’s secondary and would drop off to a large degree without the boost from gambling. And I mean gambling on the matches, not just sponsorship by gambling sites. It’s a betting industry.
This is all professional sports (even going back to long ago as the Roman Empire). There is nothing special about professional video gaming.
The industry saw that people were interested in watching matches between highly skilled people. Any form of entertainment/news/sports is bankrolled by advertising and/or gambling.
Many of these large events came out of more grass roots events like large lan parties. These were pretty big in the late 90s to early 2000s.
> (Online gambling’s also all wrapped up in right wing political money and funding right wing media[!] in, at least, the US, was another thing I learned that I hadn’t expected)
Gambling tends to attract the more profit orientated which roughly aligns with what is considered "right wing" (at least in the US). I found the industry to be pretty apolitical as a whole. Many of the C-suite and above seemed to be actually relatively left-wing at least in some view points. It was odd when the top executives were far at least on somethings far more to the left than I was.
Should 17-year-olds be gambling? They're still in high school, the high-tech excuse of blaming the parents while pocketing billions of dollars is odious and convincing a jury to slap these companies with tobacco industry levels of damage remains feasible.
You can make a non-toxic, high quality free to play game, e.g. Beyond All Reason. Of course there will be no marketing budget for that game so most people won't know it's there.
Ideally kids wouldn't be participating in real world transactions at all, and I'd love to see the numbers of how many were actually kids who directly went to gamble I stead of being pushed into it by streamers which is where I see it constantly.
> Now, thanks to a recent update from Valve, the latter is in a downward spiral, having lost 25% of its value — or $1.75 billion — overnight
The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
The thing is Valve is clearly aware of the fact that it’s getting kids addicted to gambling. They have the data. It’s extremely ubiquitous. This has been an ongoing issue for a while and Valve has rightly been criticized for willfully getting kids addicted.
Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids. But that doesn’t give Valve a free pass, particularly when they used dark patterns to appeal to children.
> Yes the parents have a responsibility to look after their kids.
How? Individual parents can't fight off predatory corporations entrenched in mainstream culture going after their kids. They need to make a go at Valve.
edit: Rereading, I guess that was kinda the point you were making?
I agree we should go after companies clearly engaging in profit-above-all, making societies and future generations worse from the start. Make them hurt, make them bleed bad, take tens % of their global revenue (not profit, thats easy to game).
But - parents are responsible too, more than anybody else. Gaming is generally bad for kids, physically and mentally. Come on, everybody who cares knows that for past 2 decades. Screens generally fuck up kids properly, the younger and more interactive the worse the result. Kids need tons of physical fun and tons of continuous social interaction in larger groups, doesnt matter what some echo chambers claim, 'digital skills' are not something your kid can anyhow miss on.
Its supremely easier to fuck off kids, leave me alone, my adult life is oh so hard already, here play some more, give me some break. Adults being glued to phones hard themselves. Results are what they are. Its called universally bad parenting, by psychologists and various experts for a reason. No sympathies for parents there, but I feel sorry for all those kids whose potential is squished into various anxieties and abysmal social behavior.
Talking all this and much more as parent of 2 small ones, luckily for them environment we are in is firmly agreeing with all above.
When you say easier to simply earn, I understand it as you think they do this to benefit their playerbase / users.
Yes, it says that they want a bigger cut of the sales when those items are sold.
Not sad this hits the trading sites as that will also likely mean fewer will get scammed as they will stay in valves market, but saying valve is doing this for the users is crap, they do it for the profits, and maybe to stay under the radar of additional lawsuits regarding gambling laws around the world.
> The fact that they made this change to make these items far easier to simply earn should say a lot about the ethos of the company though.
Them letting it happen for literal decades while being highly aware of what they're doing says more about the ethos than this, in the grand scheme, tiny move.
Don't get me wrong, me as a person who does not participate in any kind of this gray-area gambling has basically a lot of net positives from Steam and Valve. But this doesn't make them a pro-consumer company.
They're still greedy capitalists, and it shows in many different perspectives. They may be "better" to consumers than the average, but still.
