Predatory as hell. Almost impressive how Valve manages to simultaneously be one of the best and one of the worst companies in gaming.
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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”.
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 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
Still the point is you don’t spend money without knowing what you get so it is better. Still predatory, but better
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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 with more money than sense.
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.
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 $2. That’s the micro/macro cutoff for me.
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The fact that the skins don’t affect gameplay is really nice, but you can’t ignore that the lootbox system is just a slot machine and that they allow skins to be gambled on the web.
Also their moderation is fucking awful
I mean, this is just cosmetic stuff and you can see what you’re getting before you buy, plus you can sell the stuff for real world money. This is the least scummy way to do it.
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I would never pay for a cosmetic or loot box. but if that’s the story of thing someone wants to do, I think this new system is fine
This is pretty disgusting. Just make a normal skin store where people can buy the skins they want at whatever price you(valve) decide they are valued at. No fomo. No gambling.
Isn’t that what they did? Except to help preserve the “value” if the rare items you still have to get lucky to be allowed to buy them.
If they had a store where you could buy the ultra rare skins for 1000$, that would push down the “value” if the skins more quickly.
The way they are preserving the value is a form of fomo.
For FTP games that I am really enjoying, I will buy stuff sometimes to support the game.
