How Valve is Profiting from Steam's Back-Door Casinos 

You're not gonna get mocked by most people in csgo or tf2, maybe some but most wont

@@AfutureV I've only every done micro-transactions to support games I enjoy/have played a lot of, but I definitely limit myself to average game prices, I'd buy a season pass, but never a $100 Valorant skin pack for example.

@@AfutureV it can be tempting, not gonna lie. When you can only get a gold gun or something like that by paying for it, it used to be fine when it was five dollars for all the new stuff. Now it's just five dollars for one thing, but if you really want it that badly, everything else starts to fade away.

One of my classmates fiercely defended fifa lootboxes to me for about an hour while I tried to argue that games before this age of monetization would actually give him the content for free...

Do note that at this point, Valve is facilitating the transformation of in game items into IRL money. It doesn't matter whether you like the item or not, only that you can trade it or gamble it for more money. A $500 chip on a poker table doesn't cost $500 to make, but everyone in the casino agrees that it represents $500 and can be traded for $500.

I had to skip that part myself. It was far too heartbreaking. :(

He looks more tired than overtaken with emotions

We need to add into account that gambling is an addiction, similar to smoking for example. So, even if they knew it was wrong their brains are hardwired TO gamble. It's such a sad situation really. These people needs proper help and these casinos are essentially exploiting their addiction.

@@sparklesparklesparkle6318 people's minds work in different ways, for example gamblers are addicted to the thrills and the prospect of "hitting it big", heroin is a different kind of pleasure, they're both addictive sure but you can't really compare them and say that one is easier compared to the other

The video and journalism is superb as always, but watching Quinns just die inside in outfit after outfit showing just how many interviews and how many days/weeks/months this took was incredible.

Amen, I still hate that industry part of valve

yeah I remember being on trade servers and being interested in trading and being with other people, getting into looking at rarity of things, but I am so glad I did not care about that stuff and just had more fun walking around as a spycrab or sniping people and chatting on the servers than doing actual trades. I just went in for what I wanted and then left.

For anyone unaware, the spy's disguise kit as a 10% chance of giving you a spycrab animation when you taunt, instead of the usual animation. The idea is that two people put their bet into a pot and spam the taunt button, the first person to get the spycrab taunt three times loses.

@@Blazik3n99 oh that is sad

What a pleasant surprise to see you here! Gambling is awful though yeah

Gambling is one of the worst influences on society. You won't understand until you see a local casino at 4 am

This is really true though - this kind of thing leaves a half-permanent stain on your physical brain that only *weakens* over time by not doing it rather than completely going away [at least not for several decades]

​@@themore-you-know why be transphobic about it? just say they.

Let's not get up in arms here @A T and @MT Foxtrot. They initially went by any pronouns until settling on they/them january last year. Not being up-to-date doesn't make you a transphobe and implying so waters down the debate and distracts from relevant aggressions towards non-binary people. On the other hand, correcting someone on their use of pronouns is hardly that big a deal, @A T. You sound like you've been the victim of a war-crime.

No Clip also does a similar level of investigation, though it is usually less about issues in the industry and more about the development of a particular game/series.

@@AusSkiller Yeah those guys are top tier as well, but yes, their content is more documentaries than journalism.

ironic

:O That makes a lot of sense, thank you for the insight!

I feel like this is a given, of course people will play more if they get baited out by the machine. personally I only buy and sell skins for profit and will never gamble on one of these sites - another reason: you never know what kind of unfair odds these sites have and are lying to you about

Its just work my man. I wouldnt blame yourself for these issues. If you wouldnt have done it someone else would have, these websites are predatory but in my opinion at least, if they required an ID to gamble then it would be fine.. its only an issue because children can do it.

But members of the NSDAP genuinely believed all they were doing was work. One’s conscience needs to be honestly confronted and heeded.

Thanks for sharing your story. It’s good for people to be reminded that things are more rigged than they even appear.

