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Casinos tend to make a lot of money.
I would honestly trust csgo cases more than actually casinos.
Why? Casinos are incredibly regulated, loot boxes aren’t.
Legislation to stop gambling for children when?
Id rather not because anytime the children argument is used it feels like government officials see it as an opportunity to further infringe upon privacy. Would probably push for real ids online and having to give identification cards to companies to play games. And not like companies are known for the best security practices.
There is a middle-ground though: require a credit card. You can’t legally get a credit card under 18, so either your parents gave it to you (i.e. you have their permission), you stole it (they’ll probably catch the charges), or you’re old enough.
Don’t allow this nonsense to be purchased with gift cards, require credit cards. Do the same for adult sites, gambling sites, etc. Maybe require a second factor for every new website a credit card is used at (a text/app notification should be enough) if you’re worried a kid will lie and use the card at an adult website instead of their stupid F2P game.
And on top of that, anything purchase with an element of chance should be regulated as gambling, and the items should be tradable with other players if the customer doesn’t want the item.
Kids aren’t really the ones spending so much on games, but they are being used to help market those products. People wouldn’t buy cosmetics if there wasn’t someone to show off to, so thin the field a bit and hopefully we’ll see less of it.
Add enough hoops like that and you’ll nudge the industry to stop making so many of these games.
Assuming you’re including debit cards here (as most people do when they say “credit card”): you can get one under 18. In fact a few countries are already going fully cashless, with nobody (including kids) being able to pay with cash. If I open the Revolut app, I get right away on the home screen a banner for “Revolut <18”.
I’m not sure what could be a better solution though.
I’m not including debit cards.
I’m also not a fan of going cashless. I’m just saying that, in the absence of a better way of verifying age that doesn’t violate privacy, credit cards work pretty well.
Perhaps we can come up with a token-based system where you can verify your age without either the game knowing your identity or the age verification service knowing what’s requesting it. I don’t trust politicians to make such a system properly, so I think the credit card option is a reasonable approach.
But then also many people don’t have credit cards - they’re frowned upon in many countries with a more debt-averse culture.
Whatever the solution is, it seems like it would end up being something country-specific and not something that scales well across the internet. Probably credit cards work for the US, but then we’d need to find something that works for the remaining 95% of the world population.
Fuck them kids. This is a scam perpetrated against adults. They’re the ones with fat wallets ready to be siphoned.
Games making you value arbitrary nonsense. That is what makes them games. There is no ethical form of attaching a real-world price tag to that fiction.
There are not many kids playing CS. Most of this is adults.
That is simply not true, why would you think that? Lots of young teans and kids play cs. My entire friends group were into cs and the genre starting at around 12.
When I use to play many years ago anytime I smurfed my matches were full of kids.
Only legislation will stop this.
This is the dominant strategy. You were never going to shop your way out of it. It’s in every genre, every price point, every platform. It’s in single-player games. If we allow this to continue, there will be nothing else.
You do realize csgo cases are optional, right?
“Nobody put a gun to your head” will never excuse exploiting people for money.
This business model is inherently abusive, and spreading. I don’t fucking care how little you think anyone needs what it offers. I am explaining why it’s a scam. Nobody should be offered this. They are victims.
So is
- sugar
- savoury snacks
- instant food
- fast food
- porn
- alcohol
Which is why many of these things are regulated, especially if they include addictive substances.
You mean alcohol?
What else is regulated?
As of 2022, 54 countries had implemented special taxes on sugary drinks and/or sugar in general: https://www.obesityevidencehub.org.au/collections/prevention/countries-that-have-implemented-taxes-on-sugar-sweetened-beverages-ssbs
In many cases that covers sweets, snacks, etc. as well. Food is usually quite heavily regulated (in the sense that there’s lots of regulation, not that it’s actually strict or as much as it should be), even if it’s not immediately obvious to us as consumers. E.g. there are ingredients that get banned because of being addictive or having certain harmful effects.
Porn is age gated worldwide, and in some cases censored. I’d class that as regulated pretty much all over the world, regardless of how hard/easy it is to circumvent the regulations (e.g. for a 17-year-old to access a porn website).
I think that actually covers all of the items in the list!
Many of these are regulated and require disclosures to the user. I’d like to see win chances for each item tier disclosed as part of opening a crate. They do this in other countries.
Food items require ingredient lists and nutritional information and are subject to many regulations as food in general. Many countries tax sugary items with little nutritional value. Alcohol requires ABV displayed on the bottle and is heavily regulated behind ID laws. Porn probably has the laziest end user regulations but other regulations have happened to prevent abuse within the production of porn.
