I waded through some Tik Tok comment threads on this change and it was so eye-opening: there are a shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items, thinking it was a retirement portfolio. I fear the crypto era has lead to even further diminished financial literacy at large… Blessed be compound interest and financial regulation.
It's been years now, but I used to be involved in the trading market for Team Fortress 2. There were people who did TF2 trading as a full-time job, exploiting arbitrage between markets and holding items that were expected to increase in value (and sometimes using bots to farm items).
The Mann vs. Machine update in 2012 added a new game mode that would give players loot as a reward for completing missions. Players who didn't care about the trading market (i.e. the vast majority) would look up trading sites after a gaming session to offload their stuff fast without caring much about the value. People who described themselves as "quickbuyers" would aim for the people who wanted quick and simple transactions and then sell the item elsewhere for a markup. I did this for a while and averaged $5-10 of profit per day, usually 20-30 cents per transaction. Someone treating it as a full-time job could probably have made a lot more, like $20+ per day.
That was pretty good money if you a) were a kid with no living expenses, or b) lived in a developing country where the money went farther. I was in group A. Any time I wanted to buy a Steam game, I'd put up my quickbuyer listing on the trading sites and save up the money. But I suspected at the time that most people in the scene were in group B. If I were Valve I'd struggle to pull the trigger on a major change to the in-game economy knowing that it would affect the livelihood of a nontrivial number of people in countries like Venezuela, and maybe that's the reason they seem to have hesitated for so long.
> shocking number of people without disposable income who were seriously investing in CS items
If you meant children, with access to parents credit cards, who are addicted to gambling, you’d be more accurate. Children gambling is a huge problem in CS, which created this economy. The players know it, the influencers know it, Valve knows it and pretty much anyone who’s played CS in the recent years knows it. This implosion does nothing more than reset the system for Valve so that they can continue to make money.
How much of the CS player base is actually kids? Maybe wrongly, my view of CS is that it's a legacy game with an audience in their 30s or 40s. And that kids are mostly gambling with roblox or fornite.
CS2 is very much alive. If you look at the pro scene, most players are in the 19-25 range (some outliers are older and younger) which makes sense since it’s much easier to become a pro after 18 than before. But that also implies a healthy pipeline of young players. Obviously the exact breakdown is difficult to estimate, but I’d be inclined to think fewer people in 30s and 40s would have time for CS than in their teens and 20s. I could be wrong.
From mid-2018, CS2 has trended upward at +150,000 players/year. Starting at 500-600,000 that lasted from ~2015 to 2018 with mostly flat rate, after Covid, CS2 has been linearly upward pretty much constantly. The 24hr peak recently was 1,550,265 logged in.
One week variance is maybe ~700,000 during low timeframes, and 1,500,000 during peak hours pretty much every single day. Tends to peak yearly in May, with low tides in May and Nov-Dec usually, although last Dec was relatively up. 2020 and 2023 were both large years, 2025's looking similar.
On the player age question, the best data I was able to find on a quick search was https://www.hltv.org/
Total search over the full range returns 955 entries. Breakdowns by age look like its a pretty heavily 19-24 playerbase. 25-30's also pretty significant. Almost 77% of the player base between them.
On the other hand I am not sure that most people would be playing the same game for 20+ years - I played CS religiously during my school years, but at some point, even if you keep playing games, you just want something else
It's hilarious to US CS items/weapons as a retirement portfolio when you could get pretty damn good and government protected monopoly by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up. These are now being used by actual retirement funds.
Trump banned bump stocks because he thought they were too close to machine guns.
Ron Paul and maybe Massie are about the only politicians of my lifetime that held any real power that I can think of that would even entertain deregulating machine guns.
Incidentally, the longer forced reset triggers stay legal, the more real machines will have their value growth slow and, almost certainly, eventually tumble. The only reason this hasn't happened yet is because most people aren't yet familiar with them and many of the people who are just kind of assume that once they really go mainstream the government will put a stop to it, meaning "real" machine guns maintain their special status and therefore their special price. If FRTs stay legal for a long time and survive public scrutiny, then confidence in their future will grow and they will then eat much of the market demand for machine guns.
Of course, some machine guns would always remain valuable for their desirability as antiques, as long as people remain interested in them. That presumption of future demand for your collection might be a relatively safe bet for cool old guns in America, but it's still a bet.
They could likely get away with banning the FRT and bump stock through amending the definition of the machine gun in congress, just not the executive branch.
