The dark open secret here is that counterstrike (and potentially dota) made the most money due to being used as a vehicle for gambling
And the dark non-secret is that them and basically all the other top-grossing multiplayer games on the list are there because gambling is also their primary source of income.
I know you mean the general gambling of loot boxes, but no, I meant, literal gambling on 3rd party s(h)ites. CS2 skin gambling. Which iirc most other games are not doing.
No other games have a direct fake money to real money pipeline. The trade system, and its API for external use, make it super easy to run those sites.
They could take the API away, but I doubt that would actually kill the off-site gambling scene if the trade system itself is kept. As long as you can give your items to someone else, they will have ways of extracting real money from people and if they can do so in a way that greatly benefits themselves over the users (as with gambling for the skins), they will continue to do so. But at least Valve wouldn’t be profiting off it, in that case.
It’s kinda wild to me how the problem used to just be getting scammed out of your money or your items (or both) because these kinds of 3rd party, black market things have existed for MMOs and other games with trade systems for decades but you were just buying and selling straight up with little to no protections from the developers. But then in recent years, they’ve gone from just being resellers to casinos where you wager your skins.
CS2 skin gambling
What is that?
Basically, Valve’s game, Counter Strike sells cosmetics for the game. They can be bought from through in-game lootboxes (a form of gambling itself, but not what’s being refrenced here) or, notably, from other players in an open market. Valve provides the infrastructure for managing this, but doesn’t charge players for its use or otherwise moderate it. For a comparison, when NFTs were popular and people were saying it was already a solved problem with fewer issues, markets like what Valve set up for Counter-Strike cosmetics were the existing, non-blockchain version.
Ultimately, as this is an open market, with free trading, this has significant benifits and significant downsides. On one hand, I can buy hundreds of $0.02 skins to use in the game without every touching the $3 lootboxes, or can trade items with friends or other players. On the other hand, this is an largely unregulated market. Valve controls the “wallets” but doesn’t have direct say over trade negotiations, and governments are either ignorant or intentionally looking away. This means scams, money launderers and illeagal or sketchy casinos can use Counter Strike Cosmetics as a currency or intermediary without having to fear oversight or law enforcement.
These casinos are the gambling being refered to here. Because they have have effectively no oversight, they can use every scheme in the book to abuse their players from rigging results, to ignoring normal casino legal payout rates, to advertising to children, to using bureaucracy to make receaving payouts as slow and difficult as possible. The casions advertise aggressively and are able to make millions and millions off this.
The reason Counter Strike, and to a lesser extent DotA benifit from this is because the items being used in this, are cosmetics in their games. As the only practical way to use these cosmetics (besides selling them) is in-game this encourages players to play the game. For example, if a player wins a jackpot in the casino, they might play a round of Counter Strike to show off their valuable new cosmetic item before the sell it. This adds to the games population and acts to advertising the costmetics in-game.
Thanks, I’m familiar with the lootbox mechanics in valve’s games, but had no idea this kind of gambling existed…
Here’s a good start https://youtu.be/v6jhjjVy5Ls
I know, I was more expanding on your comment mocking the prevelence and acceptance of gambling by the industry as whole. That said, quite a few other the others do have external markets for selling accounts, often with rare items (from lootbox gambling) being a major factor in the value. I know my War Thunder account is worth well over a grand at this point, for example, because of some of the rare drops I have on it.
Ah gotcha. Thanks for the explanation. I’d argue reselling of accounts is nowhere near as bad as skin gambling though. It doesn’t trigger the gambling addicts.
It absolutely still can, but its not quite as enticing. For example, you open a lootbox, get all the slot machine animations (usually with misleading visuals to play up your odds) and then a glowing red “legendary” item. You don’t know how much its worth without looking it up, but you do still get the risk and payoff regardless. Even if you can’t resell if, it can still be enough for people to get addicted to. If anything, its worse in a lot of new ways because its usually harder to avoid (Ie, mobile or sports games where lootboxes are needed to play the game) and can’t be cashed out. The sunk cost without any way to cash out is often an intentional decision to to help keep users (esspecially those gambling) from leaving. You can see this esspecially in games that go to great lengths to show you your “earnings” at every turn. They’re known as anchor purchases if I remeber right.
I insist that this is nowhere near the same as actual gambling with skins on slots and such. Those are much much worse.
Valve cracked down on dota gambling many years ago and since then, i dont think it is a thing anymore. However, normal gambling(for dota games or conventional sports) is the primary sponsor of most dota tournaments/teams.
Coffeezilla did a 3-part series about how CS2 skin gambling is flourishing and hooking children as young as 12 and Valve is profiting from its inaction to crack down on it.
But they did shut down the dota 2 gambling. I dont know why cs is different.
I don’t see why valve is responsible tho? Blame the gambling sites.
Buying them randomly and being able to trade them is the a distinct decision and it powers this industry. They could shut this off immediately if they wanted to, but they profit from it.
So we take away the market functionality from all players because 3rd party sites misuse it for gambling?
What a dumbshit take, sorry to say.
The only thing that’s dumbshit is your simplistic understanding of how the world works and how these systems interplay
Ah yes, lets blame an unrelated platform instead of the ones that are abusing it.
Bold of you to call me simplistic lmaooo.
