I think more responsibility should be on the individual and responsibility on the parents for minors.
At least we can agree on that.
I do think that we should expect easier parental controls with more granular settings to be able to allow parents to protect their kids from risky trades
Steam has an entire parental control setup with family view where you can completely restrict your children from purchasing or selling anything without your consent.
https://store.steampowered.com/news/app/593110/view/4149575031735702628
But if you put all the necessary systems in place to be a casino
I don’t even see that.
What I see is valve offering random items in chests and third party sites gambling your skins away. But these things are not linked in the slightest. I just don’t see how valve is responsible for third parties misusing their platform.
In general, I much prefer the valve system because if I pull an item from a chest that I don’t like I can sell it and potentially get something I need instead of having a dead skin lying around (and therefore literally losing money).
But you can buy products and then sell yhose if you wanted to for legal tender.
In league of legends, I can get random essence from the chests. If I get enough of those, I can buy stuff from the store I could also buy for real money.
The only difference with valve is that they just show the outright amount instead of hiding it behind vbucks or some other fictional currency.
you could sell enough skins to buy Valve’s products, including hardware such as the Steam Deck and their VR headset
Yes, but to me, this is even an upside. Playing CS:GO for years and being able to sell all the skins you collected and converting them into enough money for a steamdeck seems to be a great deal and awesome functionality. If I stop league of legends, all the skins I earned in the game are basically lost.
Is your critique solely because of loot boxes or something else? Because I feel we mess up two topics: Lootboxes being immoral (something I would agree with, but with much worse offenders) and third-party sites offering an illegal casino on valves platform. I just don’t see valve responsible for that but rather the third party sites.
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.
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?
First of all, you don’t really get “real life money” - you get steam credits. There is no way to convert skins into real money without somehow using a third party sites which is already circumventing steams market. In a casino, if you gamble, you get either money directly or you get credits that you can exchange back to money after you leave.
So yes, I do call him stupid or dishonest for considering it gambling. Valves system is in no way, shape or form worse than stuff like yugioh, magic the gathering or pokemon TCGs that have been available for over 20 years now and much more easiely available aswell to children or even specifically marketed to them.
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.
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 still swallowing the entire industry
No, it’s not. There’s phenomenal indie games out there. Hades 2, Elfen Ring DLC and Black Myth Wukong are just some of the latest games I’m having a blast with, and then theres still rimworld, factorio, timberborn, CK3, Dead by Daylight … The list goes on. None of those games has Ads for ingame purchases (except DbD) and all of them are phenomenal.
None of them are AAA,truey, but idc. Theres so many fun games out there that idc what ubisoft, EA, Activision or other shit companies release.
I think iPhones are overpriced garbage, yet I’m not sitting here and asking for them to be banned - I just don’t buy it. I bought a used pixel 6, installed graphen, done.
I think casinos are stupid and a waste of money, yet I’m not sitting here and asking for them to be banned. I just don’t go there.
I think Microsoft, google and Amazon are terrible companies, yet I’m not sitting here and asking for them to be banned. I just don’t use their products and services.
Making a change starts with yourself. If you don’t buy their stuff, great - still plenty of great games out there.
True, but the problem is that there is no point to do it. Just use a database. Games are already centralized. Why bother?
Unless the big gaming companies come together and develop a system that would allow you, for example, to get skins in rainbow six siege and use them in battlefield or call of duty (which is almost impossible to build anyways because of different engines, model formats etc), there is absolutely no reason to have any decentralised crypto/nft bullshit involved.
Because there are no games made for the PSP anymore.