Kinda exposes the lie about entrepreneurship being about job creation. Not all high tides raise all ships.
Gonna piggy back off this to drop a decent summary from coffeezilla about valve’s lootbox gambling problem that Valve has consistently dodged responsibility on. It’s really not new news but folks should be informed/reminded of it nonetheless.
I don’t watch CoffeeZilla in any large amount, but this pretty well sums up the situation in this instance.
Honestly it’s both valve’s fault and the legal system. They’ve tried to combat these sites with the trade window system back in like 2015 2016 I think, but their csgo and tf2 trading economy struggles when you have to wait a week to do stuff.
It also doesn’t help when a lot of these sites dodge being legally a casino, and get away with it.
I mean, we can point at the legal system, but as you said, casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law. Ultimately, Valve is the group with the power to remove any gambling-adjacent mechanics from their games, but they have been pretty flaccid regarding changes because they know that they will lose money from it.
Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling - but at the cost of CS’s financial success and overall appeal.
Is there a proposal to do this that doesn’t gut other legitimate parts of their trading system?
casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law
They don’t “find new loopholes”, they explicitly lobby/capture the agencies/courts that write/interpret the rules and carve out loopholes.
Might as well say “You can’t keep money in a bank, the robbers will just find a way in” while a guy in a ski-mask walks through the front door, hands the teller a $20, and is lead directly into the vault with a complementary tot bag.
Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling
There are countries that impose limits on what tech companies are allowed to advertise, distribute, and collect revenues on outside of the US. These countries don’t have President-elects who are joined at the hip with their country’s most wealth individuals, bending over backwards to make the billionaires happy.
No, they wanted to pretend like they were combating them while leaving them fully intact. There are pretty easy ways to combat it, but that also requires they destroy the market they profit so much off of. The trade window system (purposefully) did very little to stop this. It’s was purely PR, which some gullible people actually believed.
People like Valve, so they believe everything they do is honest and good. It isn’t. It may be better than some other companies, but it doesn’t make them good. You can recognize when they do the right thing while also recognizing when they’re doing the wrong things, and enabling gambling (underage or not) is bad. At a minimum, they control CS esports, so they could ban advertising from gambling sites if they don’t want to block it in its entirety.
I’m not bothering watching all the video. I hope they highlight that a good part of the company clients are kids.
It’s funny that these publications only learned that this year when Valve has had a publicly available company directory on their website with names, pictures and email addresses since forever.
A great deal of that money comes Valve running an illegal underage casino, and getting young kids addicted to gambling.
Valve running an illegal underage casino
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…
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.
I’m specifically talking about CS:GO, which is the most predatory and developed by Valve to be so.
CS:GO, which is the most predatory
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.
No, there’s companies that abuse valves market for their underground casinos.
I honestly don’t get why you are mad at valve when they are not even in the slighest involved in that process apart from offering the market system. That’s like being mad at cloudflare or AWS because a website that scams you uses it.
It’s because Epic Games is spending a shitload of money astroturfing these idiots into believing that Valve is personally running a massive counter strike casino and you need to THINK OF THE CHIILLLLDREEEEEEEN.
Which is ironic because fortnite is specifically tailored to children/teens and has had lootboxes until they got sued, had to remove it and were like: “Oh actually we always though lootboxes were stupid :( so we removed them :( pls like us :(.”
Now they’re probably trying to harm valve this way, which is dumb because counter strike is rated 18+.
And yeeees, no kid gives a shit about age rating - well aware of that. But I’m not sueing porn sites because kids can access porn with just clicking “Yes” on the popup.
Aren’t the kids mostly playing Fortnite and not Counter Strike? Doesn’t Fortnite outright advertise to children, have FOMO practices design to keep people addicted and spending money, and promote gun violence.
Well we need to see Valve in court over this how dare they make, host, and promote Fortnite!
Wait… Valve doesn’t make, promote or host Fortnite…
Curious
Tbh valve could stop this by making it only tradeble to your friends or make the skins non tradable so they are just that, skins for you.
But why would they? Trading skins is a big part of the game. I enjoy trading/selling/buying skins every now and then. There is nothing bad about being able to trade stuff.
The problem occurs when third party sellers abuse your platform - but why you would be mad at valve instead of those sellers is beyond me.
Lootboxes are literally gambling and redeeming them even look like slots.
Allowing the selling/trading of skins allows for a black market to emerge to convert them to currency. Valve created the conditions for this exploitive system to emerge and does nothing to stop it. You can debate whether valve has a duty to stop it but they are forever a black eye on gaming in my eyes. Just because they sell cheap games twice a year doesn’t white wash them
So amazon or ebay are responsible for a merchant scamming you?
Wüsthof is responsible for people being stabbed with their knives?
Ferrari is responsible for people driving too fast and crashing with their cars?
Or if we extend it into absurdity: Are you responsible for paying taxes that your country uses for bad purposes?
Sorry to say but I’m not sure if you’re just dishonest as fuck right now or really stupid.
You pull random items out of cases and can sell these items - if you feel like it, you can buy specific items on the market. I don’t see the casino functionality.
Fucking lol. The lengths you things go to. Just shaking my head at how fucking stupid you must think the average person is. What an incredibly hostile world you have to live in.
I hope the employees are compensated well compared to the profit.
As of 2021, Valve employees made roughly $430K-4.5M, depending on role. Not bad, considering the average salary in WA is around $58k.
Source:
https://www.theverge.com/2024/7/13/24197477/valve-employs-few-hundred-people-payroll-redacted
As a private company with no board and stockholders to appease, with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person, employees at valve are doing fantastic. Way higher than “industry standards”.
with a guy in charge who is at least a descent person
There is no decent billionaire
You could sort of say that, just because he is a billionaire, but unlike virtually any others, his money has come from no oppression or cheap labor or dirty money, or slavery or anything else. He hasn’t drove up pricing, his employees are paid better than anywhere else, he doesn’t exploit a need, and he doesn’t use his money and position for political power.
So the only “not descent” thing he’s really done involving that money, is having that money. But with his company being a private company, he can also keep that money as a security nest egg in case the company somehow falls on bad times and keep paying his employees.
It’s a bit weird (skip to 10:41 for specifically the pay system)
