Counter-Strike is a free to play monetized game. It doesn't make sense for the pay-to-play audience that buys $1,000-2,000 laptops and $830-1,300 phones.
Steam generally supports macOS, Valve spends a lot of time on the platform so I think you're dead wrong there. The titles that thrive on it target its rich audience.
What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story. However, among all media companies, Valve's captive audience may be the one large, growing group that spends more on software every year than Apple users do. So it's complicated. That audience will not buy skins.
> Steam generally supports macOS, Valve spends a lot of time on the platform so I think you're dead wrong there. The titles that thrive on it target its rich audience.
Steam does run on Mac but the client and the game library are 2 different things. Not sure if you noticed the shrinking library and Apple's attitude towards the Mac games. They don't care about it. 0 support for 32bit games migration, unconventional api support (compare the usual d3d/vulkan land). Unlike ios, Mac does not have a hold on the game market
You're right they don't have a hold on the game market but they do care about gaming, just in an Apple kind of way - they want control of their stack, hence Metal as the only fully supported rendering engine. They're actively looking for developers to produce games or port them with the game porting toolkit.
If their approach is to buy a few notable games occasionally like resident evil, not sure how long that would last. I actually would like Apple to just extend their support of IOS games to let them run seamless on Mac. There are both freemium and premium games on IOS. Just throw in some control api support and let the user install them on Mac. But Apple doesn't even bother with this low hanging fruit
I don't think people play counterstrike because they are cheap. A lot of my money goes to computers, and I still end up playing a lot of counterstrike. It's because it's fun.
What? The only monetization is skins. You also need to pay for the premier matchmaking. CSGO and CS2 is top of the Steam charts with about 1mil active players, not because its free, but because it is a great game.
Valorant is there, but CS is practically its own genre.
In CoD, Destiny, and CS you all shoot guns, but the difference is stark between them.
For competitive gameplay, and gameplay feel, CS wins.
You saying Macu users are too rich for the game? Have you SEEN skin prices in CS2?
Saying Valorant is 'there' is dismissive. I would argue a lot of the changes in CS2 were made to stay relevant to Valorant competitively.
CS2 doesn't feel remotely competitive in its current state on 64t. It's a huge problem that Valve thankfully are taking seriously and patching every few days. I am curious where they will go with the networking re: subtick.
I wish Valve would talk more about their decisions to remove several settings and things like lefthand. It feels like it is intended to keep things more similar across clients (IMO more competitive and level), so they don't end up in the config-maxxing hell that is TF2.
This is a misconception. Apple has something like 90% of the market share of all computer shipments above $1,000 in cost. Those shipments dwarf custom builds. Also, you can visit the Steam hardware survey, expensive ($1,000+) PC builds are quite rare, actually maybe only about 10% of the Steam audience, which neatly matches the expectations for who owns the premium end of the market.
Not sure why I’m being downvoted. Anyone can easily verify what I’m saying by visiting the Steam hardware survey. I know that this does not match the expectations of HN readers!
It's de facto a pay to play game (you need to buy "Prime Status" to play main game mode since it went free to play), monetization is fair gameplay-wise, only cosmetics.
> Counter-Strike is a free to play monetized game. It doesn't make sense for the pay-to-play audience that buys $1,000-2,000 laptops and $830-1,300 phones.
Assuming people who play f2p games don't have to pay their hardware too.
>What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story.
That isn't accurate in this case because the rich gamers have more expensive setups than a macbook/imac. If you are spending 100,000+ on a cs skin you also have a 4090 (ie. not macos). You are thinking in terms of 'pro' software and ios mobile games.
When you ask people about the "economy" they repeat whatever they heard in the media about the "economy" because they don't want to sound out of touch.
This is why the answers on all the economic surveys are that the responder is personally doing fine but thinks everyone else is doing badly.
This is kind of a complicated story. I'm not really trying to talk about whether you're right or wrong. You're saying something objectively true, it just doesn't mean what you think it means, and it doesn't translate to the role that CS2 plays in Steam, or how the CS2 audience differs from the rest of the audience on Steam.
On the one hand, the top of the app store is free to play experiences - apps like Spotify and Tinder, games like Monopoly Go.
There are places where "nobody" (close to 0%) pay for Spotify subscriptions (representative of all subscriptions), like Japan, even though the iPhone is more popular there than anywhere else in Asia, comparable to the US, so there's some additional cultural elements to software spending that are a long story to tap into.
And, in your life, you might know 1 person who (1) has spent money (2) in Genshin Impact, Hearthstone, or a Supercell title, and (3) is above the age of 25. There's something weirdly idiosyncratic about Roblox; and then, something about the off-brand-studios-you've-never-heard-of games. 11 year olds and Monopoly Go players, they are somehow bringing those titles to the top of the App Store.
If iOS had a similar tiny marketshare relative to Android as macOS does relative to PCs, nobody would maintain free to play games for it. Those games are monetized by whales and advertising, including cross-promo, which are scale plays. There are no "small" free to play games.
