https://www.twitch.tv/sliggytv/clip/BlatantBenevolentLaptopKlappa-8aWZyycl_j0wnAIv
Saw this when rewatching the SEN-NRG final. Interesting take and it makes sense. i just had never really given it any thought.
Would all these events be possible without the insane skin market in csgo?
He makes sense with the gambling stuff definitely, after all like 80% of under t1 events in cs are basically organised by those stuff, and since riot doesn't want to be associated with them and are picky on who can set up tourneys, it's understandable. I still like the open circuit better but he's right that organizers who can profit well from t2-4 are mostly from gambling, and probably won't happen w valorant
I completely get why they don't want gambling.
But a skin market would've been a really cool thing, CS has a massive subcommunity for just skins, idk how they would implement it without cases but I'm sure they could've figured something out. tbf that ship has sailed since you defo can't add something like that 4 years in to the game
I mean, they could profit from a tax or fee like the Steam Market has. For example, if I sell a skin in CS where I get 100 dollars the buyer has to pay 115 dollars to get my skin. Those 15 dollars go to Steam and each time a skin is sold, Steam also makes money. I feel like this can work if Riot decides they want to make something akin to a wallet(transactions with real money) and making skin scarcity more common(limited skins as the primary skins that people can sell & trade)
Maybe these ideas of mine are dumb but it feels like a workaround to not having cases and giving a chance for people who missed out on limited edition skins to have a way to acquire & collect these skins without breaking TOS and profiting Riot at the same time.
I understand what you mean and I also thought of that but I don't believe that would work at all for many reasons:
I don't think it makes up for the amount of skins people would stop buying. If you implement that the sells on new skins would dramatically drop. If you wanted a new skin you would spend 50 dollars on a skin from someone who doesn't wanna play anymore, not 100 on a new one. And the margin of benefit there for riot is way smaller
One of the reasons that works in cs is because the amount of items is limited, which means prices can grow bigger than the original price and therefore people speculate and it's like a bubble. In valorant other than very few skins, you can literally get any of them at your store at any moment so the price is kinda capped at the original price of the skin
How does this even benefit Riot, the whole point of this was that tier 2 would benefit from having gambling money sponsors related to the game. But how would a third party make money from a system like this without the gambling part? Maybe you could make a third party store where you could buy any skin. But then again if Riot really wanted that they could just do it themselves and allow everyone to buy any skin at any time.
I think Valorant should also have something like the skin market where t2 teams can sustainably make income and support their teams the cs scene is so much more stable compared to Valorant because teams can make profit from these stuff
Big csgo tournaments also pay like 3x what riot pays combined cs is the second highest paying esport of all time
Brother you're missing the point, ofc gambling is not bad for the pro players, it's actually great to make the scene work. The problem is the moral side of it, not anything else, it's just a line Riot is not willing to cross. It's like if they allowed drug ads, would help the scene grow with money but it's not ethical
And yeah the actual solution as you say is just Riot pumping more money into making more events
Completely agree with Sliggy on this
Gonna waffle a little to help the scene understand why things aren't so simple:
Riot can't allow gambling in VALORANT for one simple reason, their target demographic
VALORANT is rated +16 and their target demographic is teenagers and young adults, therefore they cannot allow gambling sponsors into their eco-system as it would result in Riot potentially being banned from advertising VALORANT to their target demographic in states like California and regions like EU. There is a reason why Valve does almost zero advertisement for games like Dota and CS2 and it is simply because they don't wanna get even more fines from governments. The reason why Valve for example removed in-game banners in Dota 2 right before this years The International is 100% because they got a letter for either the EU or the Danish government about potential fines as teams used those banners to advertise gambling sites which are banned (For example 1XBET one of the biggest sponsors in Dota2 is banned in Denmark)
From a tournament organizer perspective, it is easier to fund tournaments in CS due to how much gambling sponsors and trading sites offer in funding compared to other industries. A snack sponsor gives max around 100k in sponsor money for a full year if you're lucky but 100k is not a lot when running a year-long high-end production circuit especially if you want to pay your staff fair wages like us.
1 matchday can easily round up to 2k-5k in wages (If you pay your staff) and a regular split in Challengers is a total of 24 matchdays which means 1 split can cost anywhere between 48k-120k now count as a second split and then a third split and then you realize this shit is expensive af to run and then you also have fans and teams expecting LAN finals, full studio production and all that which can easily drive up the cost of 1 split to 200k-300k AND THEN teams also expect an additional 5 Billion Dollars prize pool like that can suddenly appear out of the thin air
In CS meanwhile, unregulated gambling sites will just slap a 400k-800k cheque in your face and boom you got yourself a tournament with a 50-80k prize pool + potential LAN + a fuck ton of teams match-fixing + if you're lucky an actual profit from your tournament. The issue with this is the long-term funding though as governments are cracking down on gambling harder each year and CS has become less and less interesting for other brands to sponsor as your brand will be next to a random totally not russian bookmaker site who has been bankrupt for 5 years but is for some reason still running
Open System works in CS right now, but if that's the case in 5 years from now is uncertain tbh
One very important detail people often get twisted every time Iin franchising good/bad conversations. The fact that the franchising concept is the correct one in my opinion does not mean it doesn't need to improve a bunch of shit.
People blame franchising for absolutely any problem they see. "Franchising is terrible there isn't enough games" Wtf does that have to do with franchising, have riot add more games?
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