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.
this post was submitted on 23 Oct 2025
82 points (98.8% liked)
Gaming
33073 readers
4 users here now
From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!
Please Note: Gaming memes are permitted to be posted on Meme Mondays, but will otherwise be removed in an effort to allow other discussions to take place.
See also Gaming's sister community Tabletop Gaming.
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
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
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.
I seriously need to find a grift to hook people in for monthly payments
You and every other corporation, pal
Yeah, but corporations don't need to eat!
The engineer needs a new tiktok dance.
I want my guns to look pretty and track how many kills I got with each gun.
Granted my total collection is like, $50
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.
Or if someone else buys the domain name and now your fancy url resolves to porn.
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.
I'd say a link stored in a network that is decentralized and independent of one central entity has more inherent value than a record of money in a bank. Link rot is a thing, but so is the Web Archive and its alternatives. It's just that there have to be people who value that record in the same way they value money, but that's not how it is. Nevertheless, it's something compared to having absolutely nothing after Valve shuts down. You'd still get to show people the records and say "I had that", as worthless as it may become by then.
Edit: And to elaborate even further, I remember a Steam event when being the first to obtain a profile badge, which was indicated by its timestamp, was considered valuable and allowed people to join a special invite-only group. Their badge wasn't even visually unique in any way, but it allowed them to brag and feel a bit more special. They'd get to say "I was there at that time and I did that", and the badge as their evidence would be independent of any screenshots that could be doctored. NFTs are like that, but more persistent.
NFTs with fewer steps, but yeah.
virtual speculative shit gonna do virtual speculative things
What a weird fucking world we live in where this is a headline.
Ok but the game is so full of cheaters its not even worth playing.
What if I'm only role-playing for the skins?
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
They keep finding innovative new ways of removing skill from the game and making more shit up to RNG.
That's why I quit playing. First shot accuracy should have never have been fucked with.
Over pixels?
Nah, you got what you get.
Oooh I feel like that might be a bad idea for valve, but might be good for everyone else. I don't personally play, but I would assume some of their player base is invested in the gambling. If they feel discouraged, it might be enough for them to stop.
I want to see ohnepixel face on this one.
Haha! Sucked in, idiots!