It's a totally different audience. iOS has both audiences, but the people who literally monetize in F2P are smaller in size than pay-to-players, even if they produce greater revenue overall. The pay-to-players are the audience I am talking about, because I'm trying to say that that's whose left in small platforms, and macOS has a lot more of them than whales.
An illuminating example would be that the Epic Game Store has Fortnite. And yet. Who cares about the Epic Game Store? Epic has so many incentives - it practically buys all the sales of finished games up front, to give them away to its users for free. But that's actually kind of the opposite of what they should be doing for a healthy ecosystem.
Fortnite monetizes free to play users better than anything else on EGS, so you can't make a huge F2P game on it. And by the way, Valve has CS2, DOTA 2 and Team Fortress 2, #1 #2 and #8 on the charts that have only 2 other F2P games on it.
How much do you think a gaming rig costs? OG CS was famously cheap to run, but CS2 is not the same thing. Sure, you don't NEED to pay $2k but I'm sure players are paying as much as they possibly can to have the best gaming setup
The thing is, is that CS2 replaced CSGO (which at one point was pay-to-play, which means people were required to sink money into a title which is now completely upended), removed a lot of content (whole game modes are missing and there's no plan on adding them back into the new version; maps have been removed, and to an extent some of the customization has been removed), and removed Mac support, which was previously very much supported with CSGO.
They've also changed the game mechanics when it comes to determining when gunshots "register", which has very much changed the dynamic of the game and has vastly raised the bar for casual players to win even a single round.
Further, ranked matches are handled differently now. It used to be that even losses contributed to your initial rank after a couple of placement matches. Now, you must win 10 games before you get a rank. Since placement games (games you play before you get a rank) are more or less randomly matchmade, it means that less skilled players are going to be up against impossibly difficult opponents to the point that even a single win is impossible, thus you're trapped in this unranked loop and will never achieve meaningful matchmaking with people of your own skill level.
Further, "Prime" status was originally a barrier for cheaters since you had to buy it, and it made it such that prime status players were only matchmade with other prime status players. Since cheaters run the risk of getting permanently banned, they'd have to buy Prime over and over again - something Valve betted would be a way to filter out a large percentage of cheaters. However, they started to grant Prime status to people who had leveled up enough, which removed the cost barrier. Since cheaters level up quickly, it's become sort of a moot mechanic now.
And no, Steam won't refund Prime status purchases, which are around $15.
Couple the matchmaking differences with the shot registration differences, the removed content, and the dropping of support, and you have what is essentially a completely unique game that Valve replaced CSGO with.
People are rightfully very upset. Many people bought CSGO for e.g. MacOS support. Now that game has been removed from their libraries with little to no recourse. Steam said they're issuing refunds for a few select Mac users but I've yet to see anyone say they've been granted such a refund.
It's a messy situation that Valve has handled in one of the worst ways possible, learning no lessons from the Overwatch 2 debacle that did much the same thing (and was received equally as poorly) or from Ubisoft's repeated similar behavior.
valve should offer a refund to anyone who has predominantly played on macOS over the last year or two.
other than that, I don't see any issue with what they've done here. maps get added and removed from the official pool all the time, you can still play them on 3P servers if enough other players are interested. and hit registration has been a constant complaint since approximately the beginning of time, hard to take that part seriously...
> other than that, I don't see any issue with what they've done here.
You don't see an issue paying for a game only to have it forcibly removed from your possession?
> maps get added and removed from the official pool all the time
This isn't the official pool (if you're talking about competitive pools), and no it doesn't happen all the time. Valve never removed a map from CSGO, only added them.
> you can still play them on 3P servers if enough other players are interested.
Oh right, community servers. I forgot about that, thanks for reminding me. Community servers are no longer listed publicly in a browser like they used to be. Now you have to google search for servers and connect to them directly via IP and port. They removed that functionality as well.
> and hit registration has been a constant complaint since approximately the beginning of time
Not really. The only time people complained about it prior to CS2 was when they made it server registration to combat cheaters, which introduced a lot of randomness depending on who you asked (nobody really knows how it works, but people could feel a difference at the time). Now they do sub-tick registration which is an approximation function that is being gamed by non-casuals.
Here's a good video on the subject[0]. Ignore the bit about mouse DPI, dude had no idea what he was talking about with that.
They're trying to offer 128 tick-like gameplay without having to pay for the increased compute and network costs of doubling the current 64 tick servers by faking hit registration, which is having an adverse effect.
So it's not merely some "git gud" complaint. It's a very valid complaint over a major change of game mechanics from a previously purchased titled that was effectively stolen away from you.
You should be upset by this. This is not how companies should behave.
Steam generally supports macOS, Valve spends a lot of time on the platform so I think you're dead wrong there. The titles that thrive on it target its rich audience.
What does Apple have? The rich users. End of story. However, among all media companies, Valve's captive audience may be the one large, growing group that spends more on software every year than Apple users do. So it's complicated. That audience will not buy skins.