'sv_pure' exists and says no for the official servers, sorry
Community servers are a thing, so is a worse experience. The well-maintained community days passed. We wanted curation and we got it: matchmaking and even our customization/spending.
Which is an easy technical problem to solve, but the liability of abuse when sharing user content with other users is not palatable.
It is also not impressive to others, not a status symbol, and that's actually the purpose of skins in the modern day. No one grinds 1000hrs of warframe for a skin just because they think it looks cool, they think it makes THEM look cool. They want people to be impressed that they had $2000 to spend on a knife, not that the knife skin was neat. The skin is an auxiliary component to the task.
This is what turned me off of Global Offensive, and CS2 I guess but it doesnt look like much(if anything) has changed between GO and CS2 compared to the changes made from 1.6 -> Source -> GO.
Looking back to ~2012/2013 and its seeming to be clear now that the introduction of weapon crates, the steam marketplace, and all of the other MTX in all of their(proprietary) competitve games may have been a good indication that these would be the last games Valve would develop in-house.
To be fair though and just to give a counter-example, the "clout chasers" with the $1000 knife skins is essentially the same as the bragging rights of a 4/5/6 digit steamID during 1.6 and CS:Source. Although flexing SteamID length was something I only really saw in the competitive scene and of course had a much smaller(unofficial) market.
Oh well, RIP Steam games, long live Steam software(their platform/Proton, etc) and hardware...minus the steam controller.
Where do people get this impression? It's not trivial to build user comments on a web page let alone a proper chat app but people think it's easy to share game assets for some reason.
It's really not that crazy. You log onto a server, the server communicates your skins to the other clients. Counter strike itself literally did this in the 2000s, it was removed. Modders for other games working for free figured it out. Games used to automatically download maps and skins in a bunch of Valve games as well as other games.
I would also consider building comments into a webpage pretty trivial, it was like the second thing I did when teaching myself web applications years ago.
I bet it's harder in modern frameworks than it used to be, but that doesn't make it a hard problem, we just surrounded an easy problem with more difficult but unrelated problems.
Making it cheaper reduces the status symbol aspect, since that's mostly about signalling wealth. But maybe not the rarity/exclusivity signals for items made artificially rare or hard to get.
That's sad. I remember a time before sv_pure. Sure, people installed transparent wall textures, but there was also a lot of cool customization to be done. And it was just your game, before streaming.
I was thinking of your description of the situation before sv_pure. What you wrote sounded like "sure some people completely destroyed the game but you got to see some cool skins". Skins can't make up for wallhacks, and wallhacks won't let you enjoy the skins. It wasn't a tenable situation.
Well, both. I wish less servers had enabled sv_pure in extra strict mode, but it was a solution to the wallhacking and extra loud footsteps. It was also the start of the decline of being able to run your own mods.
I see people doing this a lot in Deadlock, Valve's next game that's in pre-release stage now. There are all sorts weird and fun skins people play with through mods, some of them definitely not copyright-friendly.
I wonder how Valve will handle this once the game is ready to be released - will they just blanket ban the mods? (seems likely, and the community is even probably ready for it so will not be too pissed off at the move.) Or will their monetization route be something else this time, not "hats" like usual? (I'm hoping so, although I can't imagine what else it could be without being pay2win.)
All Source games, not just Deadlock, did and still somewhat do have a strong modding scene. The way it's handled now is that official Valve-hosted servers have a config option called sv_pure set that prevents most mod .vpk files from loading on connecting clients (though some things like custom HuDs are whitelisted by this system). Once Deadlock gets paid cosmetics you can expect sv_pure to be turned on for Valve servers, which 99% of the playerbase will exclusively play on.
What's the other 1%? For eg., in Dota 2, if I create a private lobby, would that allow the mod vpk files? Or only for local bot matches? Or some other more involved scenario?
Not sure about Dota specifically but for e.g. TF2 any non-Valve-server game had pure off by default. That does mean bot matches or private lobbies. You could hop into a community server and run your mods fine right now if you wanted.
