I mean, we can point at the legal system, but as you said, casinos just find new loopholes to circumvent the law. Ultimately, Valve is the group with the power to remove any gambling-adjacent mechanics from their games, but they have been pretty flaccid regarding changes because they know that they will lose money from it.

Crackdowns won’t stop the gambling on CS, legislation and enforcement won’t change it, but making items non-tradeable, or damaging item value or appeal through any method, can stop the gambling - but at the cost of CS’s financial success and overall appeal.

It’s a bit weird (skip to 10:41 for specifically the pay system)

Gonna piggy back off this to drop a decent summary from coffeezilla about valve’s lootbox gambling problem that Valve has consistently dodged responsibility on. It’s really not new news but folks should be informed/reminded of it nonetheless.

I don’t watch CoffeeZilla in any large amount, but this pretty well sums up the situation in this instance.

What do you mean by ‘cheater’? Like ‘scammer’?

I’m not following.

Markets were originally decentralized, and while that has its problems, a decentralized market is miles better than a monopolized market.

Like, are you thinking of Etsy or Amazon or something? Because those are all run by a single point-of-sales and logistics collectives.

What we’re talking about is basically building a means for getting all the websites around the web of small shops and such (or in this case all the various game store fronts like steam, itch.io, GOG, and EPIC GAMES) and giving you client which allows you to browse and order from them simultaneously. All that store’d have to do is add the protocol to their server and add themselves to a list.

Each server would likely have to utilize a payment service. In that fashion it’d be no different than how stores host their own websites you can order from. In my mind, the federated protocol would simply be a means for a person to browse stores similar to how one can navigate a mall or market.

For games, the further benefit after would be that via a client of the protocol, you could then download your games from the various stores in a singular library page.

Federated marketplace protocol really should happen at some point.

Like, it seems like a very clear solution to an online monopoly risk. Maybe I’m wrong, though.

Mmm, nihilism juice. My favorite!