That's capitalism

There is a reason. Most games now days are online multi-player games and the user expect the game to be constantly updated for years after launch. Dev need a constantly cash flow to make this profitable. I agree that there need to be another way of do this. But you cannot expect to pay once for a multi-player game that will have online server's+ updates for years after launch

@@namegoeshere197 This is what they want you to think, to justify microtransactional economies. There's already a better way to do this, there's a little thing called dedicated and independent servers that older games (and some modern ones) use to employ, allowing users to host their own servers, and even modify/update/mod the game to their liking. This is literally how Counter-Strike and many Half-Life mods became hits. I think most people underestimate the amount of money these companies make off of initial sales. Also one of the unfortunate side effects of not allowing users to create their own servers is that AAA games can literally just get shut down and become unplayable forever. That means that art that I worked on for 2-3 years on a video game will never be seen or enjoyed by another person ever again because the company was too stubborn to allow users to host servers on their own. I think if Valve focused more on user generated content that was more like expansions, DLCs, or mods of their games it would have a much better impact than these small pieces of UGC (Dota 2 Workshop, TF2 Workshop, CS Workshop) that glorify gambling or microtransactions. They are operating out of pure greed unfortunately, there's nothing neutral about offering an API into your gambling scheme disguised as a "game economy".

@@namegoeshere197 This might sound crazy, but after Quake 3 Arena came out, hundreds of thousands of people still played Quake 2 online. When Battlefield Bad Company came out, people still wanted to play on Battlefield 2 servers. If the sequel to a game comes out, and it sucks, you always should have the previous game's multiplayer experience to fall back on. But now companies want to own absolutely every aspect of the gameloop: You can't run your own servers, you can't do LAN, you MUST sign up for their third party DRM online service, and they can and WILL delete all your data without any warning or justification.

@@Akaikami player-hosted servers allows easier cheating. But I do agree that once a game stopped getting support from the devs, they should just allow the game to be hosted by the players, for preservation reasons.

crazen🤨

+1

Don't say stupid things

@@koghs they didnt

@@YinnYangGMD you own it babe

Hey bro, you got this. It's hard, it's always there, but I have faith in you. Go kick gambling addiction's ass.

@@jordan4673 That next big win never comes. There are things I want to say to you that really aren't appropriate for this comment section, so you'll just have to imagine it yourself.

@@Mikowmer ur welcome

i suggest to learn coding/ programming and make your own lootbox/ gambling thingy and i'm sure after you kinda understand their end of the "bet" you'll never be a gambler again at least not electronics ones.

stop playing freemium games that present these options to you. there are thousands of games that you can play and enjoy without lootboxes. "yeah im trying to quit crack but i really like hanging out with my friends at the crackhouse and when i see the crack there its hard not to smoke it"

I'd say that all gambling is morally unstable but I very much agree and love to hear that someone from your standing can give their take on this stupid shit as well.

Yeah on one hand I like the valve ethos on not enforcing things like white lists on their ID, but I don't buy it for this problem. The truth is, Valve could push updates to these games that shut down all gambling by removing the gambling aspects of these games, removing skins and making it so all players just start out with access to all these skins and going back to the drawing board on how to make money off of counterstrike.

@@TeleportRush the primary gambling is kinda acceptable nowadays, but the tradeable part is why i don't buy in NFT and stuff. even if you can profit from selling the skins it won't be you who make the most money in the "game" if anything you lose money.

@@fltfathin First party gambling shouldn't be acceptable nowadays, but yeah the fact that the items are on the steam inventory is the reason third party gambling can even happen, and valve could shut that down in whatever method they choose as long as it ends the ability to trade these items.