My teenage nephews play CS and can all buy keys to unlock cases with no age verification.
As he can buy almost everything else apart from alcohol.
Sure, seeing information, be it nutrition in food or odds in games is nice, but doesn’t fix anything. We should demand to ban most of those things outright.
We’re in strong whaboutism territory though. We can look to regulate and fix gambling in gaming without having to examine every regulation problem out there. I think we all agree that gambling mechanics in games are not healthy for people and currently face almost no rules at all.
Ah, lootboxes, not merchandise
Deranged to spend the money on a case where you don’t even know what you get. I chose to pay a much more reasonable $50 for a Valorant knife. Elden Ring’s production value is great, but have you seen these 5 animations?
I can’t see any proof for these numbers. The link in the article didn’t say how they came to the conclusions they did.
https://csgocasetracker.com/monthly#faq
It’s a guesstimate based on what looks like public information. With valve not disclosing the numbers and profiles being able to hide the number that is the best you can do. Wish they would include some type of confidence interval but that’s probably too much work.
Amazing, they deleted CSGO from the universe, then released the worst possible followup they could have made, and yet still made money. Amazing.
Don’t be hyperbolic. New releases have issues and CS2 issues are nowhere near how horrible CSGO was when it released. It’s by no means the worst followup and the reason you lost CSGO is so you could get your skins to CS2. Would you have preferred if all your skins would’ve been left behind into CSGO? Most people wouldn’t.
Valve did good enough with CS2 which is why it’s making money and will continue to make money.
You mean the one and only corporation that truly cares about its users? /s
How anyone doesn’t think they’re as shitty as any other company of similar size is beyond me.
I don’t really like lootboxes as a concept, but cosmetic lootboxes that they actually let you trade between accounts is certainly one of the better monetization schemes out there.
I’m sure there’s a better reason to criticize them than teens spending $300 to get a gun with a “leaf pattern” but the reality is they’re the best seller in the market and that’s why people like them.
one of the better monetization schemes out there.
Let’s not let minor arguments about which is the lesser evil disguise the fact that they are all still evil.
Yeah, the reason why they make so much is because the skins have actual value, they also get 15% on any sale made through their community market. I fucking hate lootboxes, but I also hate skins costing as much as a game. MTX (micro or macro) are always going to be shit, until regulations catch up to all the predatory bullshit we are going to be stuck with one system or another and I’d rather take CS’s.
I mean I made a profit, if I sold up right now.Oh fuck off, it’s digital art, they could let people buy the exact skin they want for 50 cents and be done with it, you’re defending them praying on people with a gambling problem.
I’m not defending anyone, I’d rather you pay for your game and that is it, how it used to be before the 2010s rolled around. I despise micro/macrotransactions, battle passes, the cosmetic trend, FOMO content, I could rant about it all day and how fucked it is.
I was just picking my best of the worst. I see you don’t understand how CS skins work, so I’ll try to explain.
- Anyone can design a skin for a weapon and put this on the Steam Workshop.
- People then vote on their favourite skins, eventually Valve make a new case and look through skins to add them to the case,
- Everytime a key for that case is bought the creators get a cut.
- Everytime a creators skin is bought/sold between players, they get a cut.
- I can open the case with a key and hope I get a skin I want. Gambling.
- I can buy the exact skin I want directly off the Steam Market… and be done with it
- I can trade other players for an exact skin I want.
- I can sell that skin again on the Steam Market (Valve gets 15% cut, of which some goes to skin creator as prev. mentioned).
- I can trade that skin to friends/other players, for free or for something they own.
So I get a lot more freedom with my new cosmetic item vs another game:
- Skin made in-house.
- Buy skin from store.
- Maybe I can refund if they have the option, if they do it’s usually limited.
Or - Buy loot box
- I now have skin I cannot trade, sell or do anything with but use.
So yeah, I think Valve have the best of the worst predatory cosmetic systems out there. That’s not defending the practice, I’d MUCH rather the whole cosmetic trend fucked off along with the microtransactions and online systems in singleplayer games and the list could go on…
(Edit: Lmao at you editing and putting ‘for 50 cent’ in there)
That’s exactly what you’re doing and your doing it even more in this message!
"I think they have the best of the what worst
Fuck no, there’s no “best” in this case, pushing people to gamble is pushing people to gamble and that’s it. I used to work in the gambling industry and I’ve seen the damage it can do, it’s fucking disgusting to defend a private business doing it.
I agree with you, I hate gambling. It has ruined many lives.
But that doesn’t mean I cannot discuss the shit as it exists.
That shouldn’t be too hard to understand. I won’t engage with this further. Have a good one.