This provides a continuous revenue stream that allows maintenance and improvement of the game without affecting gameplay. It's entirely cosmetic. Don't participate in it if you don't want to. I played with stock skins majority of the time till a friend gifted me an AWP Redline after staying at my place. It was cool but to someone who just wants to enjoy the game it hardly matters. Besides you can go to various private servers and play with whatever skins.
> Doesn’t gaben have enough money for his super yachts and sword collections?
Isn't most of this trading done on 3rd party services though? I mean sure, Valve is indirectly responsible for allowing trading of rewards like this, but they don't control the market values themselves and only profit indirectly from it.
Which does make me wonder about their other popular collectible game, TF2 - they don't update it, like, ever, but it's still popular and they can potentially make huge amounts of money from it. But they can from the Half-Life franchise too.
TL;DR I don't really understand Valve, but it doesn't really matter because they're swimming in money regardless.
That era was nice but it has a different problem. People will pearl clutch about kids getting exposed to someone's custom skin making their character nude, or putting curse words on the side of a gun or whatever.
Most of the scarcity in artificial economies like CS is (just as with trading card games) manufactured and vulnerable.
Seeing what happens with a rug-pull in a billion dollar artificial economy like this is a valuable lesson for anyone watching.
If/when the huge Satoshi bitcoin stash gets traded in, we'll see similar outcomes there too.
I'd say that's true: if you have one skin, there's virtually zero production cost to making more copies of said skin.
It's not that different for many things in the real world, I suppose (eg: if you sell way above cost, then your cost is also arguably zero), but I'd say it's magnified in the digital world (or even with NFTs).
I got really into Lorcana last year, spent $40 on a particular rare card I needed for a deck. Out of curiosity I bought some cards for $3 each from Aliexpress, and got myself a jewelers loupe.
The cards were literally indistinguishable even with the loupe. I quit buying cards after that. It’s a suckers game if I can’t tell the difference between a $50 and a $3 card even when I know one is fake. Sure enough, a few months later the prices have absolutely cratered for the cards.
The only ones they couldn’t copy exactly seemed to be the “enchanted” cards, which sell for hundreds or thousands of dollars.
Isn't most of our technology based on technologies invented to maximize killing in world war 2, or alternatively as a way to maximize monetization in sleazy ways?
World War 2 took at most about a decade (depending on who you ask). The history of development of our technology is much, much longer. I doubt 'most of our technology' is based on anything that happened in WW2.
It's just that technologies are all connected, so if you want to make them look bad you can do so. Is fixation of nitrogen into ammonia something that improved billions of lives through fertilizer, or something that enabled manufacture of many millions of tons of explosives? It's both.
Sure, no question about that. I'm just objecting to connecting everything to WW2. There were plenty of other wars before and after and even at the same time.
Actually, no. Even a perfect quantum computer can only attack a key if its public key has already been revealed on-chain, which is only the case for a small amount of coin. The other QC attacks rely on cracking a private key after it was broadcast, and before the transactions make it into a block.
Technically, "abandoned wallets" is not something that exists, all you have are "unspent outputs" of transactions. For QC attacks to work the public key to a private key has to be revealed, for modern addresses that only happens when you spend coins, not when you send them somewhere.
I guess some people call early P2PK (pay to public key) addresses "abandoned", but we simply don't know if somebody still controls them.
Interesting. So as long as your wallet has only received Bitcoin, it's untouchable but the moment you transfer any of it, it's at risk of being emptied. The only way to protect any of the funds is to simply move it to another new wallet. We would be in a situation where any wallets (with known keys) can only be sold off in their entirety to prevent theft. However, who is going to want to buy any Bitcoin if the potential buyer's market decreases with each user exiting the market? The inherent value immediately drops to zero because each successive sale would be less than what it was purchased for. Kind of a Schrodinger's wallet, do you really own any Bitcoin if you can never withdraw from it?
The attack when sending a transaction has a time constraints. It will take many any years to go from being able to crack private keys in years/month to doing it in minutes.
In a scenario where you have a powerful enough quantum computer and are able to break the encryption you can access any wallet (I.e. the system would be done, and the value would be zero).