There definitely needs to be regulation around this stuff, it’s annoying that regulation moves at a snails pace, we likely won’t see any legal development for awhile

isn't that why like the TF2 adult swim show that Expiration Date was meant as a pilot for never surfaced? Because Valve's infamous inability to work with others long-term left AS hanging for months until they canned the project altogether silently

@@hambor12 Yup. That and why the HL2 collaborations ended. Half Life 2 has around 4 collaborations projects with studios like Arkane, EA, WB and more where they had them make their own spin on the HL2 formula, the most infamous one being the Ravenholm expansion Arakane worked on. Gabe literally got tired of Valve making Half Life stuff and despite them doing zero actual work on any of the projects they literally just called every single studio and told them to instantly cancel with without any reason given. Arkane's indev version of Ravenhold was close to completion and to this day they make new devs at the company play it.

@@hambor12 That sucks so hard

@@elsienova4269valve do cool stuff but they sound incredibly shitty to work with

@@elsienova4269 well i guess its time to apply to work at arcane

I would argue that it was important for Valve to get the skins in game before the major just so that viewers could get to see stars running with rare skins.

There's a GDC with a Valve employee who talks about the introduction of skins in CSGO, and tl dr their gambling became a lot more popular once they started making silly, goofy, kid friendly skins that looked more like toys instead of the realistic military camo and what not they made before. I wonder why.

Cope lil bro before skins csgo was just cs source but more shit

@@SuperDuperSeb Yeah but that has nothing to do with skins, they were making gameplay changes the whole time lmao

@@EmApex If they didn't add skins csgo wouldn't be as popular and profitable as it is now... gameplay doesn't matter

Great idea. I think it's specifically important to teach them about how their brains won't finish maturing until 25 and they can permanently damage it by using easy-dopamine buttons that are addictive. And when they get addicted to something that costs money, it can be life ruining.

+1

Don't let the bastards rope you in Also, I didn't even realise you could sell them so thanks for the tip

@@spacebassist common drop ones are not worth anything, you can delete them. Operation cases and old crates go for a pretty penny tho

Personally, selling a tf2 crate made me feel more rewarded than opening one.

Do you mean to say that thanking PMG for having good journalism would be controversial? I feel like most people would be able to see pretty clearly that they do their homework.

@@josewilkins2517 no, they're saying the video is going to be controversial

@@josewilkins2517 Oh, not at all! I mean that this report will be controversial, or at least uncomfortable, because many see Valve and Steam as pinnacles of the industry. I mighta worded it poorly, admittedly

@@garchompenthusiast Valve literally can do NOTHING that will ruin some people's "Good Guy Valve" image. Gabe Newell could kill a person on an E3 livestream, and you'd have people defending him just because he "made Half-life". It's pretty disheartening when you try to discuss the more intricate problems with Valve (such as how their sales models devalue indepedent studio games while not affecting AAA titles), because people won't even recognize the BIG stuff like child gambling rings, introducing lootboxes to thhe west, and the extent of their DRM practices.

Their workplace structure is to thank for their status in the industry. Everything a Valve employee does is of their own volition, there are no deadlines to meet or shareholders to please. Their desks are quite literally on wheels so they can move from one project to another easily. It feels wrong to me to blame Valve for the online gambling problem. Law enforcement agencies exist for a reason, Valve has done everything they legally need to, it's not their job to play police.

That makes sense, it's an expensive lesson but at least you learned something from it. I did a similar thing, backing someone on a kickstarter once. Nothing came of it, project was silently shut down. In hindsight I realised there were some major red flags, but I remember even then being relieved that it hadn't been more money and also happy that I learned to pay more attention and be more careful in the future.

agreed. i 'accidentally' (an intentional act done out of ignorance) spent hundreds of dollars on league of legends skins when i was 13. it wasn't even gambling, but it was through daddy's credit card and at the time i couldn't understand that there was 'real' (ie. paper) money on that thing. to a child it just seemed like an infinite money machine. the reaction from my parents was so visceral i felt awful for days afterwards, thinking i bankrupted my family. im glad they didn't pretend it wasn't a big deal because i definitely needed that wake up call. to this day im very careful with my purchases and live as frugal as i can while still allowing myself the occasional luxury.

