If you want another CS level, ~~Italy~~ Inferno has a ton of photogentic spots in both Source and GO. I'm also particularly fond of Lake, but that might be partly the 500 hours of Wingman on the map speaking.

Edit: or for Valve games in general, theres the dam from Half Life, Ravenholm or the drained shores from Half-Life 2, or an overgrown chamber from Portal 2.

In my case, its even just if packet loss gets too high - not rare on wifi.

Basically, Valve's game, Counter Strike sells cosmetics for the game. They can be bought from through in-game lootboxes (a form of gambling itself, but not what's being refrenced here) or, notably, from other players in an open market. Valve provides the infrastructure for managing this, but doesn't charge players for its use or otherwise moderate it. For a comparison, when NFTs were popular and people were saying it was already a solved problem with fewer issues, markets like what Valve set up for Counter-Strike cosmetics were the existing, non-blockchain version.

Ultimately, as this is an open market, with free trading, this has significant benifits and significant downsides. On one hand, I can buy hundreds of $0.02 skins to use in the game without every touching the $3 lootboxes, or can trade items with friends or other players. On the other hand, this is an largely unregulated market. Valve controls the "wallets" but doesn't have direct say over trade negotiations, and governments are either ignorant or intentionally looking away. This means scams, money launderers and illeagal or sketchy casinos can use Counter Strike Cosmetics as a currency or intermediary without having to fear oversight or law enforcement.

These casinos are the gambling being refered to here. Because they have have effectively no oversight, they can use every scheme in the book to abuse their players from rigging results, to ignoring normal casino legal payout rates, to advertising to children, to using bureaucracy to make receaving payouts as slow and difficult as possible. The casions advertise aggressively and are able to make millions and millions off this.

The reason Counter Strike, and to a lesser extent DotA benifit from this is because the items being used in this, are cosmetics in their games. As the only practical way to use these cosmetics (besides selling them) is in-game this encourages players to play the game. For example, if a player wins a jackpot in the casino, they might play a round of Counter Strike to show off their valuable new cosmetic item before the sell it. This adds to the games population and acts to advertising the costmetics in-game.

Shallots

Oh god, its contagious. Its going to take me weeks to get that out of my head.

It absolutely still can, but its not quite as enticing. For example, you open a lootbox, get all the slot machine animations (usually with misleading visuals to play up your odds) and then a glowing red "legendary" item. You don't know how much its worth without looking it up, but you do still get the risk and payoff regardless. Even if you can't resell if, it can still be enough for people to get addicted to. If anything, its worse in a lot of new ways because its usually harder to avoid (Ie, mobile or sports games where lootboxes are needed to play the game) and can't be cashed out. The sunk cost without any way to cash out is often an intentional decision to to help keep users (esspecially those gambling) from leaving. You can see this esspecially in games that go to great lengths to show you your "earnings" at every turn. They're known as anchor purchases if I remeber right.

c/nostupidquestions might be a better spot to post this. asklemmy is more for silly open-end questions, or more poll-like questions rather than questions that expect a genuine, well research answer.

I know, I was more expanding on your comment mocking the prevelence and acceptance of gambling by the industry as whole. That said, quite a few other the others do have external markets for selling accounts, often with rare items (from lootbox gambling) being a major factor in the value. I know my War Thunder account is worth well over a grand at this point, for example, because of some of the rare drops I have on it.

And the dark non-secret is that them and basically all the other top-grossing multiplayer games on the list are there because gambling is also their primary source of income.

A) Valve should not stop casinos from profiting off vulnerable people, because they have already made money off those people and it would somehow be unfair to stop now, which to me sounds ridiculous.

My argument isn't that Valve shouldn't ban them if they have the means. Its that Valve cannot effectively ban them without penalising unrelated users just as much or more. The body that does have the means to do so without putting random users in the crossfire is the government.

You are using this as an argumentation that the government should ban them instead of Valve, but the end tesult would be the same. The casinos would walk away with the money, and the victims would be left to cry over it.

In a lot of these cases, even under current law, the government could be fining the individuals running these casinos. As they are run with effectively no oversight, many are blatently rigged, rely on false advertising, or use shoddy, under-the-table finances. That was what the first big crackdown was over - not the existance of these casinos, but the revelation of how rigged they were. As exemplified by the mob tactics being used by these casinos, they haven't changed. Depending on the location, laws could also be implemented in ways that do go into effect in more aggressive ways, upto and including fining casinos for past actions if its really needed (and to be clear, I wouldn't be opposed to fines like this being applied against Valve either.)

