I think it’s an improvement though. You never part with your money unless you know exactly what you’ll get.
It’s basically individualised offers in the form of boxes.
For FTP games that I am really enjoying, I will buy stuff sometimes to support the game.
Who is buying these skins. I feel like such an alien sometimes. I just can’t understand wanting to spend any money at all on a cosmetic skin
Game developers hire economists and psychologists to run experiments on the precise ways they need to design their games to make people feel like they need skins and other cosmetics and spend money on them. The games are designed to nudge people into associating having good skins with being good at the game and having the default skins with being bad at the game, and to make people want the new skins and feel bad for not having them. Furthermore, they don’t really make money on the average person who either doesn’t spend money on loot crates or maybe spends a bit of money every now and then- the real money makers are a tiny percentage of players who have some bizarre compulsion to spend absurd amounts of money on this stuff. These are known as “whales” and a lot of them have legitimate psychological issues that cause them to be like this or they’re like Saudi nobility who just have absurd amounts of money and don’t give a shit about blowing it on fake video game stuff.
To put it into perspective the player model shown when high level players play while have flashier animations which not only look cool but make the player look extremely nimble, it’s hard to explain but you just look way better with skins on to a point where players do make weird associations like “karambit is an awp skin”
the reason why in the aforementioned association is because after firing the awp (bolt action sniper) players will draw their knife instead of waiting for the bolt to be reset.
the draw is animated and on the karambit, the draw is exceptionally flashy, since this is frequently done as a legitimate technique (you move faster with knife drawn in cs) then people see the flashy karambit animation very frequently
Its a free to play game. You put 1000s of hours in why not spend some.money to customise your gun. Money isnt that tight for some people.
Yeah, I bought a few season passes when I was into DOTA. The main gain from those is cosmetics and some ladder ranking, but realistically it was that I’d played the game a ton for free and felt that paying a bit to engage wasn’t a big deal.
Everyday the thrill of the game wore off for me, but honestly given hours played versus money spent it was probably one of the cheapest investments in entertainment I made.
I guess. I’d rather not throw away my money, even if it’s not tight. I wouldn’t feel joy about a custom skin. Every time I saw it I would be reminded that I’d wasted money.
But that’s me, not everyone.
I’ll spend like $30 on the weekend getting alcohol and take aways. These add no value to my life beyond the short time I spend consuming them. Spending $20 for a skin that I think looks cool for a gun I really like and often use is an easy choice in a game I got for free.
Its hard to explain for someone that doesnt play but its more than just a skin on a gun when you play competitive games you’re expressing your skill as a player in front of an audience of people. Its a way for players to make the gun feel more like their own instead of just having everything look exactly the same. People are playing $80 to play a 1 time play AAA game so for f2p games with infinitely replayability spending some money on a skin isnt a big deal you’re just paying devs for the game you love.
when you play competitive games you’re expressing your skill as a player in front of an audience of people.
The first part of your post makes sense, even if I don’t agree with it. But this part stands out- buying a skin isn’t a skill question. It’s just a wallet question.
Some games have stuff you can only earn via achievements or whatever. I could see being proud of, like, a skin you only get if you get 100 perfect whatevers in a row. But, like, just buying it? But I guess the audience has enough people who are impressed by that sort of thing.
spending some money on a skin isnt a big deal you’re just paying devs for the game you love.
Also not to be a negative nerd, but unless the company is very tiny the developers aren’t getting much, maybe zero, of that money. Developers get a salary. Stock options, maybe. It’s not like a tip jar. Profits typically go to the owners under capitalism, not the labor. “Buy skins to support the developers” might be indirectly true, in a limited sense, but it mostly feels like capitalist propaganda.
I’ve spent like 5-10 dollars on csgo skins. Haven’t gambled but just spent money directly towards the marketplace to choose the shitty skins I like. Some designs are just really appealing to me
People who never used fpsbanana or joined a server with a bunch of skins.
I blame league of legends and then dota. Those things pushed matchmaking into cs and then gamer empowerment into obscurity. Even Microsoft’s version of Minecraft that they rewrote you have to pay real money for in order to save more worlds. There is a direct correlation between laziness and stupidity, and paying more.
100%.
Make a fun game. If there are skins, include a handful of good ones with the game and call it a day. I’m there to have fun playing a game, not to try on outfits.
Maybe I’m old.
Before this shit existed (like back when the hottest shit was Quake), I thought it might be cool to get a professionally made skin everyone in the game could see for like $0.25-$0.50. A dollar, at most.
The first iteration of a system that could have potentially made that a reality, the things you’d actually wanna buy were $25-50. Like who the fuck workshopped these ridiculous prices?
Adjusted for inflation, the price is probably the same 😅
But seriously they just charge whatever people will pay. It’s not like it’s free market, if people can’t make their own custom skins.
I wouldn’t spend money on skins in most games but Counter Strike is different. You can buy a skin, use it for years, and then sell it for more than you paid. In fact, skins are actually a very good investment that have historically had less volatility and better returns than stock indexes like the S&P 500.