So really what you're saying is that skin betting taught you a valuable life lesson and therefore is a good thing that needs to be protected. /s just in case

@@_holy__ghost how dumb did you have to be to not know debit cards have real money even at 13, it sounds like you were extremely spoiled if you didnt understand the value of money

@@Raulxz first of all, a CREDIT card doesnt have 'money on it'. second of all, i understood the concept of money, i just didnt didnt understand where its coming from when you're just typing numbers into the computer and i didnt have a concept of how fast i was racking it up. plenty of kids dont know this shit. this is normal. sorry you had to go work at the coal mines when you were 12 or whatever but my experience is not out of the ordinary.

@@terrificmarrow2764 ?

@@Thelizardwizardd ralsei

@@terrificmarrow2764 you could've just said that the words "environment" and "confrontational" are too long for you.

800 euros is rookie numbers

@@totallynotsam584 Yes i heard of much more, it was a ton of money for my 13 year old self. It was all the money I had saved in the last 2 years and I even borrowed some money from my parents(without them knowing what it was for)

I was addicted to CSGO gambling at the same age as well. Never had to ask my parents for money to buy video games then, cuz I was good at it, lol. Thankfully my mother taught me how to gamble and evaluate risks in general from a very young age.

Glad I didn't win anything I bet if I did I'd be addicted

Fighting against gold selling is a neverending struggle. I don't think *anyone* has succeeded in curbing it beyond literally removing trading altogether. And even then money can exchange hands beyond the scenes so to speak for boosting and what have you. The gold for real money by the company itself goes way back - in retail WoW numerous years in fact, likewise with Bonds in RS/OSRS (which are good part of why that game is still going today) but especially EVE where I believe buying gametime with in-game money has been a thing since at least near its inception. Viewing it as inherently greedy tactic is fallible (likewise for power leveling), as buying from 3rd party has other nasty things related to it like account theft in buying power-leveling services from others or card info getting stolen. In fact, Jagex's ultimatum of removing free trade and PvP loot in RuneScape was because they were on the verge of being blacklisted by card companies due to people buying gold from dubious sites and then getting their card info stolen resulting in chargebacks and whatnot. Bear in mind that people have been buying and selling gold (in WoW) ever since WoW released, no GDKP necessary. Ultimately, these problems are things that PEOPLE have created for themselves. They can't help it as long as it's enabled, but in terms of MMOs something like killing trading completely is basically killing a huge part of the game with it - in fact, when Jagex slammed down the hammer on trading it hit the game population and it's one of the instances that people say "killed" the game. It is then better to start mitigating the risks of such activities rather than try and endlessly playing whack-a-mole with the never ending stream of goldselling or boosting sites as those just keep creating more and more problems for the consumers AND the company. Yes, it may look like its just pure greed on the surface, but it's also what the consumers desire - the services exist because people literally have a demand for them. People even buy gold and items on PRIVATE servers which could get whacked anyday! Even GDKP is literally something that people can circumvent by not allowing gold for bidding on raid drops, simple as. Also, one of the core design aspects of MMOs is that they're made addicting in design - to keep people engaged. This also includes literal random drops that people chase after year in year out by for example clearing a specific raid on numerous characters each week in hopes of a mount or doing time gated activities. One way or the other people are constantly dealing with games of chance and taking trying to hook the player into p(l)aying more. Even single-player games aren't exempt from this.

The steam marketplace, the original nft market

Uhh, isn't Greece's economy in shambles? But yeah, it's crazy to think one of the most championed creative/tech companies was practically the first to implement every degenerative fiscal mechanic, but it was cool cause the context was much more palatable. The players/community make the skins that you purchase in TF2/CSGO and they can come packaged thematically with actual free maps. DotA 2 never monetized the gameplay and beat Fortnite's battle pass by several years. The battle passes were also marketed as supporting the Esports scene from the start, which built the community and DotA as a brand. Though there's one exception. It's amazing how spectacularly Artifact backfired, but I think it genuinely could have worked if Valve was more realistic with the (probable?) financial cost-cuttings of a digital TCG, were generous early, and focused on social features. They could have also tried to leverage more deterministic, but lengthy or difficult to earn DotA 2 cosmetics (i.e. paints/nametags) to act as marketplace/trade fodder for Artifact cards to provide an entryway for frugal players. They could have also packaged free artifact draft entries and boosters with DotA Plus subscriptions (if you only play dota 2, just sell them on the marketplace).

