I’ve spent like 5-10 dollars on csgo skins. Haven’t gambled but just spent money directly towards the marketplace to choose the shitty skins I like. Some designs are just really appealing to me

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

Surely this corporation is my friend

Surely this criticism is founded in an informed set of facts not ooooh the corporation. Which is doing surprisingly well despite all the pressure, isn’t your friend ah ha!

You tire rationality constructed sayings and subvert the very essence of what it meant and then, hold the applause, you resent people not liking your clearly look at me, its LEVEL headed and applies to other things (def not this but WHO CARES amiright guys?), Dopey, pick-me, bullshit.

It is founded on the fact that Valve was one of if not the first companies introducing predatory loot boxes via TF2 and only changes the system to skirt regulations on gambling. They’re just doing enough to pretend that all this isn’t a virtual casino where they always take a cut. It is not only exploitative, but also dishonest.

Let’s not forget that their argument that what they’re doing isn’t gambling was the exact same thing casinos did to skirt laws (showing you the prize of the next spin). You lose a lot of goodwill with such behavior.

There’s no need to defend it, they’re doing just don’t, and they would even without these scummy systems

See I’m not defending lootboxes or the companies that use them. I’m seeing a criticism directed at one of the LEAST offending players in the industry as if they are some cabal of assholes, like its hilariously under informed and your fucking YouTube video preying on your desire to have a boogyman is being pushed as if that isn’t the same level of bullshit.

They get paid to push bullshit. You don’t. So you don’t get that excuse here.

The point is the lootboxes are the canary and not the fucking toxic gas.

Yes, it is lame that they unwittingly legitimized it. Free to play isn’t something that had been done successfully for games like that, large scale, hardware dependent. But they had no idea how that would go. How in the world were they to know what that would do to the industry at large? They fucking didn’t that’s how. League was still being openly mocked for its fiscally stupid “free-to-play strategy” and expected to fail just as so many games before them. Which became the free-to-play MODEL after the RESOUNDING successes of both League and Fortnite, and was seen as much more exploitative (locking characters and thus most of the game not just cosmetics) and though inevitably it became the literal industry standard after DayZ/UnknownPlayers: Battlegrounds came around and was FAR more influential at every conceivable level we still had no knowledge yet of it being a real problem (in psychology) That didn’t come till well into Mobile Gaming coming up.

What exactly were they supposed to do instead? GoFundMe and Patreon? Barely existed and NO one smart would have trusted them at the inception. Especially for a big company.

So EA and Activision/Blizzard and dozens of other players make entire series of games built around taking advantage of every aspect of human weakness. Catalogues of max exploitative schite. Then you have Activision and Take-Two and now even Sony and Microsoft and a half dozen others who buys up every developer and game rights then produces the same underwhelming but palatable crap or strait exploitative slop while exploiting the workers to the extreme, in both pay and insane time crunches, while holding onto fantastic franchises because theyre not what boils down to easily exploitable and really just don’t like risk and/or competition and you whine and complain about this? Seriously you moved past the low hanging fruit and strait into the branches for some reason.

I just want to hear more about how Hitler isnt bad because he didn’t INVENT genocide or something its using your logic and its fucking ridiculous.

Don’t care about fucking lootboxes with all the bullshit that’s worse that I lined out being way more prevalent. I wasn’t having a discussion till you showed up. Just pointed out that point. No one asked for your essay you got from a internet influencer masquerading as legitimately formed opinion coming about the place. Its attracting others doing just about the same thing, not thinking and upvoting common positions in leu of using their heads

Let the live service cattle subsidize the best platform for buying non-slop games. Easy math.

Free to play isn’t something that had been done. And htf were they gonna do that otherwise? Give out the game for free and operate at a loss? Clever.

The game wasn’t free until 4 years after release in 2011. Loot boxes were introduced in 2010.

Also when it went F2P, it surely has been done before, for example by League, which went F2P about two years before TF2 in 2009. So that timeline doesn’t track

The problem with their loot boxes isn’t only the content, but the fact that it’s designed to entice people to gamble on it while masquerading as something else. It’s predatory, and while there are other predatory systems in other games, theirs is quite devious; this is an opinion I’ve held since the matter gained public attention with the Belgian regulation in 2018.

Its a free to play game. You put 1000s of hours in why not spend some.money to customise your gun. Money isnt that tight for some people.

I guess. I’d rather not throw away my money, even if it’s not tight. I wouldn’t feel joy about a custom skin. Every time I saw it I would be reminded that I’d wasted money.

But that’s me, not everyone.

I’ll spend like $30 on the weekend getting alcohol and take aways. These add no value to my life beyond the short time I spend consuming them. Spending $20 for a skin that I think looks cool for a gun I really like and often use is an easy choice in a game I got for free.

