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Valve invents new Counter-Strike 2 loot boxes that successfully dodge anti-gambling regulations (www.pcgamesn.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/pcgaming@lemmy.ca
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[–] 80 points 1 year ago (12 children)

Don't hate me for asking a question. I don't endorse loot boxes and do think they suck. But help me understand:

Isn't this better than loot boxes?

You get to see what you're paying for before you pay. You pay more for rarer items that clearly have very high monetary value and you're allowed to sell on items for real money of you want.

Valve also still sticks with a cosmetics only model and no gameplay affecting transactions. Selling cosmetics only is probably the best way to monetise.

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  • [–] 37 points 1 year ago (5 children)

    and you're allowed to sell on items for real money of you want.

    Just to be real: You can sell them for Steam Wallet funds, which is not "real money" since it can only be used on Steam.

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  • [–] 25 points 1 year ago (4 children)

    You can sell them on hundreds of third-party marketplaces that let you withdraw to your bank account or crypto wallet.

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  • [–] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    You can do that, but you're not allowed to do that.

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  • [–] 18 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    Valve may not endorse it, but they certainly allow it. In fact, there are many skins that cannot be traded on Steam’s official marketplace, but only on third-party sites due to their high value.

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  • [–] 5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    They tolerate it as long as they don't do stupid actions that will alert Valve's lawyers.

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  • [–] 4 points 1 year ago

    Thier monetization benefits from it, as people are more willing to spend more on lootboxes if they have the possibility of a payout of real money. They'll only put lawyers on it just enough to convince regulators they're not a casino 😂

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  • [–] 16 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    You get to see what you're paying for before you pay.

    Yes, for the first box. The box after is not shown. So its basically just „hey, if I open this Box, it could very well be that the next box will be a legendary knife”

    So you are just betting for what comes after that

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I think it has an option to decline it too, so you don't have to purchase to move on. I could be wrong about this, but I think this is what I heard.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    I don't play CS, but...

    I dunno, bit better, bit worse, little bit of column a and b. To me this reads like "surprise-fomo-store": congratulations, you found the rarest of things, good job, now fork over this months rent money, you'll probably never get this lucky again!

    Sure, you don't need to pay, but same argument applies to lootboxes in general.

    The prices of these rarer items are just silly. TBH.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago*

    Previously, loot box's gain is a probability distribution over (market price - fixed box price). Now it's (market price - rarity price according to Valve).

    I think in the end the market will take the Valve price (fixed or with rarity) into account since it's known and the same to everyone. Then it's again just playing against the probability distribution of items.

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