CS:GO lotto, Twitch, and Babby's 1st Gambling

People use money on cosmetics, keys to cosmetics etc. Valve makes an unbelivable amount of money on idiots and their need for weapon/character skins.

If you ask me, it has to be some widespread genetic mutation that make whales pour thousands into mere textures.

Or it hits a market of people who have had no personal contact with the concept of gambling, and find this stuff exciting?

Stop giving a link to that whiny, insufferable fucking jew.

I can understand buying skins you like, but the crate business doesn't make sense to me.

CSGO has crates. These crates sometimes drop after finished matches. They can only be opened with keys that you purchase from Valve for about 2 bucks. The reward from opening a crate is a random weapon skin (or rare knife) that can range from 5 cents to the jackpot of $400 and up, since yes, you can buy and sell these skins on a community market that Valve gets a cut out of from every transaction. Here you can see why people are starting to associate this process with gambling, seeing as how some want to turn their 2 dollars into 200 dollars, or just want the rush of going big. The fun part here is that this 200 dollars is not even real money, it's Steambux, so in the end Valve wins anyway.

Now in addition to this, there have been a shitload of 3rd party websites popping up that basically use these skins as casino chips. And to trace the line back to OP, an owner of one of these betting websites that has a somewhat reputation as a CSGO player has been making videos about "winning big, look how easy it is", on his own gambling website, obviously to draw more people in. And apparently that guy is not the only one.

All in all, some argue that it should be illegal, since there are kids with no concept of what gambling is that fall prey to this, and they end up stealing their parents' credit card just to see the shiny YOU WON A $400 KNIFE even though they'll probably end up spending more than that to get there, only to probably lose it all anyway because his favorite youtube streamer told him about a way to turn your knife into two knives on a website he totally doesn't own. And the whole system is aimed at these kids and people with poor self-control anyway.

Another important thing to say here is that most of the skins you win are worth like 0.01€. You spend 2€ on a box and you get basically nothing in return.

Not everyone is greedy and wants to win the jackpot, some people just want a decent skin.

Its literally gambling.

Fuck off already.

What I don't get is that there's still morons defending these disgusting fucks, and that if history has shown anything nothing will come of it because "lol who give a shit it's just internet money xD"

If this shit didn't involve Youtube or the Internet in general people would have already been jailed for decades at this point.

Unlike gambling you do win something every time though.
Sure, sometimes they are worth less on the market than the key but that's just economics and supply and demand at work.

Just stop at this point, stop paying attention to any of these faggots. As much as enjoy shit like crowbcat and whatnot, the majority of this "internet cleansing" is just another form of autism for faggot NEETs and normalfags to feel like they've done something with themselves.

Thank god I got off the ride with ASSFAGGOTS 2 a year ago.

So gamlbing would be okay if instead of nothing you would just win 0.01€ instead?

But that's REAL money. 0.01€ in gift cards would be more appropriate.

yeah but you still lost money you dork

If you've ever bought a skin with actual real world money you need to reconsider your life choices. I've taken the poorfag way with every multiplayer game I've played to avoid paying for cosmetics.

It actually isn't even real money, it's steam money, it's totally worthless.

I wonder who came up with the idea of skin markets.

Valve were bad before CSGO, if you remember the L4D2 fiasco. I blame myself for being a Valve fanboy back then and not being harsh enough when they started to exploit us. Back in the days when BM:S was going to be the best mod ever created. Now it looks like the last level will be DLC if they ever bother. Typical really.

That's what I said. As opposed to getting real money, you get gift cards, i.e. only redeemable at a certain place

This crap is way worse than gift cards, valve gives you gift cards that can only buy digital goods.

Is it just me or is this whole thing
Fuck em. Let their parents find out that they have a gaping hole in their wallets after their let their kids get raised by videogames and youtube ecelebs. Let them find out what parenting is.

Retard kids are "gambling" with CSGO skins and two YouTubers that promote the gambling sites are owners and they never disclosed it.

Then it's fucking Monopoly Money.

You're stupid if you honestly believe that. The issue here is that real money is involved. This would very much be a moral panic if those crates were opened for free, or if it was in a game where you bought them with a currency earned ingame. But when we're talking real money, yeah, it's a problem.

