[gquere]

They're running an online casino directed at children and have made specific adaptations to bypass legal regulations in several countries.

[Dead_Lemon]

The game does have a mature rating, so parents should be vetting their activity.

I would still contend and say the gambling aspect, with real money, is a net negative to the community.

[armonster]

But is the game rated mature due to violence, or due to gambling? I might be okay with my kid playing a game just because it has violence, but that doesn't mean I'm wanting to sign them up for gambling, but I'm curious if the mature rating even covers that since it's more of a meta-game thing and not actually part of the "game" itself.

[catmanjan]

There's a big difference between 15 and 18 though...

[rplnt]

You don't need to play the game to gamble.

[seanclayton]

How many kids do you have?

[Aeolun]

Anyone purchasing a $20k cosmetic is almost certainly not a child.

If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking? That it’s a legitimate investment? The only people spending that much money on cosmetics are drug dealers.

[shawabawa3]

Kids buy a $2.50 case in the hope of winning a $20k cosmetic item

Then there are the third party gambling sites where you bet items on matches in the hopes of spinning up your cheap items into more expensive ones

[temp0826]

I was recently at a lan party for a friend's 40th birthday (something I don't think any of us had done since highschool or so!), most of them are way more into gaming than me and have been consistently since childhood. I was pretty shocked at one point when they went on a loot box binge and I witnessed them drop hundreds on loot boxes etc (I don't know what it's called, the keys or whatever). Definitely didn't seem like the first time. These are adults with children of their own. There is a demographic out there of people I wasn't aware of, not necessarily whales, that have a ton of disposable income for this fluff. And valve has their hooks in them for whatever reason.

[huimang]

No, but they incentivize opening cases in order to obtain such valuable prizes, at $2.50 a pop. TF2 does this too, with Unusual rarity hats.

[gquere]

I didn't downvote you (my account is low reputation) but your argument is weak: that some skins go for absurd amount of money says nothing of the rest of the ecosystem. There can both be children and drug dealers (ab)using the same "gaming" mechanics.

[matsemann]

> If you vote this down, pretty curious what you are thinking?

That you used a straw man. The $20k cosmetics weren't mentioned, and even if some buy these, the thing itself can still very well be targeted as gambling towards children.

[c048]

Considering how much this particular system has been linked to real life crime and gangs, you're not far off.

People downvoting you must either not be aware of this, or have a personal stake in it.

[charcircuit]

Virtual items are legitimate investments.

[lolitsobvious]

Damn you’re trying to tell me that people will abandon all morality just to make billions of dollars? Who would of thought that something like that could be possible.

[solsane]

Well, that’s lootbox mechanics. I don’t see how this most recent iteration changes any of that.

[saghm]

I honestly don't understand the logic behind policies like this. As a kid, my friends and I loved to buy Pokemon and Yu-Gi-Oh cards for a few years, and while I think most adults thought it was pretty silly, I don't recall anyone ever claiming that this was somehow equivalent to gambling for children despite it basically the same mechanism as loot boxes; most booster packs were essentially not worth the value once opened because with the exception of a few specific rare cards in each set, the cards were not very valuable even to a collector or player of the game.

I could see an argument that there's an issue with closed ecosystems where value of an item can be changed after someone has obtained it due to control by a centralized provider, but that's completely different concern to the idea of gambling being harmful.

[Retric]

As a kid I viewed MtG, baseball cards, etc as gambling and often heard them referred to as such.

The loot box issue is in part how easy it is to take this stuff to excess. My 8 year old niece racked up ~1,500$ worth of charges in a game when AT&T messed up permissions after a cellphone upgrade. It’s shockingly easy for people to blow arbitrary money on this stuff as the industry is optimized to be predatory as whales make up the bulk of profits.

So I suspect physical stores being really skeptical if an 8 year old showed up to buy a grand of Pokémon cards likely tampered the backlash.

[pessimizer]

It absolutely was and is gambling, and plenty of people complain about it. I've always thought it was disgusting to make a living off of pay-to-play games targeted at children. Morally somewhere around the level of being a pimp.

I don't even like it when targeted at adults, but we allow adults to do far worse when it comes to gambling. A lot of our hollow economies depend on it. But you really have to be a moral sewer to pay your rent from kids hoping to open the right bag to hopefully energize their often very narrow, often very autistic social lives. At best you're a carnie.

So there's one data point, take it as you will.

[wincy]

I quite honestly don’t know anyone under 40 that plays Counterstrike. It seems like an old guy’s game at this point. It isn’t 2003 anymore.

[snake42]

Its probably because you don't know many under 40 year olds. Its been a popular game for a long time.