Sure, people will always care for skins and beanie babies. Everyone knows that.
But you can’t get your money back out. You only get Steam wallet credit when you sell it, right?
That’s where 3rd party trading platforms come in.
These skins have 15% returns? That seems dubious but it could be. I don’t think you can sink $300k into skins like you can vanguard, though.
I bought operation cases for around 100€ 5 years ago, it’s now worth 1000€
That’s the case with a lot of collectibles. LEGO is a great investment but you have to keep it somewhere
I don’t think you can sink $300k into skins like you can vanguard, though.
There are skins worth millions, so definitely you can.
…who is paying a million dollars for a skin??
Whales.
Royal whales
Agreed. The only time I’ll buy a skin is if it literally improves camouflage. I see no reason to buy a flashy skin that only serves to make you more visible to enemies.
“Camouflage is the colour of fear.”
“What the enemy can see, he will soon learn to fear”.
Leave it to Valve to find the most predatory monetization possible.
I think nintendo is so much worse tbh. Mario kart for example they shove the dlc in to kids faces the whole time. Nonono, you can’t play these tracks, but you van look at them. Here are all the characters. No not this one, you need your parents magic numbers.
Cases are silly and bad, but at least it’s adults who should know better.
Nintendo has a ton of things we can criticize but at the very least the process with them has usually been simple purchases. You pay for what you want to buy and that’s what you get.
Tf you talking out your ass fr
Coffeezilla has a series on Valve CS2 market. Watch it
No way I’m taking your false equivalence bs, there’s nothing about Valves lootboxes that put it NEAR the industry standard of make shit game look good make money, lootboxes with GAMEPLAY mechanics locked behind, forcing dlc for basic features and micro transactions for consumables and to level up bullshit.
So suck my d*ck
Surely this corporation is my friend
I can smell Gabe’s smegma on their breath from all the way over here.
Surely this criticism is founded in an informed set of facts not ooooh the corporation. Which is doing surprisingly well despite all the pressure, isn’t your friend ah ha!
You tire rationality constructed sayings and subvert the very essence of what it meant and then, hold the applause, you resent people not liking your clearly look at me, its LEVEL headed and applies to other things (def not this but WHO CARES amiright guys?), Dopey, pick-me, bullshit.
It is founded on the fact that Valve was one of if not the first companies introducing predatory loot boxes via TF2 and only changes the system to skirt regulations on gambling. They’re just doing enough to pretend that all this isn’t a virtual casino where they always take a cut. It is not only exploitative, but also dishonest.
Let’s not forget that their argument that what they’re doing isn’t gambling was the exact same thing casinos did to skirt laws (showing you the prize of the next spin). You lose a lot of goodwill with such behavior.
There’s no need to defend it, they’re doing just don’t, and they would even without these scummy systems
See I’m not defending lootboxes or the companies that use them. I’m seeing a criticism directed at one of the LEAST offending players in the industry as if they are some cabal of assholes, like its hilariously under informed and your fucking YouTube video preying on your desire to have a boogyman is being pushed as if that isn’t the same level of bullshit.
They get paid to push bullshit. You don’t. So you don’t get that excuse here.
The point is the lootboxes are the canary and not the fucking toxic gas.
Yes, it is lame that they unwittingly legitimized it. Free to play isn’t something that had been done successfully for games like that, large scale, hardware dependent. But they had no idea how that would go. How in the world were they to know what that would do to the industry at large? They fucking didn’t that’s how. League was still being openly mocked for its fiscally stupid “free-to-play strategy” and expected to fail just as so many games before them. Which became the free-to-play MODEL after the RESOUNDING successes of both League and Fortnite, and was seen as much more exploitative (locking characters and thus most of the game not just cosmetics) and though inevitably it became the literal industry standard after DayZ/UnknownPlayers: Battlegrounds came around and was FAR more influential at every conceivable level we still had no knowledge yet of it being a real problem (in psychology) That didn’t come till well into Mobile Gaming coming up.
What exactly were they supposed to do instead? GoFundMe and Patreon? Barely existed and NO one smart would have trusted them at the inception. Especially for a big company.
So EA and Activision/Blizzard and dozens of other players make entire series of games built around taking advantage of every aspect of human weakness. Catalogues of max exploitative schite. Then you have Activision and Take-Two and now even Sony and Microsoft and a half dozen others who buys up every developer and game rights then produces the same underwhelming but palatable crap or strait exploitative slop while exploiting the workers to the extreme, in both pay and insane time crunches, while holding onto fantastic franchises because theyre not what boils down to easily exploitable and really just don’t like risk and/or competition and you whine and complain about this? Seriously you moved past the low hanging fruit and strait into the branches for some reason.
I just want to hear more about how Hitler isnt bad because he didn’t INVENT genocide or something its using your logic and its fucking ridiculous.