@@LeMicronaut Yanis Varoufakis was brought on as Greece's financial minister long after the Greek financial collapse started - he was specifically brought on to _fix_ things, and was the strongest anti-austerity voice in Greece.

What valve pioneered was the shop client, the storefront that launches with the game. Contemporary rivals from when steam launched (Impulse, Gamersgate etc.) either offered a self-contained downloadable installer or had a client that you only launched to install the game. Steam on the other hand launched itself every time you played. Once you have that, you can start interacting with the players independently of the game's developer and purchase place. Valve added pop-ups, a built in game shop that appeared even if you hadn't bought the game from steam and generally acted as if they owned the place. Despite all that, an awful lot of game developers either signed exclusivity agreements with them or chose to release their game solely on steam.

@@endlesswaves8257 can you list some game devs who did that?

I think it may have to do with them introducing lootboxes in pretty nonpredatory way making sure they aren't really pay to win etc. Then all they had to do is wait for others to make them 1000% predatory and p2w which makes them look like saints in comparison.

yep, A yes TF2 is okey because is fun and the objects modify actual gameplay and stats

Valve has coasted on the good will of making great games two decades ago. That’s long gone and spent now.

🤯

It's not only the consumers. The media is at fault too. Nobody seems to have cared about loot boxes, but when Overwatch was released there were big outcries, because of them. It's like everyone turns a blind eye towards Valve. Same with NFTs recently. CSGO skins are very much comparable to NFTs, but the outcries only ever started after NFTs actually became a thing and only towards those. It is shady af what Valve does, but nobody seems to acknowledge it.

Lord Jeff has spoken.

It's always been that way. Military manufacturers would never list the environmental impacts of their products even though OSHA would mandate it.

If you aren't a major news outlet, you aren't getting an audience.

@@Ramonatho Why would OSHA mandate environmental things? That seems more like an EPA thing.

@@dandymcgee OSHA mandates all worksite hazard control, environmental or personal.

Yep, never bothered with gambling sites either. I got my unusuals via a dedicated trading site for way cheaper than I would've spent rolling the dice on the crates, but can't deny the fact that the TF2 trading market still heavily relies on loot crates and MvM random drops to keep things churning along.

The "coming youth" is addicted to the dopamine kicks of TikTok clips and has not enough attention span for a 30 minute talking head video on youtube.

​@@ZeroB4NGA bit of a late response but as a older member of gen z who grew up on technology I frankly just dont agree with you, simply if a video is well made it should grab there attention. I loved videos like this when I was younger. Also just look at the views. Clearly this video isnt "boring"

Don't discredit the kids. I've been gambling real money since I was 9 on dice and bones. This is the adults realizing how they can better fuck up the kids, but it's not like some kids don't want to gamble either. We should work with them, not against them.

@@Ramonatho The question is whether or not we should accept gigantic companies facilitating and encouraging it. And we should not. This isn't some sort of tradeoff of human rights; corporations are not people. Also, "I did it and handled it fine" is not a reasonable defense for ANYTHING. At best, that's called survivor bias. Personally I think we should even strictly outlaw advertisements aimed at minors.

@@IstasPumaNevada If Valve (and only Valve) did it, it's perfectly acceptable. At least according to the double standard.

@@MakotoIchinose Riot does gambling too. With the masterwork chests, the hextech cheats, the bags and other stuff

@@IstasPumaNevada wow, nice job completely missing my point just to insult me, very contributive to the conversation my dude.

Oh, the Roblox video must have been an _experience_ for ya. I know it was for me and I don't even have my own kids

@@damien678 Yup. It was difficult to explain to our oldest son exactly why we wouldn't let him play Roblox, but I think we're all better now for it.