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.

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.

I’ve been saying for years that valve is an extremely predatory and scummy company but don’t let the gamers hear that. Queue downvotes

This is pretty disgusting. Just make a normal skin store where people can buy the skins they want at whatever price you(valve) decide they are valued at. No fomo. No gambling.

Wow look at this bait! So fresh!

Best of both Worsts.

Not bait. I’m just morally opposed to the normalization and encouragement of gambling especially for underaged populations but really for anyone.

Its PEGI 18

That means nothing?

Its a parenting skill issue.

Addiction is a disease. No amount of parenting can prevent it. You know what could? Regulating corporations

The fact that the skins don’t affect gameplay is really nice, but you can’t ignore that the lootbox system is just a slot machine and that they allow skins to be gambled on the web.

Also their moderation is fucking awful

I mean, this is just cosmetic stuff and you can see what you’re getting before you buy, plus you can sell the stuff for real world money. This is the least scummy way to do it.

They shot themselves in the foot in my opinion. I just won’t play video games that have that gambling aspect to them. I already spend enough on trading cards for that thrill

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

Exactly! They should start by banning porn games. Then lgbtq games that corrupts our children. Then any political opposition. Only then will we live in a free and safe society. /s

Porn and lgbtq games are not the same as gambling. You’ve used a false equivalency fallacy

It’s just cosmetics is the excuse companies have given since the very first days of horse armor and look at where we are now…

Who is buying these skins. I feel like such an alien sometimes. I just can’t understand wanting to spend any money at all on a cosmetic skin

Before this shit existed (like back when the hottest shit was Quake), I thought it might be cool to get a professionally made skin everyone in the game could see for like $0.25-$0.50. A dollar, at most.

The first iteration of a system that could have potentially made that a reality, the things you’d actually wanna buy were $25-50. Like who the fuck workshopped these ridiculous prices?