Don’t care about fucking lootboxes with all the bullshit that’s worse that I lined out being way more prevalent. I wasn’t having a discussion till you showed up. Just pointed out that point. No one asked for your essay you got from a internet influencer masquerading as legitimately formed opinion coming about the place. Its attracting others doing just about the same thing, not thinking and upvoting common positions in leu of using their heads
Don’t hate me for asking a question. I don’t endorse loot boxes and do think they suck. But help me understand:
Isn’t this better than loot boxes?
You get to see what you’re paying for before you pay. You pay more for rarer items that clearly have very high monetary value and you’re allowed to sell on items for real money of you want.
Valve also still sticks with a cosmetics only model and no gameplay affecting transactions. Selling cosmetics only is probably the best way to monetise.
and you’re allowed to sell on items for real money of you want.
Just to be real: You can sell them for Steam Wallet funds, which is not “real money” since it can only be used on Steam.
You can sell them on hundreds of third-party marketplaces that let you withdraw to your bank account or crypto wallet.
You can do that, but you’re not allowed to do that.
Valve may not endorse it, but they certainly allow it. In fact, there are many skins that cannot be traded on Steam’s official marketplace, but only on third-party sites due to their high value.
They tolerate it as long as they don’t do stupid actions that will alert Valve’s lawyers.
Thier monetization benefits from it, as people are more willing to spend more on lootboxes if they have the possibility of a payout of real money. They’ll only put lawyers on it just enough to convince regulators they’re not a casino 😂
You get to see what you’re paying for before you pay.
Yes, for the first box. The box after is not shown. So its basically just „hey, if I open this Box, it could very well be that the next box will be a legendary knife”
So you are just betting for what comes after that
I think it has an option to decline it too, so you don’t have to purchase to move on. I could be wrong about this, but I think this is what I heard.
If I understood it correctly, you open a new box when you buy an item, but if you don’t buy it then you need to wait until the following week to open another box again.
Still the point is you don’t spend money without knowing what you get so it is better. Still predatory, but better
The new case doesn’t have legendaries.
I don’t play CS, but…
I dunno, bit better, bit worse, little bit of column a and b. To me this reads like “surprise-fomo-store”: congratulations, you found the rarest of things, good job, now fork over this months rent money, you’ll probably never get this lucky again!
Sure, you don’t need to pay, but same argument applies to lootboxes in general.
The prices of these rarer items are just silly. TBH.
Previously, loot box’s gain is a probability distribution over (market price - fixed box price). Now it’s (market price - rarity price according to Valve).
I think in the end the market will take the Valve price (fixed or with rarity) into account since it’s known and the same to everyone. Then it’s again just playing against the probability distribution of items.
Predatory as hell. Almost impressive how Valve manages to simultaneously be one of the best and one of the worst companies in gaming.
Let the live service cattle subsidize the best platform for buying non-slop games. Easy math.
Best or worst, aim for No. 1!
Just goes to show the dire state the rest of the industry is in.
They shot themselves in the foot in my opinion. I just won’t play video games that have that gambling aspect to them. I already spend enough on trading cards for that thrill
“Best of the worst”.
Best of both Worsts.
Oh so it’s loot boxes mixed with a limited time store multiplied by FOMO. Very cool.
Not!
Also: “At what point do they become macro transactions?” IMO at $2. That’s the micro/macro cutoff for me.
I think being able to see the item and having the option to purchase is much better than opening a random box that you have no idea what you’ll get.
Stop paying for stupid shit in games or just stop playing these games. Donate to charity instead.
I would never pay for a cosmetic or loot box. but if that’s the story of thing someone wants to do, I think this new system is fine
Urg, AAA games suck ass more than ever. Thank christ for offline, AA and indie games!
I’ve been saying for years that valve is an extremely predatory and scummy company but don’t let the gamers hear that. Queue downvotes
The fact that the skins don’t affect gameplay is really nice, but you can’t ignore that the lootbox system is just a slot machine and that they allow skins to be gambled on the web.
Also their moderation is fucking awful
I mean, this is just cosmetic stuff and you can see what you’re getting before you buy, plus you can sell the stuff for real world money. This is the least scummy way to do it.
It’s just cosmetics is the excuse companies have given since the very first days of horse armor and look at where we are now…
Wow look at this bait! So fresh!
Not bait. I’m just morally opposed to the normalization and encouragement of gambling especially for underaged populations but really for anyone.
Its PEGI 18
That means nothing?
Its a parenting skill issue.
Addiction is a disease. No amount of parenting can prevent it. You know what could? Regulating corporations :)
Exactly! They should start by banning porn games. Then lgbtq games that corrupts our children. Then any political opposition. Only then will we live in a free and safe society. /s
This is pretty disgusting. Just make a normal skin store where people can buy the skins they want at whatever price you(valve) decide they are valued at. No fomo. No gambling.
Isn’t that what they did? Except to help preserve the “value” if the rare items you still have to get lucky to be allowed to buy them.
If they had a store where you could buy the ultra rare skins for 1000$, that would push down the “value” if the skins more quickly.
The way they are preserving the value is a form of fomo.
