The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
Why don't they just take a 6% pay cut and make sure there is nothing to criticize them about :/
[0]: https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/valve-mak...
Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
There's always this question when Valve comes up of, "why are people more upset about gambling for cosmetics in a game than gambling for power/features in a game?" It's a clear double standard, and I've never heard an actually good explanation for it that makes it sound justifiable.
edit: The other thing is that the people blowing money on cosmetics gambling fund the game such that all the core gameplay stuff in Dota and CS and be totally free for the average player, and that's pretty great for a lot of consumers.
It's not exactly the same yet since Deadlock isn't being monetized yet, but I've spent hundreds of hours in the game having a blast for free, I can't give Valve money even if I want to, and that buys a fair amount of goodwill from me.
Do you have a link to this sentiment anywhere? It's the first time I'm hearing about it.
> Especially since Magic the Gathering and similar card games are very normalized, and have a straightforwardly more evil monetization strategy, since you need to do gambling there to even play the game, it's not cosmetic.
I'm not sure what you're calling "gambling" here, but the way I understand it, it's not merely "a game of chance that you pay money to play". A fundamental feature of it is that the odds are set deliberately so that you're statistically guaranteed to suffer a net loss to the other betting party ("house"). That's not quite the case for tradable items when the "house" doesn't control the price you might sell your item for; the market is the one responsible for setting the price. Note that I'm not saying that's necessarily always better -- there are lots of ways to financially screw people over besides gambling -- I'm just saying it's not gambling, and so it makes sense that people react to it differently.
For items that you can't trade (like where the platform prevents you), that's more similar to gambling in that respect, I think. But then it's less similar from the standpoint that there is zero financial redemption value for the items you win, so it's s arguably still not gambling.