The creator must be shitting his pants with the publicity this gane is getting. Someone that makes a game like that is surely trying to exploit opportunities. They have to be doing something illegal, whether that be illegal business practices or avoiding taxes.
If it gets too much publicity, it may catch the eye of a regulation agency that could start an investigation, especially if he pisses someone off, and that person makes an anonymous tip to a 3-letter agency as revenge.
It’s a different scheme. While the developers can print as many items as they want if they want to, the prices are entirely made out by the community. So they just manipulate the odds to make some items rarer. If they print the same items, the price will fall right off.
However why the game has this much players is that its really easy to bot.
I see, it does not match all the properties of Ponzi scheme. But those people are idiots. And Valve really should intervene this since similar titles already popped up. Basically there is no end to that.
What many posters in this thread fail to realize is that there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise transcends human existence in 2024.
Of course, Gaben as their CEO has the last say in it. And he’s just a good guy. But wait, aren’t there other companies that have good guys as their CEO and yet the enshittification persists?
The profound reason is that Valve is not a publicly traded company. They have no obligation to any investors to make number go up. They are a private company, they can do whatever the fuck they want. If they stay flat and keep paying their employees, that’s totally fine, and there is 0 pressure on them to change anything. THAT‘s why Valve seems like such a different company compared to everything else that’s out there.
Of course it’s still a choice to go public or not, and they have made the right call (for us consumers).
there is a very good reason why steam hasn’t been hit by the enshittification that otherwise permeates human existence in 2024.
Come again? Steam is enshitifed af. from forcing CS:GO players to move to CS:2 to adding DRM left and right, they do it all. They even release remasters of old games that are essentially always broken one or another.
Steam doesn’t control the quality of remasters. That’s up to publishers. I’m not the most active gamer and might have missed something, but didn’t valve release a major revamp to the way the Library and Store were layed out in the past year or two? They also recently expanded family sharing and remote co-op. The only L I can remember in recent memory is the whole “You can’t leave your games to another person when you die”
Based take imo. I think many posters fail realize the insane amount of money steam makes Valve. Rough estimates are that Steam sold 400 million games last year. Average cost for a game is ~$15.5. Steam has a platform fee of 30%. That means that, roughly, Steam made Valve ~1.86 billion dollars just through the sell of games. Not considering microtransactions or hardware sells. Reportedly, Valve made 1 billion dollars just off cases from CS2 crate openings. Let’s just give Valve the benefit of the doubt and assume they made $5 billion dollars last year.
Impressive, but honestly not that impressive when you consider that Xbox brought in 18 billion and PlayStation brought in 30 billion last year. However, if you factor in that Xbox has a head count of ~$20,100 and Sony has one of ~12,700. While Valve has a head count of about ~400. We see that Xbox and Sony are bringing in about $900K and $2.4M per head respectively. Valve is bring in 12.5M per head. Plus Xbox and PlayStation have multiple studios and campuses. While I believe Valve only has the 1 or 2 campuses and they are their only studio.
My point being that, Valve has a ton of liquid cash for investment and growth opportunities. I’d wager Valve brought in more than 5 Billion last year, but with them being a private company, it’s hard to pin down what exactly they could’ve made.
Yeah, I had many games on GOG, still have, and after I did full switch to linux using Proton is such great experience. I have Steam Deck too and it’s just more convenient to get stuff on Steam, sadly. I’ve already finished Cyberpunk 2077 on Windows two years ago and I’ve recently wanted to play Phantom Liberty DLC. I’ve tried to install it through Heroic, Bottles and directly through Steam and experience to setup GOG Galaxy to maintain cloud saves and achievements is frustrating at best, but I’ve also noticed some lags and micro-stutters when using GOG client.
News to me. Do you have any articles on this? Searching for “banana right wing” gives me a bunch of articles about Chiquita funding a paramilitary group.
One of the devs had his steam name set to “Abschieben schafft Wohnraum” which translates to “Deportation creates living space”. He has now hidden previous names and claimed that this was to troll, but he still has Trump and Putin as his background so I don’t think that I am going to believe that.
This and the whole Team Fortress 2 bot situation (check Zesty’s video for more details) requires Steam to implement something against botting in general.
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