Learn from history. The past showed us that we need to protect the stupid.

For example in early 2k here in Germany there were a shitload of ads directed to children. They told you to send them a sms and in return you would get free games and music for your phone, which ended up to be a huge scam. When sending out those messages you would make a contract with them and have to pay like 300€. Courts need to step in and stop those criminals.

Other than that, there are also people selling freeware. It was again like 2005 and 2006 when some websites decided to offer freeware, like idk winamp and stuff like that for free to download. But when you hit download you had to tick a box that said you accept their rules and shit. Turns out they had shit like you have to pay them 30€ each month in that contract.

These are simply things that people can't see coming.

Also outside of gaming, think of the early years of industrialization, some companies had you pay fines if you were sick and shit like that.

Get a lot of this pleb.

This is gambling, though. It's not hard to understand the concept of gambling, even if you're a kid. Way I see it there isn't any scam, aside from the faggot youtubers promoting their site as if they're not the owners which I agree is a dick move, but I don't see the problem with people gambling their shitty skins if that's what they want. If anything this is less of a problem than actual real life gambling, and that's still legal and widespread.

Every currency that isn't physical is basically monoply money.

I'm making fun of its value that Harpy and Weedman have been working on.
Canadian here, can confirm the maple syrup scent is awesome

It's not really that fair. First off all, kids should be excluded from gambling because they are naive idiots.

Also the game doesn't tell you the chances to win.

I was there when the information got leaked and people saw the f2p shit incoming, and we didn't guess that Valve would be that bad.

You see, if you don't have any experience in this shit you could think that there is a fair chance to win every item. E.g. if there are 7 items in the box, there is a 1/7 chance to win the item you want. But in reality the chances for the good stuff is way lower.

That's why people in the early days bought 3 keys and 3 cases and were then pissed because they got the skulls 3 times in a row.

I didn't buy a case, I wanted to wait for the reviews first because I remember those cases from a game called crossfire, but even I thought that Valve wouldn't go that far.

What they did is evil and horrible for the gaming community as a whole, now other game devs also go total apeshit on microtransactions. I bet Overwatch wouldn't have those if valve didn't push it.

Any currency that isn't backed by a physical object of value is literally monopoly money.
It only has value if you willingly give it value.

Kids should be excluded from playing M-rated videogames in the first place. Nobody who should be playing TF2, CSGO, dota and all the rest would have a problem understanding the risks involved in gambling on virtual hats. Again it comes back to bad parenting. Or should we not sell liquid detergent in stores because kids might think it's juice and drink it?

Oh.
Isn't the exchange rate something like 77 cents USD to 1 CDN? That's not beyond recovery, though I hear that there's a problem of the Chinese buying up land.

user, he has the most over expressive face I've ever seen. He just can't stay still. And the deep eyes don't make it any easier to watch

I think it's around 70 cents now. There are a lot of factors, but not much is being done to fix it.

I was playing those games back then and they didn't affect me negatively.

yea
ok

where the fuck are kids getting money to throw away on gambling anyway?

i wish my parents gave me an allowance to waste on dumb shit like gun skins

you're not an upper middle class chinese family

While the whole thing is shitty, I can't help but blame Valve for even creating this stupid 'market' in the first place. It puts more emphasis on the skins and less on the actual fucking game. Their response is of "skins aren't real currency" is the laziest goddamn thing too.

They steal their parents' credit cards.

They would get caught within a month when the bill arrives anyways
Are they seriously that stupid that they cant even think that far ahead?

That's what made me not steal my parent's credit card to buy jewxon cash for maplestory back when i was in school. Unless modern parents just don't give a shit, which wouldn't surprise me.

They're children, user; ones raised by youtube with parents stupid enough to have unsecured credit cards, no less.
Why do you think they shouldn't be gambling int he first place?

Of course.

It reminds me of this time an American kid I knew once gave his mom's landline number to some guy in Canada. I think he did it so the guy could contact him about WoW raids and his mom got pissed because she was being charged up the ass for international phone calls.