It's a dumb analysis of the situation that ignores what would actually happen:
A new wallet cert would be created that uses more bits. Enough that a brute force even with a quantum CPU would take too long. Then you transfer the funds to the new wallet. Abandoned wallets might be claimed during this transition but overall the deflationary trend of btc won't really be effected long term.
I think having Trump whisper in your ear before the next Truth Social post is the least effort way to win at Crypto. Inventing a viable quantum computer seems like way too much effort for the bros.
The purpose of the update is certainly not to reduce the cost of these items, but to better position Valve to earn this revenue steam, as opposed to third party scalpers. Looks like it's working.
They don't care about the resell value since they don't earn a commission on those sales.
The point is that, for as long as items can be transferred in game, they are always convertible to cash in the real world. Inserting artificial friction inside the game to increase scarcity, such as limiting convertibility of items, will drive those trades away from the game economy and into the third party ecosystem where the dollar rules supreme as the super-convertible means of exchange. So you have an induced scarcity that in effect drives third party profits.
By increasing in-game convertibility, the trades are directed to other in game assets that are a just a proxy for loot boxes, i.e money in Valve's accounts. So prices crashing in the third party market signal that players have a cheaper and more direct route to acquire them - give the money to Valve - which also generates the supply of new rare items as those loot boxes are opened.
It's a smart economic move.
Buy that doesn't mean the prices will stay low, since they can always control the overall scarcity, or add new, rarer and more exclusive items. The total amount of money they extract from "kids" is ultimately linked to their ability and willingness to pay.
Glad to chat with someone who understands in-game economies. I agree, but for a different reason. I don't think Valve cares about the economics that much. I think it's more of a product strategy move.
They have been threatened numerous times with lawsuits over the gambling aspects of the IAP. This moves completely de-risks that. As you said, it's not going to affect profits very directly. It will however make the speculative market collapse, and keep players engaged within the game's economy.
Not it, Valve. Valve designed and implemented the system. Gabe Newell, founder and own of Valve, is one of the people responsible for introducing gambling to children. Children who grow up and develop a gambling addiction.
Just because they made some good things doesn't mean we can't call them out on literally their biggest, ongoing, evil.
Yes, let’s blame the f2p game dev when there are literally streamers pumping fake platforms, doing fake wins, marketing gambling sites at kids. Valve did that
It's Valve that created the loot box mechanics (i.e. gambling). That's the foundation on what everything is built. And even without the adjacent ecosystem, it's still Valve that's exploiting children by introducing gambling to them.
I have no skin the game, literally or figuratively (buying some 2d sprites for a virtual weapon is childish and pathetic from grown up man point of view and kids should spend 0 time in such game... either buy a real gun, get into ie paintball for the kick of the hunt or find something else that feels amazing and doesnt involve sitting on your introvert ass, worsening isolation and mental issues), but - your argument is very weak whataboutism, and ignoring who introduced it all, to weakest members of society to prey on addictivity of it all.
Pathetic all around, imagine I am giving you a minus I cant give, and expecting better from you next time.
A few months ago, I realised CS:2 is more than 60GB and still barely worked on my M1 Pro Mac. I tried with these three: Whisky, Sikarigur, and even CrossOver trial. A friend suggested I should try some kind of partitioning and install Windows on that. I definitely will never try that.
CS:1.6 (which is what I still would want to play) is history unless I clasp my nose with my toes and then hang upside down from a ceiling fan and request someone to switch it on and then pray it works and keeps working. It doesn't; it crashes with flamboyance. There are some browser options, but that's another story altogether, and that too if I can find enough players there, let alone with good pings.
I finally realised that the only computer game I ever loved playing and played really a lot— albeit with gaps worth years in between after college— is just gone for me, and there's no coming back.
I guess now I am too old for all this, and maybe that's the point. Possibly someone who is on the older side will not buy these skins and whatnot; the company's focus is rightly not on us at all.
