Credit where it's due, it looks like this guy actually investigated the botting behaviour on steam. We'll soon see now whether Valve really does give a shit about even maintaining the facade of legitimacy on their platform or they're just going to let some shitty idle clicker game being botted on to exploit the steam market run it's course.
Even the dev themselves admitted it's basically a load of bullshit and he's just doing it to generate money. I mean you've got to respect the exploit, but it is an exploit at the end of the day. This is why you can't even trust the stats on steam anymore, pretty much guaranteed that most of the 'players' on all of the platforms are bots and alt. accounts farming various in-game items through playtime rather than playing the game normally.
Realistically it potentially means if you want to see what games people are actually playing it's probably going to be a bit further down the list.
The game is a money printer. After enough clicking you will earn banana “skins” in the game, and because of the ability to sell those a-la-Counterstrike, you can earn actual money just from those clicks. While most skins might sell for three cents, some prices have increased to dozens or even hundreds of dollars. The record right now appears to be $1,345.
lol no wonder people are trying to exploit it, the steam market is completely retarded.
Journalists notice that someone is exploiting a system and it isn't them and so make an article to try and trash that process.
Meanwhile the same journalists don't give a fudge about other journalists exploiting the same system they use to hamstring customers into buying what they promote.
Is Al Capone perhaps noticing that training Saul Alinsky under him maybe wasn't a good idea?
I was going to give this guy a chance because it looked like he'd done some actual research on the topic and that's why the article stuck out to me but you're right.
Yeah that tells me everything about them lol.
That's how the entire mainstream cryptocurrency craze started. Journalists started buying crypto and then began running news article after news article promoting the new digital gold, seeing their original investments explode into the stratosphere.
That's actually not how it worked at all, journalists hated cryptocurrency and tried to bury it and mock it as much as boomers. The reason it's been going so mental these days is because of it's deflationary nature and the bitcoin halving process and people are looking for a way to digitally store their wealth, Bitcoin fits the bill. Also worth pointing out that El Salvador adopted it officially into their economy.
In a lot of countries the journalists were encouraging buying bitcoins.
good for you. you're noticing that the world is a dark writhing mass of competing interests. always has been.
"+1" is quicker but you have the right idea :)
Any time digital goods are sold for large sums of money suspiciously, think money laundering. Almost certainly what this is.
What are the skins for, and shouldn't we blame the idiots that would spend anywhere from $0.03 to $1,345 for the skins?
It's NFTs without NFTs. The skins do nothing, but they must be buying them thinking they can sell to an even greater fool.
Yes we should, but it's becoming clearer and clearer that people who buy skins have the equivalent of a gambling or hoarding problem and they should be classed as mentally ill. If nothing else, they definitely can't be called gamers' because you realise when you see people play the only reason they're doing it isn't to play the game it's to increase their stats and preserve their k/d ratio which leads to witnessing some mind boggling gameplay.
There's definitely a huge problem with gambling and the "stupid tax" as a whole. I don't know how it is in the UK, but sports betting in the US has gone absolutely insane the past five years. I only see it getting worse, and if that makes them mentally ill, the minority of people will still be sane.
I don't think "people are using bots to play a meme clicker game for pennies" is the grand dramatic social issue you're framing it as.
It's a symptom of a much larger problem involving botting and devs who take advantage of people with actual addiction problems, also potential fraud. I like the banana game because it's one of the more blatant examples out there, I think a huge chunk of the 'playerbase' on the top played games among other things are fake.
I gotta wonder if bots are gonna force all social media to be subscription-based, because otherwise the data harvested from these platforms is worthless.