You’re missing the part where they make the vast majority of their money from the gambling, not from the cut they take from sales. They don’t have to run the gambling service. But they do because it’s a money faucet.

[–] ColeSloth@discuss.tchncs.de 3 points 19 hours ago

Two things: First, they very likely don't make most of their money off of their loot box sales from the few games they own that have them. (CS, Dota 2, TF2).

Secondly, you're just full of shit and making up that "fact". As a private company, none of their stuff is completely public record, but using various trackers and estimates and sales numbers from game studios, Steam sells north of 700,000,000 games a year and makes a $billion or so from cs and tf2 stuff.

Since the average game sale amount is around $15; $15 X 700,000,000 = 10,500,000,000 ÷ valves cut of 30% = $3,150,000,000

Now not all studios pay that 30%. Some have lower deals based on volume and notoriety, but it's still safe to assume that their game sales make over two billion a year. AKA well over their loot box money.

[–] ysjet@lemmy.world 1 points 20 hours ago (1 children)

I like how when valve does it, it's 'gambling,' but every other company out there it's just 'microtransactions' and 'monetization.'

Valve somehow gets 99% of the hate online for lootboxes, despite having one of the most transparent and fair implementations of them.

Like, have you people never seen a gacha? Half of them don't even fucking publish the rates for what you can get, and make far more money than Valve does.

[–] NOOBMASTER@lemmy.ml 1 points 6 minutes ago

No, there are actual gambling sites for counter-strike items that are run by scammers who hire a youtuber, give them a huge (deliberate) win to entice kids to bet their parents wage on some stupid cosmetics' slot machine.