The ruling on those had nothing to do with overruling any part of the NFA. Only correctly identifying that FRT and bump stocks do not shoot automatically more than one shot by a single function of the trigger, which is what congress said would be the things allowed to be called machine guns.
> NFA for machine guns will never be overruled, never.
2 things make me question this. Never is a long time. People who claim to know the indefinite future, generally don't. These things being understood, forgive me if I don't take your word for it. Nobody should.
Most American conservatives and Trumpists believe most if not all of those things from my experience, and a lot of what's on that site now reflects official American government policy. The only surprise I see there is at least implied pro-Ukraine sentiment.
Having it all laid out together like that makes it obvious how inconsistent it all is. The mental gymnastics to actually believe all that stuff must be incredible. I read the other day about a theory on to obviously false beliefs as a form of in-group signaling and I can't read this collection any other way.
I would sleep perfectly soundly if it relied on politicians not wanting the plebs they subjugate to have easier access to machine guns, which is what keeps their value up.
As for current NFA items holder, the constitution requires them to be compensated fair value if they are to be confiscated.
The risk is arguably lower than many single stocks, many of which are bought in retirement portfolio.
NFA firearms have an artificially high value because of the exact set of legal restrictions that the government has put in place: loose enough to not crater legal demand, yet tight enough to restrict legal supply. This market is tied to within US borders.
The government can destroy the assumptions behind this market with a stroke of the pen.
The government can destroy the assumptions on which many businesses are built, that are held as stocks in an investment portfolio. Move the goalposts to relation to international markets, and I will likely find how it applies to some other asset commonly found in investment portfolios, like perhaps the current values of some tax preparation companies.
Your original assertion was "...by buying NFA machine guns knowing the number is capped and the price is likely to only go up"
Later you said lower risk than many individual stocks. Maybe, maybe not depending on how we define things. But I do think it's quite possible for the price to go down.
I think you may have to check the text again? The 5th amendment says you get due process, and requires compensation if something is taken for “public use”.
Passing a law which you can challenge in court that says “machine guns are illegal now, turn them in so we can melt them down for scrap” is not public use.
You can pretty clearly see this isn’t the case. Prior to the reversal of the bump stock ban, owners of bump stocks were required to surrender or destroy them.
That's because the state argued they were unregistered machine guns, thus never legally held property. It is not at all comparable to legal, stamped machine guns then being made illegal.
The EO couldn't have forced an uncompensated surrender of a registered bump stock, were it one existed before the Hughes Amendment.
The case law I’m seeing does not seem to provide that level of certainty.
There’s plenty of flexibility in the case law for what counts as “public use”, but nearly all of it is about individual cases where the government takes a specific person’s specific property, or damages it in some way. There doesn’t appear to be much case law at all for the guardrails if the government declares an object to be illegal to possess writ large for safety purposes and requires owners to destroy or surrender those objects.
I’m not saying there’s no path where the courts would require compensation, but for the level of certainty you’re claiming, I’d expect there to be a more clear line you can draw to existing cases.
It's wild to claim with certainty "clearly see that's not the case" then just claim you're just uncertain here.
My initial claim in any case was that the constitution requires the compensation, not that there is 0% chance the government would violate the constitution.
I’m saying: I am certain the constitution does not guarantee payment in this situation. I am not certain a court couldn’t find a way to connect the takings clause and expand current case law to apply to a case like you’re describing in the future.
None of the above has anything to do with the government violating the constitution.
I mean, I think they’ve proven over the last century that the single thing they’re good at is protecting the regular payment of dividends (and of course buybacks more recently)… One might not be entirely mistaken to compare expecting much more than that from the modern state to expecting Valve to protect your skin investments.
I have had friends in the 90s and 00s "invest" in Beanie Babies and Legos and make a ton of money... for a while... and then get wiped out. This is not a new thing.
Yeah, I was trying to think about that when I wrote my comment. I do think there’s at the very least a scale change between the proliferation of unregulated “markets” these days (crypto, cs skins, Pokémon cards, I’m sure others) and the “your beanie babies will be worth a fortune some day” of the past. Perhaps what’s more surprising, though, is how consumer behavior leads these markets to now actually move up and to the right for remarkably long. My sense is you were always in fact delusional to think your beanie babies would hold value, but perhaps people are not entirely crazy looking at the charts of skin prices over X years and expecting it to continue. Perhaps I’m being too harsh on the collectors and too charitable to our contemporaries…
That anyone would use a game cosmetic as a retirement portfolio is so unbelievable it has to be trolling, right? I think we might just be witnessing the grief process unfold…
It's not trolling. People living paycheck to paycheck, without much in the way of financial literacy, are big consumers of "made to be collectible" widgets because they're desperate for appreciating assets and don't know how to do better when they struggle to save up a few hundred dollars (in no small part, because of their gambling addictions.)
