I don’t have the journalistic skills nor connections to those who do, but my buddy who is deep into farming steam marketplace items for wallet cash pointed this game out to me (not his video, but one of the only pieces I can find looking critically at it:
https://youtu.be/j7Ae2UTatyA?si=vyjipAjrtCgLIOI6
Effectively this looks like a sink point for someone who gets credit cards or steam accounts to dump money into at the end. There are many games with idle-able marketplace items, each sellable for a few cents.
I know People Make Games has looked at steam gambling sites, but this looks like another end of the pool.
Anyone else see this stuff around? Anyone see any investigative stuff around marketplace item shenanigans? Or if you’re more on social media than I am and wanna point this out to someone who can poke it, please do.
My friend’s ultimate takeaway is that he feels like the whole marketplace system is edging a lot of legal stuff and it ultimately will need to be shut down. In the meantime, he says he’ll keep collecting items from these idleable games, like picking up pennies from the sidewalk.
I do this with any Steam Trading Cards I get from any game that has them on steam. I don’t deliberately idle in them or whatever, but if steam gives me a Card I just put it on the market. They have exactly zero value to me, however they seemingly are worth about $0.05 to other people. I don’t try and Play The Market, steam usually says “120 available, starting from $0.08” and I will always price mine $0.01 under whatever the current lowest is. I don’t care about devaluing a commodity — it is already valueless to me.
The next time I ever go to purchase a game on steam, I usually get to apply a minor (around $0.50 - $2.00) discount, thanks to having credit in my steam wallet.
My thought was how the automatic production of those items would be easy on a botted computer, creating a large volume of these items to be used as a vehicle for transactions. My friend says the latest version of the game has a minimizable view with jist a little notifier when you get another item. The way any game can add more items is like there’s a million little crypto printing presses minting more of each currency as well as printing totally new notes.
It’s not a big deal, as it appears this game didn’t sell much anyway, but making a typo and appearing to pull some of that good Telltale money post-2020 is a strange move.