B) Poor Valve could not compete with their competition if they didn't have the money they are gaining from their gambling-adjacent market, which to me sounds even more ridiculous. When Epic attempted to pry open the market using one of the biggest and most successful games ever as a leverage, they largely failed because the Steam user base was too entrenched. Steam is literally printing money right now and they don't need the CS skin money to compete with anyone.

When talking about CS, we're talking about an individual product, and one that is competing with other products where lootboxes and other manipulative tactics are already the norm. As you said, this isn't about Steam. Valve is still a buisness, and their products are still a part of the market. They're not going to just spend money to run a game they lose money on. Even if they do stop selling lootboxes, that doesn't fix much because you've got thousands of other companies also trying to hook the same addicts on their gambling products. Instead, you need to impose limitations industry-wide, to ensure one product can't get ahead by just being more abusive. Since we obviously aren't going to have Valve, EA, Ubisoft, Epic, ect. all come together and agree to stop putting gambling in their games, we need a higher power to do so, that being the government.

It's not his place to provide a solution: he is a journalist exposing a problem. Do you have such expectations for all journalists talking about any topic?

It wouldn't be his place to provide a solution if he was arguing that the practice is a problem and prehaps pushing for further study. It is his place because throughout the video, he tries to argue that solving the problem is not only possible, but easy - and yet, despite supposedly being easy, his best solution is to basically propose that the industry self-regulate. That is the main issue I have with this video.

Valve could shut down the entire gambling market today and nothing would change to their market position.

And how would they do this without screwing over normal users and victums of the casinos in the process? They can't get money from these casinos, nor collect casino records to redistribute scammed money. All they can do is disable trading or their marketplace, effectively seizing the poker chips (or metals balls, following Coffee's pachinko comparison) but doing nothing about the money casinos have taken from victims nor preventing the casinos from either walking away or re-investing in a new casino. To prevent new ones from popping up, you could disable all trading and marketing, but now you're punishing 132 million users for the acts of a couple thousand.

They could have some sort of account-level check to make sure that minors don't spend their steam gift cards on CS skins

They could, but A) this is just one game on their platform, and B) this would leave them directly competiting against those who don't regulate themselves and can make and reinvest significantly more. This is exactly the situation that Coffee argued was systematic and needed to be adressed further up the chain previously.

they'd rather use the gambling loophole of "akshually, it's not gambling as defined by law". Then they lie through their teeth by saying that they "don't have any data" supporting the claim that the gambling aspect of the game has profited them by leading to more interest in their games, which is bullshit.

Again, exactly like their competition. The recent talk of Balatro's PEGI rating being a prime example, with the industry self-regulation body declaring that virtual slot machines and loot boxes aren't gambling but featuring poker hands was.

PC players, and Lemmy users in particular, have a huge double standard for Valve.

This is the problem I have with this video. Valve is being held to a different standard, and told to self-regulate while others in this very series are having blame redirected away from them because its unreasonable to expect them to self-regulate.

Honestly, in a lot of ways, I think this video is a miss. In both this video and to a lesser extent the last, he put a lot of the blame on Valve, but also provides a higher standard to Valve than the other companies covered. So much of this video boils down to "Valve uses lootboxes too," and "Valve needs to do something about this." without addressing Valve's position as a market player nor providing any solution for Valve to actually tackle the casino problem. He even says in the video that Valve previously issued takedowns but nothing changed and many of the casinos didn't even respond to the cease and desist. No other course of action is suggested, and frankly, I don't see any from Valve that wouldn't punish victums and unrelated users far more than the casinos.

This isn't to say Valve is blameless, but Valve is fairly tame for their direct involvement with lootboxes and is competiting directly against companies that use them far more agressively - exactly the reason Coffee previously gave the casinos and those involved with them leniency, and encouraged looking further up the chain. In the same way, I'd say the actual solution here would be for governments to ban underage gambling and enforce those laws - because the more Valve trys to crack down on this or even just avoid it, the more of an advantage the worse players in the space have. Ubisoft and EA have already been attempting to dislodge Steam for years, and its not because they think they can be more moral than Steam.