Its hard to explain for someone that doesnt play but its more than just a skin on a gun when you play competitive games you’re expressing your skill as a player in front of an audience of people. Its a way for players to make the gun feel more like their own instead of just having everything look exactly the same. People are playing $80 to play a 1 time play AAA game so for f2p games with infinitely replayability spending some money on a skin isnt a big deal you’re just paying devs for the game you love.

Nice history lesson, again, did not request that that’s all you

I am aware of its history, it made a at the time dead game come back, sheerly due to the stupid colossal failure of a moral decision you claim they made. It made a bunch of hyper-competitive and underrepresented at the time, new, cosmetic focused collector-type YOLOFOMO gamers both shit and cream their goddamn pants.

This was a stunning stupid punt to make enough money to keep the game they, and many dedicated people, wanted to stay on, yet wouldn’t or couldn’t foot the bill, for. This was a morally just cause in many eyes. They INSPIRED bad companies. They didn’t design it in a laboratory to mislead you you fucking dunce, it just happened to be, at the time the quintessentially invisible, psychological vulnerability of the time, that was, exploited for an, at the time, entirely morally justifiable cause. Because we literally didn’t know that it was predatory, which was, SPECIFICALLY avoided by Valve all over the fucking highway but it was seriously what pays the bills and they’re not fucking immune from competitive business practices working in a system of both exploitive labor and business practices so expecting them to suddenly foundationally change their funding and put them in an easy place to be taken over and corrupted by the same shareholders and executives that own companies that ACTUALLY do that shit just because its works and they just think if it works its their fault but let’s try REALLY hard to exploit the shit outta them on purpose people must sit there and laugh, which is entirely against the fucking spirit and sentiment of the OP statement. So fuck off with that.

One, because fuck that, and two because fuck misdirecting that outrage and making things all around worse off. Well meant for sure, but destructive and undeserving of moral praise or claim IMNSHO

So yeah, back to the purpose of the entire essay, because that’s what this fucking became.

Was that I gotcha supposed to save your shitty take or something? Because it does not.

Game developers hire economists and psychologists to run experiments on the precise ways they need to design their games to make people feel like they need skins and other cosmetics and spend money on them. The games are designed to nudge people into associating having good skins with being good at the game and having the default skins with being bad at the game, and to make people want the new skins and feel bad for not having them. Furthermore, they don’t really make money on the average person who either doesn’t spend money on loot crates or maybe spends a bit of money every now and then- the real money makers are a tiny percentage of players who have some bizarre compulsion to spend absurd amounts of money on this stuff. These are known as “whales” and a lot of them have legitimate psychological issues that cause them to be like this or they’re like Saudi nobility who just have absurd amounts of money and don’t give a shit about blowing it on fake video game stuff.

I can smell Gabe’s smegma on their breath from all the way over here.

when you play competitive games you’re expressing your skill as a player in front of an audience of people.

The first part of your post makes sense, even if I don’t agree with it. But this part stands out- buying a skin isn’t a skill question. It’s just a wallet question.

Some games have stuff you can only earn via achievements or whatever. I could see being proud of, like, a skin you only get if you get 100 perfect whatevers in a row. But, like, just buying it? But I guess the audience has enough people who are impressed by that sort of thing.

spending some money on a skin isnt a big deal you’re just paying devs for the game you love.

Also not to be a negative nerd, but unless the company is very tiny the developers aren’t getting much, maybe zero, of that money. Developers get a salary. Stock options, maybe. It’s not like a tip jar. Profits typically go to the owners under capitalism, not the labor. “Buy skins to support the developers” might be indirectly true, in a limited sense, but it mostly feels like capitalist propaganda.

To put it into perspective the player model shown when high level players play while have flashier animations which not only look cool but make the player look extremely nimble, it’s hard to explain but you just look way better with skins on to a point where players do make weird associations like “karambit is an awp skin”

the reason why in the aforementioned association is because after firing the awp (bolt action sniper) players will draw their knife instead of waiting for the bolt to be reset.

the draw is animated and on the karambit, the draw is exceptionally flashy, since this is frequently done as a legitimate technique (you move faster with knife drawn in cs) then people see the flashy karambit animation very frequently

Yeah, I bought a few season passes when I was into DOTA. The main gain from those is cosmetics and some ladder ranking, but realistically it was that I’d played the game a ton for free and felt that paying a bit to engage wasn’t a big deal.

Everyday the thrill of the game wore off for me, but honestly given hours played versus money spent it was probably one of the cheapest investments in entertainment I made.

Nintendo has a ton of things we can criticize but at the very least the process with them has usually been simple purchases. You pay for what you want to buy and that’s what you get.

If I understood it correctly, you open a new box when you buy an item, but if you don’t buy it then you need to wait until the following week to open another box again.

I think it’s an improvement though. You never part with your money unless you know exactly what you’ll get.

It’s basically individualised offers in the form of boxes.