He's done a lot to that hair
youtu.be/96MypX3_eVI

People are only now noticing the ass ravaging, bullshitery that Valve has been pulling for years not just with CS:GO? The online gambling sites aren't the main issue, it's that these cosmetics are obtainable via a random drop system, meaning (let's face it) most of the time you'll get worthless shit, but once in awhile you'll get something valuable. Leading to people spending money on keys to get expensive skins so they can then sell them to retards. Nevermind that they're ultimately worthless, pixels on a model that can vanish in any second.

are they finally in jail?
their fanbase still protecting them?
still no word from them?

sorry, second webM wrong.
That's actually from the nipple bread. Yeah i know, she doesn't have nipples, so what.

It wasn't worth the time I spent and they've effectively ended anyone making money off the market with all the trade restrictions they put in place.

And this is bad?

twitter.com/Futterish/status/750824674444120064

shit about to hit the fan?

archive.is/F6d7l

gameinformer? are they big? do they pressure the ftc now?

top fuckin' kek

Its about like the cliff notes on CSGO gambling being a huge scam.

webm.land/media/tmp/40866e5e-6c1e-4c36-bc64-1b984870f72b.webm

here we go, faggots new 'i'm sorry but actually not sorry' webM

ok, what a faggot.

Of course their fanbase is helping them. Children will trust whatever these guys say regardless of the facts, because kids think these people care about the kids, when all they want is the untapped sheqel market behind the kids.

yeah sure but in this case we are facing around 10 Millions 12 years old cowadody penisköpfe.

I can't believe that.

OK, I think I'm getting that part. You pay 2$ real money and get a random skin that might be worth from 0.01$ to 400$. Where do those skins get their value from? Does it mean that if I have a fugly 10$ skin I don't want I can put it up on the Steam market and some kid will buy it for 10$? Is it possible to set for how much I want to sell the skin or are the prices set by Valve? Can I buy the skins directly from Valve without bothering with the whole crate business? And from what I understand, all the money you "make" is just Steam shop credits, so the best thing I can do even if I got a 400$ skin is buy some games, right? But this does raise the question, who would be willing to pay me 400$ for a skin in the first place? Can I sell the skins back to Valve?

Now this part I don't understand. Is Valve allowing those 3rd party sites to access their system? So let's say I have my 10$ skin and I want to gamble, what do I do? Do I hand the skin over to the site, they convert is to Steam credit, put it all in a pot, roll the dice and give every participant what they won? So I could in theory and up with 20$ or 2$ Steam store credit?

I'm sorry if I sound completely clueless, but I don't use Steam, the biggest Jewry I have experiences were the Insomnia sales on GOG. Assuming my logic up there was right, what do people earn from gambling? Do they hope they can buy a skin for 10$ real money and make it 50$ Steam credit? And what is it the gambling sites are getting out of it, can you convert Steam credit to real money again? This is all just so fucking weird.

Question: now that the fire is burning and the salt is flowing, how do we make it worse?

I have met some of these type of kids. They watch youtubers all day, listen to the music everyone else listens to, and they all try to fit in. These youtubers give them a sense of happiness, even if its a facade, because to the kids these people are cool and fun and all the other kids agree.

Though it is sad just how easy it is to con these kids. I have seem where they fall for the "YOU HAVE A VIRUS, CLICK HERE FOR HELP" shit so easily, because they only talk to other kids and they are all so ignorant of everything except whats popular. This case is no different. The youtuber is pretending to be sorry, so the kids think that their cool haven is being attacked by people who want to ruin the youtuber.

the bank of a casino is normaly in the casino, in this gambling case is the bank outside from the casino, selling games somewhere else under the name steam?

Did i get this right?

So, actually, steam is allowing 3rd party websites to gamble with it but keep the money flow in their own system (of course) since their profit from it too.

But if the bank of a casino is outside and this bank allowes every shady casino to be part of it, wouldn't this mean the bank helped to open the bborder for criminal actions?

The $2 cost of entry and their relative rarities. In fewer words: because people are willing to pay that much.

If that skin is worth $10, yeah.

Prices are set by the users of the marketplace.

Nope. Finding a player who's selling their skin on the marketplaces is your only option on that front.

Games or other skins, yeah.

