[riotnrrd]

I used to work at Valve -- on the CS:GO team, no less -- although I left nearly a decade ago. I don't know what prompted this change but I have some suspicions. Even when I was there and the loot box system was new to CS:GO, there were concerns that a lot of trading was happening outside of the marketplace. The trading happened elsewhere because you can't have more than $300 in your Steam wallet (more than this would trigger some banking regulations that Valve wanted to avoid), so anything more valuable than that had to happen on 3rd party sites.

We didn't want this for three reasons: we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops; and finally because 3rd party trading ended up creating a lot of scams and therefore angry players.

At the time, we didn't see any way around it: we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other, and despite omniscience and omnipotence in the game and Marketplace, we weren't confident that we could rejigger the drop rates and rarities to lower the maximum perceived value of the fanciest knife to be under the $300 limit.

I suspect that the CS:GO team finally decided to do something about it and chose this. If the team is anything like I left it, they probably modeled this extensively (we had data on nearly every game ever played in CS:GO and complete Marketplace data), and discussed the change with the TF2 and DOTA teams, who also have to deal with this, and decided that the short-term fury of a small fraction of the playerbase was worth it. I wonder if TF2 and DOTA are having similar problems and, if so, whether this change will be rolled out for those games, too.

[Mysterise]

Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective.

> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;

My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.

I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.

Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.

[riotnrrd]

> My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.

Yes. The Valve philosophy on the cosmetics marketplace (we called it "the economy") is that you distribute random rewards to players and they can trade and sell and discover the value of those goods for themselves. Obviously, this was done to make money for Valve but, in theory, it's also good for the players. It allows people who have things they don't want to sell them to people who want them. And all this buying and selling happens between Steam wallets (and there is no off-ramp) so at the end of the day, it's all just profit for Valve.

But above all we wanted people to play CS:GO because it was a fun game. We didn't want to turn it into some kind of grim pachinko parlor, with players grinding out matches just to get random loot box drops. So you have to balance the potentially real dollar random rewards so that they're a fun surprise but not economically attractive enough to become a job.

[Hikikomori]

>we couldn't prevent people "gifting" items to each other

Why not remove trade and use an auction system with a limit? Or not allowing trades under market price?

[mFixman]

Runescape tried this back in 2007 along with completely disabling PvP; it was a very unpopular change for the vast majority of players who were not buying items.

I stopped playing the game around that time, so I have to thank Jagex for getting my school grades up.

[babypuncher]

Or just skipping the predatory gambling crap entirely and selling the skins directly like every other live service PvP shooter these days

[kiddico]

Because people literally want to give gifts to each other sometimes. A friend I met playing CS get each other a skin every year for Christmas.

[Ekaros]

With trading. Market price is not only price. With skins there are lot of preferences. Starting for weapons they apply, not all people use same guns as much. And they might prefer one style of skin over an other skin.

If you are not in to extract most possible value, you might trade a more expensive skin for weapon you do not use in style you do not use for less expensive one for weapon you use more in style you really like.

[numpad0]

This sounded odd to me as well. Most lootbox games today has no trading at all - you can pay to unlock items for your own account, and that's it. I suspect the more accurate way to explain it is Valve successfully prevented authority interventions than this being more consumer friendly.

[domlebo70]

I was wondering if you had any thoughts on the CS2 rollout (2 years and counting) and the number of bugs, poor performance, and issues?