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.
No, there we’ll always a way to work around the trading system to have gambling. The current proposal I have seen is doing an ID check before trades but that would hamper legitimate trades since people don’t want to hand out their ID info like that.
I agree in general with the other commenter that it’d be difficult to do it systemically, which is why it should fall back to moderation.
Valve could say they don’t like gambling, make that a policy, and then say anyone caught doing so will lose their inventories or somesuch, then hire a team of people to sift through Steam marketplace trade data and identify gambling transactions for punishment. It would cost Valve money and wouldn’t end gambling by a long shot, but the goal would be to try to destroy the highest profile accounts who cause new players to want to gamble.
Basically instead of sitting on their hands and getting money, they could … try a little.
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.
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?
No, there we’ll always a way to work around the trading system to have gambling. The current proposal I have seen is doing an ID check before trades but that would hamper legitimate trades since people don’t want to hand out their ID info like that.
That’s the same thing I was thinking, and I’m really not a fan of the idea.
Considering the outcry from mobile auth back then, I dont think valve will ever try for id check.
I agree in general with the other commenter that it’d be difficult to do it systemically, which is why it should fall back to moderation.
Valve could say they don’t like gambling, make that a policy, and then say anyone caught doing so will lose their inventories or somesuch, then hire a team of people to sift through Steam marketplace trade data and identify gambling transactions for punishment. It would cost Valve money and wouldn’t end gambling by a long shot, but the goal would be to try to destroy the highest profile accounts who cause new players to want to gamble.
Basically instead of sitting on their hands and getting money, they could … try a little.
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.
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.
Lootboxes, such as the CounterStrikes lootboxes, have simply been banned in Belgium.
It’s not too hard to do it legally.
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.
Yeah, underage gambling is a big part of the topic.