Idiots with too much money and not enough priorities.

No, but you can sell them on the marketplace, which again, Valve gets a cut from.

Yes, through the Steam API, which seems to be available relatively freely.

Pretty much, yes.

Not without going through shady and probably illegitimate methods.

Find a way to fuck with Valve and Valvedrones.

Yeah I'm gonna make fun of your money that melts together when it's too hot.

I think the two most salt inducing shit you can do at this point in time is to fuck with kids, and to fuck with females and their safe spaces.
Quick user, I need to hear your plan on how we do both on this scenario.
We already have the kids fucking scripted with the baby gambling, now we need part two.

Find GURL GAMER tittycams that promote CS:GO gambling. Accuse them of using their sexuality to get children to gamble.

No user, you gotta think like a feminist.
A girl must be oppressed in order for turmbl salt to happen.

This is just an idea but: can we hire an actress to cry on cam saying she was scammed by these sites? Or can a fellow anonette that is browsing do it herself?

technically you can get a Steam Link or Controller (and possibly a Vive?) with that money as well.

Skins can be converted into real world money through a couple of different means, most of them involving keys. The short version is that you either trade a weapon for a ton of keys or sell it on the market and use the money to buy keys. The keys can then be sold for real money by charging slightly less than Valve. Skins aren't worth quite as much as their listed steam market value, but since keys are constantly being purchased, it makes turning skins into real world money a lot easier and reliable than people might think.

As an aside, this also has to potential to pressure the price of weapon cases upwards after they've around long enough. I'm not sure how many many keys are out there, but the one bad thing about using keys as currency is that they only have value so long as they can be redeemed. After weapons cases get old enough, Valve stops giving them to players. This means that if the number of keys outnumber the number of available cases on the market, it drives the price of the case up past the price of the keys and makes the keys a "bad commodity." With that said, the only instance I know of this happening to date is the Weapon Case 1, which is probably because people hadn't yet learned the importance of making sure that the keys they bought were relatively new.

Regardless of my stance on skins and CSGO, it's fascinating to be able to see market forces at work.

If the feds crack down on this shit and Valve loses their scheme do you guys think they'll start making fucking games again?

...

Find gurl gamer tittycams, total up their donations, and report them to the IRS for unclaimed income. If they actually failed to report it you get 10%.

What a fucking faggot, that sounds like a dependable and practical vehicle. You're a faggot too, user.

You have to think about what will quickly get women riled-up.

But to be honest, I think showing how shit Valve is to normalfags is the best way to spread the flames. Modgate did that somewhat, but some where on the fence and defending Valve, and some just didn't give a damn because it involved only one game and not much was on the line.

No. At best, they'll leave the gaming industry. At worst, they'll find another way to jew people out of their money, but with more discretion this time so they don't get sued, investigated, etc. My expectation is that they simply change how microtransactions work and pay any legal fees and settlements, but otherwise it will be business as usual unless this scandal cause a bigger backlash than before.

...

Where is the issue in this situation, exactly? To me those two guys seem like gods.

Why has nobody drawn the laws attention to this?
Its a great opportunity for some laughs, and a great way to give Valve the ass fucking they deserve.

It would be extremely difficult to get Valve sued. Not only have they cleverly exploited a loophole to begin with, but they could just easily hire multimillion dollar lawyers to argue their case.

It's 2016.

Things are going to get interesting

Thank you, so the only reason those skins have any value in the first place is because for some baffling reason idiots are willing to spend actual money on shiny imaginary stickers. And if tomorrow everyone realized that they have been wasting their money and stopped all skins would become worthless. I think I'm getting what you are trying to say, but this sounds so fucking absurd, I still can't believe it. I mean I can get buying a skin or two for a F2P game as a kind of donation to the developers, but this is absurd.

This was the part I was missing. So the gambling sites acquire a bunch of skins, convert the skins to Steam credits, buy keys from those credits and sell those keys for less than 2$ (like say 1.50$) real money. This would be a loss if one were to buy the key normally, but since they did not earn the Steam credits legitimately it is a huge win. And if Valve did not allow the trade of keys the gambling sites would not be able to convert Steam credit into real money.

