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Valve rocks
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 18 Nov 2023
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DOTA 2, Counter-Strike 2, TF 2 are all maintained and get updates or total overhauls.
What’s their opinion on NFTs now?
That was slightly facetious. I just spent the entirety of the NFT bubble reminding people that tradeable tokens attached to JPGs is something that Valve invented to do with their dumb trading cards when they introduced those and we all saw in real time that all of them trend to zero value immediately.
I kept asking cryptobros to explain why their new tokenized JPGs were gonna behave any differently and it turns out there really wasn't a particularly good answer to that one.
For the record, those get updated and get total overhauls because they are driven by cosmetics MTX and/or battlepasses, both of which Valve straight-up invented in their modern form.
So I guess yeah, they either make cutting edge innovations in monetization design for games-as-service things or they put out ads for Steam. I think the larger point holds.
I don’t understand your point. It’s bad that they give out free games and constantly update them because they make money on cosmetics? That’s somehow worse or as bad as companies that make the same game every year, charge an arm and a leg for it and then have micro transactions on top of it? Or they’re bad because they innovate and then other companies take their ideas and make them shittier? What’s your point, exactly?
No, they don't make them shittier. My point is that they're in it for the money, the money just flows in different ways. Their battlepasses weren't any better or worse than anybody else's, and neither are their cosmetics.
They just get a pass because their brand is rock solid and they run very quiet and very cheap with a very long term view enabled by being a private company. That's not good or bad, it's a corporation out to make corporation things and doing them very well.
Their cosmetics are miles better because you can resell them on a market that they maintain. You really don’t know what you’re talking about.
No dog, you just really like the thing they’re talking about and it’s coloring your reaction. The points they’re making are actually very reasonable, but your responses read like they’re just criticizing Valve as a matter of opinion rather than practice.
To be clear, it's not even criticism. I don't mind Valve making money or being great at PR and branding or using MTX. I am way more chill with those things than the average gamer.
If there's anything here that rubs me the wrong way is objectively identical practices being assessed in entirely opposite ways by the community based on who is doing them. And it doesn't even bother me because I think the practices are bad or because I don't recognize that Valve absolutely worked on positioning that exact way.
Mostly it just gives me a bit of anxiety to realize that you can get away with that and somehow nobody else seems able to do it.
Honestly, if I had to guess why I'd say it's down to Valve being a private company. They genuinely can just never tell anybody what they're doing or what their plans and make long term investments. But man, the outcome is kinda scary.
I mean, they are. Most of what they've said is demonstrably untrue.
That is a hilarious statement for reasons I won't get into here.
But also, it's a concerning statement because... yeah, no, that makes them arguably more predatory. I mean, they didn't have to attempt to dismantle an entire grey market of gambling built around their weird NFT-ish resell mechanics because it's such a fair environment.
So no, I don't love NFTs and I certainly don't think Valve inventing the entire concept around trading cards and in-game cosmetics way back when was a step in the right direction. That whole ecosystem was always a mess and it only got better because they started siloing the really bad chunks and the rest of it just quietly died down.
It makes them more predatory that I can sell cosmetics for games I no longer play to recoup that investment to use it on games I do play?
K
I mean... yeah? A whole bunch of gross crap triggers when people can use in-game stuff as real world currency.
Valve didn't pioneer TFA because they are infosec nerds, they did it because their userbase was being actively targeted. It was them and WoW early on. And again, there's the whole black market gambling ring. That made actual headlines, which is rare from Valve. I had to lock down my account and hide my inventory because at some point I got a pretty rare TF2 drop and I started being targeted by both scams and legit trade offers to the point where the spam made it hard to use the service.
And for every one of those transactions, legitimate or illegitimate, Valve gets a cut. That's their entire business model: whatever anybody in their system is doing, user or creator, they're just sitting by and getting a cut.
I'm not even mad about it, but it's certainly not better than everybody else who is doing MTX and loot boxes and cosmetics and stuff. Half of those practices are copy-pasted from stuff Valve invented.
This is an angle that often goes unconsidered. As someone with a valuable inventory, the social aspect of the service has been made all but completely unusable for me.
The profits made from the ingame markets aren’t that scuzzy until you realize they’re primarily making those profits from their f2p, in house developed games (tf2, cs, and dota). At the end of the day, Valve wants to make money. If all of their money comes from virtual items, the primary thing that will see any real dev time/effort is gonna be those virtual items. It’s profitable stagnation, and it’s bad for consumers.
except they aren't, but you don't understand enough about this to be able to conceptualize reality.
Image tokening was around before valve trading cards and the cards don't use blockchain verification (they never did). We've been embedding symbols as vectors for DECADES. It started as payment card technology.