Oh, no!
Anyway …
On a more serious note, if this is what people choose to waste money on, that’s of course their right. It’s just NFTs with extra steps.
NFTs with fewer steps, but yeah.
yeahhh at least in this context there’s a built-in playground where you can show off your expensive purchases. NFTs are insufferable because NFT owners are always trying to talk to you about their NFTs. I think CS players know that their skins are only cool to other CS players. lol
NFTs are at least independent and won’t disappear if one corporation goes down. Other than that, they’re one and the same, and it’s insane that the same gamers who worship Valve are often the first to bash NFTs.
Unless it’s the web host for the file, because the nft is just a link. The AWS outage showed that quite clearly.
AWS going down wouldn’t erase the NFT out of existence. Valve closing down would certainly remove every Steam market item.
Sure, but your entry in the block chain that is just a link to nowhere isn’t much more exciting that telling people about the cool skin you once had in a defunct game.
In one instance, you’d have indisputable proof of ownership, but only your word in the other. The former is not that different from money, which is not even paper these days but a record in a database.
Indusputable proof of ownership of what exactly? The expired domain the nft points to? Nope. Whatever the link once pointed to? Nope. You only have owner ship of that particular urls representation in that particular block chain which confers you exactly nothing else. Not much different to the state you’d be left in with skins in a defunct game as I said.
The whole concept of in-game purchases is just foreign to me. I wasn’t even willing to pay 99 cents for a few extra lives in Candy Crush. This market being worth billions is frankly unfathomable.
as someone who has a few fortnite skins, I can speak to that side of the market. When you’re playing a game like that, which is high budget and also free-to-play, it’s easy to talk yourself into spending a few dollars. You get sick of using the default skins, everything else looks so cool, and you’ve been getting hours and hours of joy out of the game, haven’t you? In a way, it’s like you’re showing support to the kindly devs that gave you this game for free. Then once you have a couple, you might get addicted to the rush of joining a party with your friends and hearing their reactions to your new skin or dance. Plus, if you’re like me, you might just enjoy the inherent humor to watching Master Chief do a TikTok dance. It’s actually enhancing your enjoyment of the game. Then, $50 later, you finally realize that you’ve been getting diminishing returns on the enjoyment with each purchase, or you just get bored with the game overall, so you finally stop spending money on new skins.
That’s been my experience. When we talk about the potential for “billions”, most of that money is coming from the whales. The people for whom money is no object, so they never hit the point where they realize that buying the skins isn’t bringing them any real happiness anymore. And of course, in the CounterStrike market, these skins are resellable, so there’s also a collector’s mindset that takes hold. Either you treasure your collection of high value skins, or you get caught up in the rush of pulling an expensive skin from a crate because you know how much you can sell it for.
I guess I just don’t understand motivations in the F2P market. Like, I’m happy to pay a reasonable price for a game, but I have no interest in being nickeled and dimed – I can’t tell you how many games I’ve noped out on because of that shit. Like, if Factorio charged for cosmetic add-ons, that would just be ludicrous. Either you made a playable game for the price of entry, or you didn’t.
I seriously need to find a grift to hook people in for monthly payments.
What a weird fucking world we live in where this is a headline.
Is Counter Strike ever going to innovate or just keep monetizing with empty fluff?
I got bored in the 1.6 and CS Source days, are people even playing different maps or is it still the same 5 maps over and over and over?
This is like watching someone turn an especially satisfying lever toy with a great tactile CA-CHUNK when you pull it into a slot machine over the course of 25+ years without ever changing or adding substantially to the toy mechanism/lever part of the machine.
CS 1.6 with War3 mod was peak. Classes, Skill Trees, leveling up based on kills and rounds won.
Reviving teammates, insanely OP grenades, partial invisibility, and other ridiculous abilities.
Yeah that was really fun and really helped with community servers bridging pepe together
Think the biggest innovation they did for csgo was molotovs, and for cs2 was smokes being affected by bullets and explosions. Other than that, I think it’s been largely the same.
Though do keep in mind, I have about 30h across source, csgo, and 2 combined; odds are I missed stuff.