Did I get everything right now? This is such a convoluted mess, it blows my head.

not enough people looking into it. It is in the end just boring stuff, jewtube shit, e-celeb shitstorm.

We don't care and just turn away, scammars will continue to milk the little 12yo idiots. No change.

Two youtubers ran a CSGO gambling site that they were betting on and didn't tell anybody they were running it, plus they were using rigged accounts which made them pretty much always win in their favor for "Big wins!" which they put into youtube videos to make money, plus they get a cut of all the gambling so they make even MORE money, and now both of them are up to their fucking eyeballs in incoming litigation and there is a class action lawsuit in the works AND the government AND the FTC are involved

I'd be amazed if they got out of this without jail time

And then another youtuber PSISyndicate publicly came forwards to his fans that he was scamming ppl, but that was "OK" because he gave away the skins to his fans, but in the two videos he did he played with rigged bot accounts which guaranteed he won fucking huge and didn't disclose that he both worked with this website AND that it was rigged in his favor.

BUT REMEMBER ITS ALL OK NOW BECAUSE HE CAME FORWARDS

Also video of TmarTn logged into his bot account which is rigged and makes sure he wins (I'm too lazy to WebM ATM)

...

NM I'm a faggot, webm only took a min to make

And just checking PSISyndicates apology video is monetized

These ppl really do have no soul

This is Valve we're talking about here. If there's anything I learned from the paid mods fiasco, they'll just temporarily remove microtransactions and change some words around to try and make it sound different enough to attempt their bullshittery again.

why did nobody yell SCAM when AAA gaming outlets had tons of Conflict of interest and still marketed to the public?

The FTC fined dozens of companies and thousands of ppl over undisclosed partnerships

WTF are you talking about?

not talking about ftc here.

When i lokk at the reaction, the jewtube comments, biscuit and all the shit ecelebs around it, they just easily step up and make an comment about it. Almost everyone on twitter is yelling scammer into their faces and so on.

But when Leigh alexander COI's came up, it was damn silence.

Because

1. Valve's got the money to hire a legal team to shut down the case
2. The affected parties are retards who don't understand that online gambling is begging to lose money
3. Most of the law could care less about vidya unless it's connected to a white kid shooting up his school

COLOR ME SHOCKED GOOD SIR

i'm not talking about the media either!

in the GG happenings there was never such a loude outcry about the scammer within the media. There was always and only the hub on kia and in the Holla Forums bread, that was all, no flood of normalfags yelling scammer, no randome jewtuber shit blow up, people just keept going on the clickbait shitsites.

But they are? It's a class action lawsuit.

thesy have enough money, they will pay what ever they have to and just keep going on.

after a week nobody will care anymore. You know why almost nobody knew these guys? Because nobody cares about it. There are tons of millions more scammer on jewtube right now. But the majority who is aware of this shit just turns away from it. Gives zero fucks about the sheeples and than when shit hit the fan, everybody wonders how this could get so bad. Maybe you get a week shitstorm and a little bit entertainment from it, after this, things go back to where there came from.

Why should we stop valve?

When will they start talking about cracking down on Cellphone micro transaction games?
There are commercials for these games.

It's not gambling and no one is going to jail.

When you open a crate, you are guaranteed a reward. It might be shit, but you get something. It's no different from a pack of cards. Your guaranteed something, but some packs have better cards. If crates are deemed gambling, so will countless other things. Card packs, random toys in kids meals, anything where there is any sort of randomness to the item you receive. And that's not going to happen.

You can bet a lawyer will be able to argue this case better than myself. Valve is going to get off. That said, if someone sued this youtubers they would probably go to jail. But no one is, the case is against Valve.

What is peoples big deal with gambling? I don't understand why it's illegal. The only people that get fucked over are the idiots that gamble. Let stupid people fuck over their lives, they don't deserve to be happy.

Read the fucking thread, dumbass.

Read my post dumbass. It's no different than a pack of cards, and that isn't going to be deemed gambling.

another example;

look what happened after 'machinima' when FTC came down to jewtube.

Now we look forward;
Today; machinima still going well.

Those are literal flash-in-the-pan phenomena.

