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this post was submitted on 29 Dec 2024
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Valve doesn't run the casino. Valve owns the real estate under the casino and collects a rent. The casino is run by a kaleidoscope of fly-by-night marketing firms after being constructed with sweatshop labor from development studios in countries with abysmal labor laws.
Turns out, it takes very few employees to be the landlord of a casino. But the casino can't make money without a battalion of scammy sales shits and a legion of cheap construction workers. Valve can't make money without these workers. But because it collects rents on the real estate rather than revenues on the casino itself, it doesn't need to include these staffers in its accounting books.
Valve is directly responsible for skins in Counter Strike which are gotten with 100% gambling mechanics. The fact that they can be sold for real life cash adds to this. I'm not saying its only Valve doing this, plenty of other games on Steam as well, but they certainly have a horse in the race.
Agreed, we should not make it seem like Valve has no responsibility just because it doesn't directly own the casinos, gambling sites, etc. They benefit financially from the way the whole system is set up and they know it. Every round and transaction directly benefits Valve financially. The more underage people get addicted to the casino system they have going on, the more money Valve gets.
I mean, who made the GUI a copy of a slot machine?
They could end this whole thing tomorrow if they wanted to.
I watched my cousin get suckered by one of those a few years ago.
£50 Steam voucher in, fuck all out. Hooray for letting 14 year olds gamble their Christmas presents away...
Lets hope your cousin learned his lesson then.
He seems to have done. I think he's a trainee accountant now and plays crown green bowling.
The government need to get involved and relegate MTX. I agree they are responsible for hosting the platform and developing the systems in the case of CS skins. It's ugly but Valve are behaving as a rational business actor in this scenario.
With Trump in office soon you can forget about regulation.
And in any case, it's tech-adjacent so legislators have zero idea how any of this works.
The EU and Australia seem to be inching towards serious legislation relating to MTX. Hopefully they can serve as an example.
I’m specifically talking about CS:GO, which is the most predatory and developed by Valve to be so.
Plenty of Gacha Games are more predatory than CS:GO. Valve is happy to host them all. CS:GO is a big money maker precisely because it has a large and enduring user base that isn't fixated on Pay2Win game mechanics. Compare that to SummonerWars or Diablo Immortal or even just Candy Crush. There's no contest.
It’s not just the tactics that make it the most predatory. It’s the massive platform and promotion that it gets by being a valve product.