In no specific order:
-
Counter-Strike 2
-
Dota 2
-
Palworld
-
PUBG
-
Elden Ring
-
Black Myth: Wukong
-
Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
-
Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
-
Apex Legends
-
Helldivers II
-
Baldur’s Gate 3
-
Destiny 2
Oh boy, I’ve never heard of
Counter-Strike 2 Dota 2 Palworld PUBG Elden Ring Black Myth: Wukong Warhammer 40
and
000: Space Marine 2 Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 Apex Legends Helldivers II Baldur’s Gate 3 Destiny 2
You a CSV file reader or something?
I genuinely try to add to the conversation whenever I comment and avoid “this” style comments. I don’t necessarily do a great job based on my comment history.
But I have to say … This comment was brilliant.
His lemmy app probably has broken formatting
My guess is the parent comment didn’t have markdown list formatting and improper newline formatting at first, so it appeared as on line for a bit before the commenter edited it, but he just responded snarkily instead of being like “hey your markdown formatting borked here”
I agree with your guess, and while you say snarkily, I read it as a light hearted jab at the absurdity of the situation.
Relaying meaning, intent and emotion over text is hard.
That’s why I like donuts, they are delicious and correct
I thought it was funny :')
Can’t win them all I suppose! Had a similar thing happen to me recently, and trying to add nuance or explain yourself is usually frowned on for some reason, so it’s best to just move on. Hope your holidays are treating you well!
Sounds like quite the uncommon parsing bug.
Like maybe 1 in 1
and
000
and
000 .
In Markdown, you want to put two spaces at the end of a line if you don’t want it to be treated as a single rewrapped line.
So:
foo barGives
foo bar
And with two spaces after “foo”:
foo
barI generally use bulleted lists instead to make it clear that it’s a list.
* *00: Space Marine* * *Call of Duty: Black Ops*Gives:
- 000: Space Marine
- Call of Duty: Black Ops
Oh, thanks for the info. I always add two lines when I want a line break, didn’t know you can add two spaces at the end!
The blank line between the two actually – well, I suppose some clients might act differently than others, but certainly in the Web UI on lemmy and IIRC Reddit – produces a different effect, has a larger horizontal space, and is intended to be a paragraph break rather than just a line break.
foo bar(with two spaces trailing “foo”) Gives:
foo
barAnd
foo barGives:
foo
bar
It’s not normally a massive difference, but suppose you’re writing poetry, say, you’d probably rather have paragraph breaks between verses and line breaks after each line in a verse:
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.I have been able to get two spaces to work on mobile.
For list view please upgrade to Lemmy premium
Wut
-
Basically what I’ve seen everyone stream on Twitch throughout the year.
Well yeah, twitch tends to stream popular games, because that’s where the demand is. And that tends to add more demand, thus more streamers.
It’s a constant Circle though, they stream what’s considered popular but because they stream it more people play it which causes it to be even more popular
Look at lethal company as a prime example of that, if streamers never took that game it never would have gotten anywhere near the publicity that it did
And I think that’s cool. One of the games I love (EU4) likely wouldn’t have stayed relevant for so long if it wasn’t for twitch streamers.
I don’t watch much twitch, but I think it’s cool that it helps keep games alive. I’m not into the more popular games (esp. FPS), but there’s a lot of communities that are kept alive by a handful of prominent streamers.
Influencers are a hell of a thing
I’m assuming half of that is FPS which is very much not my thing. Give me a story I can play. BG3 I understand.
If I was in my 20s souls would likely appeal, now I’m an old fuck and just want a good, ad free story I can play along with. And DnD. No one is too old for DnD.
Ok, and Stellaris, Civ, etc. Those are like the fentanyl or crack cocaine of the gaming world.
You need to be in your 20s to play Souls games? No one told me! I would have stopped before DS2 released if I had known!
About 30% only are fps, plenty of variety in there.
Story is kinda optional. Depends on the genre. I’m big into Factorio and Dwarf Fortress, which go light (kinda? Df is a story generator?) on story, but big on mechanics.
What do you mean? I play Factorio only for The story. Its a great and complex story with lits of small little details. /s
Great to see Baldur’s Gate 3 made the list!
Did that surprise you? It sold insanely well.
Where’s Veilguard, I saw so many articles from major publications saying it was a massive success and yet it can’t even match space marine or helldiversII? Were they being untruthful? What?
On Steam, it is in the Bronze category. Considering it only released in october and people seem to have quite some issues with the game, I still consider that quite successful
It’s in the same tier as Enshrouded, a crafting survival adventure indie game that doesn’t even come close to it in Budget, market and scale. Yeah, no, it wasn’t a success.
In the new release, yes. Though by that metric, no game is a success as Manor Lord is platinum. Interestingly, Enshrouded is not in the top sellers, even though it is older by quite a few months.
Comparing it only to its peers in the category to measure success is a pitfall. Manor Lord is in the highest, platinum, tier, and that is an RTS, colony sim made by a single dev. Does that make all other games in the platinum tier no success?
If they cost the same as veilguard, absolutely, resounding failure to end up in bronze.
Enshrouded is like 30 dollars, so half the price of Veilguard. With a fraction of the AAA marketing Budget.
I meant cost the same to make which is the point here. Veilguard’s marketing budget alone could have generated dozens of Enshrouded games.