Sure, Clash of Clans/Candy Crush have seen plenty of clones that make bank, but in 3 years they'll be replaced with new hotness and forgotten. Even Angry Birds lost relevance after a few years of dominating the app store.

It's mostly oldfags pretending to have the moral high ground by banning something they used to do, but with online gambling it mostly has to do with regulation of the games (which is hard when it's all coding instead of physical) and regulation of users (since setting an age gate does next to nothing).

People are not suing or getting pissed about the crates, nitwit. They're getting pissed over a site that /is/ gambling that isn't part of Steam.

Read.

The.

Thread.

...

why?

steamcommunity.com/market/listings/730/★ StatTrak™ Bayonet | Fade (Factory New)

it's fuckingnothing.

Do people actually pay 400$ for virtual weapons?

I might understand some Pay 2 Win shit, but when it doesn't go over 5$ or so.

They do, I even know cheaters who get banned and then buy all the stuff again on their new account. I guess some people are rich enough to just throw ~400€ out of the window.

Also, a lot of knives are sold outside of steam for real money, sometimes going over 1k.

this world

Sheeeeeit.

Now that must be a hell of a weapon if people is up to pay so much for it. Does it kill in one hit? do it summon lightning and thunder? only a "press x button to win" could worth so much.

Its literally just cosmetic, won't help in the actual game at all

as the other user said, it's just a skin. The case hardened skins for example are sold for a shitload of money. Not all factory new ones look the same, people are willing to pay a shitload of money to those that have a lot of blue spots.

Retards ITT

Huh?

I'm not even angry anymore, just really confused.

This isn't a sexy outfit for your character or your anime waifu character in an MMO, it is just a crappy skin.

I guess it is full of especulators and it is so expensive because of it?

You have to open chests with actual money, you dumb shit.

You're not putting money in to get money.

A tombola is not gambling.

How is paying for stuff gambling you intense mongoloid?

Because your chances of getting something good are almost nothing, and your chances of getting something less than the value of what you paid is astounding.

If a slot machine took dollars and always gave a quarter back, does it stop being gambling? You're winning a quarter each time you use it!

indeed

i'm confused too.
where do these people coming from who believe something like this has value at all?

I grew up with modding, never payd a dime. Have a game with tons of skins and tracks (race 07) never payed for one single skin and they are way better than any of this shit from csgo. I rly don't get it.

So Pachinko machines aren't gambling.

Riiiiiiiiiiiiiight.

That's the same loophole the fucking Yakuza use for their pachinko parlors.

In law, gambling refers to money.

The term to gamble; applies to a vast spectrum of situations.
Is there a chance to get a bigger payoff? Then yes, since it's money related.

There is no actual bet involved with those machines.

I don't get why people support this either. Before cs:go you could get mods for free, that on top of everything even looked a lot better what valve has to offer.

We now basically get a downgraded version of what we used to have that on top of everything even costs money.

And also, they disabled free mods from working on official servers.

and the biggest advantage of the good old times with these mods where, you could look into it and change things as you wished. They were wide open, change the colour, change the value, do as you wish.

and now, it is nothing else than a graphic on a screen nobody will ever see or care.You might get hyped for a few second but as soon you turn off your screen you no longer care about.

damn, even today i play around with th eskins from race 07, change here and there a little bit.
Or play around with the ini-'s from morrowind and garrysmod. Try to do this with csgo.

This argument is fundamentally the same as micro-transactions. You exchange real money for not-real money, and that makes it okay.

In this case the not-real money comes in the form of skins, where most times the skin you receive in turn will be of less value than the money you put in, but very rarely you can get something of a far greater value. Putting three bucks into a machine that has 90% chance of paying out two bucks, 8% chance of paying out five bucks and a 2% chance to jackpot at a hundred bucks is gambling. All they've done is assigned that monetary value to items, then thrown them into a market where everything constantly decreases in value so long as more chests are unlocked than players who want skins join.

it took until one eceleb was brave enough to speak first, then the rest follow through almost immediately. Pretty funny that fat coward boogie making a video on it calling it a "signal boost" when he only has less than 10% of viewer compared to the h3 video.

Why help anyone at all with that mindset? Most people on this board are dumb to begin with.

