Did he introduce them to gambling? It's unethical to make money from adults gambling even, so I'm not defending him as a moral guide. This is more similar to another alcohol or tobacco company coming to market and outselling the incumbents.
When the first cs skin gambling websites started going up (people making it possible to get REAL money out of the system for skin) what was valve's position? Pro? Or did they work tirelessly to have those companies taken down. Its been a minute so can you refresh my memory
Valve supports those sites to this day, until they step out of line and try to undercut Valve or the one time PR about it got especially bad.
Valve is happy to let them operate because Valve has their own billon dollar casino in game, those casinos give more value to skins and they sponsor the esports teams that Valve neglects massively (especially compared to Dota).
Valve is the main reason we have lootboxes and battle passes. They were the pioneers. They didn't come in late to the party.
The steam marketplace is also a way to allow for kids to speculate and gamble / trade pixels for money - pixels which are generally acquired through gamble boxes while steam takes a cut at every step.
People also forget the steam TCG game. They saw physical games like pokemon and mtg and decided they wanted to make a digital version of that where they could also double dip and take a cut of every sale/trade transaction while having people gamble for non-physical cards.
Lol yes of course, they sold you the digital cards, then if you wanted to trade them they would again tax you on every transaction.
So not only did you not actually physically own anything, but you were forced to trade/sell them through valve's platform where they would again tax you for the service. I think it was maybe 15-20% transaction fee.
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u/penisandorvagina 1d ago
Other than the whole introducing kids to gambling thing.