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.
> 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.
It’s just a weird side effect that’s surprisingly difficult to prevent - online games have had gold farmers for pretty much as long as there have been online games with gold.
I’ve run into idle bot accounts several times while playing and it’s infuriating. Mainly in the arms race mode.
Players can leave and join that mode at any time. So the bots will constantly be joining and leaving. if the bots manage to become 50% of the game they will vote kick all the remaining players. I’ve had several in progress matches interrupted because a few of the actual players bailed and the bots managed to take over the lobby.
> 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.