I see no problem with it. If people want to spend their money on virtual skins then so be it.

Regardless, it's not actual gambling. Furthermore the potential money to be made off of skins is a third party market.

You exchange cash for the chance of a cash substitute (skins) that while you cannot trade directly for cash can be done at other venues.
Think Pachinko.
It's fucking gambling.

Such gambling games was actually outlawed in China etc because they worked so well and millions of ppl were going into debt

"They were not gambling for money, they were gambling for items that were worth money!"

Same shit, and it was closed down there

if thsi would rly happen many f2p mmo cancer games would fall down.

You can't bet/trade cosmetics in F2P MMO's, you can only win mats to get better gear/better gear/money/exp boosts

Feels good

You mean the marketplace owned and run by Valve who profit from every exchange?

no user
The marketplace gives you steambucks, not money.

One grasps the rats at the tails and hoe off the head

Seriously, its the same pattern as the freemium system but with skins and steambucks. The only way it isn't gambling is on a technical level, but they are encouraging the exact same behaviour patterns as gambling, with the same intent to get people hooked on a high of winning so that they keep spending, even though overall they will lose more money.

...

boxes as a form of gambling for skins are sort of shitty, but they are literally just stupid skins that do nothing and you can even sell the ones you get for free and end up getting free vidya you could just pirate. I've made around $300 out of selling skins without ever spending a cent on anything besides the games, and ended up buying games to co-op with my faggot friends thanks to that, they even sent me their free skins so I could just piggy bank the money and buy more games for everyone during sales.
People using third party sites to make bets is undeniably a completely different level of gambling though.

happening

archive.is/bJfpk#selection-1375.0-1379.102

THEY GOT SUED

freeze their assets

...

...

I don't really play those free smartphone games, but don't you get something decent when you spend money?

Many years ago I was playing that game called pocket legends, I think it was still in beta or something back then and when you spend in money in that game you got overpowered items that made the game easier.

In cs:go on the other hand you are very likely to get nothing. And by nothing I mean a 0.01€ skin.

How I played tf2 and csgo:
Get drops
Craft drops or sell drops
Have money in steam wallet
Buy a skin I want without putting any additional funds into steam wallet.

Don't like keys? Don't buy them. They are lotto tickets.

The biggest problems I see are the fact that 3rd party betting websites can be scams, or esports teams have in the past thrown the match to make bank from these third parties.

It depends. In the case of CS: GO and other competitive games you only get visual stuff. In mobile games you pay to cut down on waiting time, basically paying money to not have to play the game as much.

I still can't understand how people can get addicted to this sort of thing. I mean, why would I want to pay not to play a game? In my day not playing a game was free. If the game gives you some overpowered weapon it's the same, you are basically paying for a cheat code to skip part of the game. What's the point of even playing the game now?

This has to be some mental disorder or something.

did he actually crap himself, or is that some kind of setup ?

how the hell could you actually shit your pants, without willfully pushing that turd out ?

what the fuck man.

Same here user. I grew up on Unreal Tournament '99 where maps, skins, models, mutators, and mods were all free and could be downloaded from anywhere. Then CoD and Halo started the map pack craze and its been just getting worse. I can't understand why you would pay so much money for such stupid useless shit

although i am guilty of buying shit on planetside 2, fuck me, eh?

Yes, that's the short version, though the more common method is simply to use keys as a currency while trading since it doesn't require people to give a valve a cut of every transaction. What's more, skins can only be listed on valve's marketplace at a maximum of $400 if I remember right, when many skins are worth way more than that.

E.g. a Factory New AWP Dragon Lore will currently cost you 540 keys. That translates into $972 at key selling price of $1.80 each.

If this sounds nuts, remember that there are some extremely wealthy individuals that play CS, and spending a thousand dollars on virtual weapon skins is no big deal to someone that rolls joints with $100 bills.

It would probably be more igienic to smear poop on your face

the human body is way more resilient to diseases

buying anything, trading cards, items in game, so on without knowing what you are buying should be illegal. why cant law just patch out this "paying 4 keys" loopholes and actually, why the fuck ARE playing card booster packs fucking legal