this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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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.
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.
So counter strike was not gambling before they started to sell hardware?
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.
At least we can agree on that.
Steam has an entire parental control setup with family view where you can completely restrict your children from purchasing or selling anything without your consent.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/4149575031735702628