Funko pops, baseball cards, knife skins, it's all used this way.
It's not always instructive to assume people making seemingly bad financial decisions are acting irrationally.
People living paycheck to paycheck due to child support orders, alimony, or other judgements taking a giant cut of their paycheck are likely buying collectibles instead of on-paper stocks or commodities because they can actually keep those without the state being able to as easily take them.
Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money rather than making some irrational gambling decision.
I know enough people in this kind of circumstance, my own coworkers, who would be in much better financial shape if they stopped gambling. It's very common for them to one day complain that they can't afford lunch, and the next day to come in fuming because they just lost $500 because sportsball team lost.
> Also, the sketchy looking guy buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets could just be laundering drug money"
I know these people personally, they aren't drug dealers.
Regular honest hard working people, who struggle to make ends meet in large part due to gambling addictions and related poor financial decisions. Financially the guys who gamble are even worse off than the alcoholics that don't; there's only so much money you can spend on shit beer a week. The gambling addicts lose far more money far faster. If they were all tossing dice and losing money to each other that wouldn't be nearly so bad, but the way of modern industrial gambling is that it's done through apps and run by far away corporations or even the government, who take their money and basically make it disappear from the community. There's no winning it back, everybody but the casino owners loses in the long run. I used to be libertarian on gambling but not after what I've seen. It hurts not only those who choose to gamble, but also their families and communities.
There's a podcast by 99% Invisible about state lottery. Basically the journalist reporting the story kind of reversed his view on state lotteries over the course of reporting the story. Going from: It's good that we have state lotteries because the money goes back to fund social activities to: It's bad to have lotteries altogether, mainly because of the societal cost of gambling that you've outlined.
Yeah, I mean the stock market is made to either pay passive income if you have millions or to slowly accumulate value through compound interest—expecting anything else is just gambling. If you’re living paycheck to paycheck, neither of the first two are particularly helpful even medium term — and it’s not… entirely irrational to go all in on option (C). I’d be really curious to actually know the scale of how many people became millionaires from crypto — I have no intuition for what order of magnitude it is. Regardless, there’s clearly a growing belief that the world is now full of such moonshots.
If you're referring to literal only scratch-offs, maybe. Gambling in general (the point I was addressing using the example), you couldn't be more wrong.
You said "buying tons of $20 scratch-off tickets". Of course I was referring to literally that. If you want to say gambling in general, no, not even that is correct. It can only be done where you mostly play against a complice and the house takes a small fixed cut. Nothing to do with lottery shit, that didn't make any sense at all.
The fact lottery tickets were one of the less practical examples does nothing to dispel the point that gambling is a commonly used method of money laundering, which was my point. Your point on one specific form of gambling might be valid but completely unmoving against the principle.
There is no need to have an accomplice, someone could just bet $20 an improbable lottery every time they sell a "hit", eventually they would win big and then have legal taxed income washed and only have to explain how they came up with $20 to end up with thousands in earnings. Who cares if they lose 20,30,50% to the house and taxes when they are happy to pay that to stay out of prison and making high margins.
In fact, watch videos of various change and counterfeit scammers, they quite often use the lottery tickets to launder their proceeds and as part of their crime.[]
There’s a difference between a physical baseball card and a digital weapon skin. One is permanent, the other is only real as long as the game it’s used in is operational. And we know games have a lifespan. It’s not like csgo/2 weapon skins exist on a chain somewhere… That’s the nuance I’m calling out. It’s not correct to equate a weapon skin to a baseball card even though they are a similar type of social phenomenon.
Collectables are a self-explanatory asset class. Children can appreciate and understand the desire for a holographic Charizard card. Series I savings bonds are harder to understand.
I saw an absolutely shocking number of posts from people clearly on minimum wage at best with 20k or so in CS skins, buying loot boxes every week, and no other investments. Obviously no way to verify the accuracy of such statements, but my sense is you would be horrified to know the scale of the market.
I might have shared your surprise a decade ago, but we live in a world where many people use something with even less utility (cryptocurrency) readily in their retirement portfolios.
At least those cosmetic items in video games actually do something.
