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Valve rocks
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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It makes them more predatory that I can sell cosmetics for games I no longer play to recoup that investment to use it on games I do play?
K
I mean... yeah? A whole bunch of gross crap triggers when people can use in-game stuff as real world currency.
Valve didn't pioneer TFA because they are infosec nerds, they did it because their userbase was being actively targeted. It was them and WoW early on. And again, there's the whole black market gambling ring. That made actual headlines, which is rare from Valve. I had to lock down my account and hide my inventory because at some point I got a pretty rare TF2 drop and I started being targeted by both scams and legit trade offers to the point where the spam made it hard to use the service.
And for every one of those transactions, legitimate or illegitimate, Valve gets a cut. That's their entire business model: whatever anybody in their system is doing, user or creator, they're just sitting by and getting a cut.
I'm not even mad about it, but it's certainly not better than everybody else who is doing MTX and loot boxes and cosmetics and stuff. Half of those practices are copy-pasted from stuff Valve invented.
This is an angle that often goes unconsidered. As someone with a valuable inventory, the social aspect of the service has been made all but completely unusable for me.
The profits made from the ingame markets aren’t that scuzzy until you realize they’re primarily making those profits from their f2p, in house developed games (tf2, cs, and dota). At the end of the day, Valve wants to make money. If all of their money comes from virtual items, the primary thing that will see any real dev time/effort is gonna be those virtual items. It’s profitable stagnation, and it’s bad for consumers.
except they aren't, but you don't understand enough about this to be able to conceptualize reality.