(PS. I always felt distracted with those skins; even in those younger and much younger days)
CS 1.6 ran just fine for me just now on NixOS. Literally just clicked install in Steam and ran it. Aren't Macs incapable of running most games? Get a $150-200 n150 mini PC and install Linux and it should run most things before like 2010 (and probably later) at 4k 60 fps while sipping like 10 W and running completely silently.
Thing is I don’t buy devices more than I absolutely need so that’s just a phone and a laptop. I will try this with NixOS because I have never tried NixOS in the first place. Brew has been enough so never tried anything else and also a lot of FOSS tools I use on my mac pro treat Brew as some kind of standard so that’s there.
FYI NixOS is more of a power user distribution (the draw is it's driven by declarative configuration management). Something like Bazzite is more targeted for e.g. gamers and may be more appropriate if you want a more off the shelf experience (I don't have experience with it but see it discussed a lot). If you only have a mac you might not have much luck though.
The n150 mini PC suggestion is because they really punch above their weight for being so cheap if you otherwise don't have usable hardware and want to play older/less demanding games anyway. They also make for extremely snappy workstations (on Linux. They come with Windows 11 which is super laggy). And they're like 2 inches * 2 inches * 1 inch, so tiny. If you're doing anything other than AI or something like video editing, they're a fantastic value.
Same here. I play the game happily. I would prefer to switch back to the good old "This games costs 50 $" which will also harm cheating. Maintain it and release sometimes an upgrade for a fair sum, keep the old one playable.
It shall not be a marketplace for gambling and cheaters.
The quickest way to end it would be to ban gifting skins. You'd be allowed to buy and sell skins in the Valve marketplace where market caps could be in place but no more private sales. Of course you could privately buy an account that has possession of the skins you want but that would add substantial obstacles to the private market.
I doubt it's going to change anything, this manipulated market will adapt and continue to extract money from kids. The cynic in me could even say that this change was pushed by Valve to take a bigger cut of the skin market (most trades are supervised by 3d parties). Coffeezilla investigated one of the many casino sites, there's a lot more to it.
I wish I knew what happened in the past few years, because steam was supposed to ban csgo gambling and trading sites, but you can see their names plastered all over twitch every day.
Society raises children, it's not fair to expect parents to police everything their child does. I agree often parents should be more responsible and not always take the easy way out.
But expecting them to individually fight billion dollar corporations that deliberately court children with damaging addictive services is asking too much.
It’s hard to express how frustrating it is to try to allow kids access to tech and the Web (it’s kind of important that they have at least some access! And isn’t a bunch of this allegedly for super-charging learning and exploration of the world?) while basically every platform and vendor (of most any kind) except Apple’s and Nintendo’s stuff is somewhere between mediocre and annoying, and utter shit on this front (even, and in some ways especially, open source operating systems) and none of these goddamn things coordinate or communicate with one another (and of course SSO, basically a necessity for even starting to tackle that kind of problem, is an “enterprise” feature for almost every vendor)
Then we’re told this is all our fault. Meanwhile schools send home devices that don’t lock or at least disable Web access at night, and I can’t admin those to fix that dumbfuck oversight. To point out just one of many ways we get undermined. This is a whole bunch of stress and work that simply did not used to exist for parents and I absolutely get why a lot just stop trying.
You can monitor and restrict Steam usage with parental controls. This is no more unfeasible than WiFi and device time limits, and last I checked, children don't carry a credit card. What's the mystery here? An 8 year old is not accruing bitcoin to buy skins.
Meanwhile you have users here that will tell you that refusing to give their kids smartphone or even any video game is not that hard, but it seems needsly restrictive.
AFAIK you don't need a credit card linked to the account, you can get in-store credit from selling the guaranteed drop items from playing a few matches, this is enough to get you started trading.
It's literally "The first hit is free". The sketchy gambling sites spot you bonus skins and stuff for the same reason. It doesn't matter, they don't actually have to ever pay out, so they can just give you fake money to get you addicted.
Unless they're using their own money with the blessing of their parents, this remains in the realm of tin-foil-hat paranoia. There's no reason to believe we're in child gambling crisis because of fake money.
