Thank you for sharing your experience and perspective.
> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;
My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.
Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.
I'm curious to know the layoffs by game. It would be surprising if League of Legends retains all of its game design/balance team, and it'd also be surprising if Valorant lays off any employees.
Not a fan of "this"-like comments, but I find your analogy very elegant in explaining the impact of money.
The concept of money mapping 1:1 to value/produced utility (note that I haven't defined what a unit of this is) is a difficult concept to grasp.
It's very common for people to trivialise money as a printed piece of paper and miss the higher level value as a currency that "benchmarks" the value of one's impact to another.
Society pedestalizes healthcare workers for their immediate, physical and observable impact to the lives of individuals; and it is understandably justified. However, this often raises questions to why nurses only make marginally above average salaries. Unfortunately the semantics of the supply-vs-demand economy is often lost here - any individual nurse is generally not difficult to replace should they leave (of course, depending on the market). On the other end of the spectrum, people making significantly above the market financial trading are commonly seen as negative-value producers when most do generate a significant amount of positive value, simply because it's hard to reason with a non-physical form of value. (I don't work in a field related to financial trading)
It's unsurprising why there's communities formed to demonise the concept of currency, trade and markets; and why some of them advance further and push for the breakdown of modern society.
While I don't mean to be pushing the message that "Capitalism is perfect and the utopia of reality" - I can't imagine alternative systems not involving a free market, that would achieve similar or better levels of quality of life and advancement in society (at least in current modern? times), while balancing around the imperfections of humans.
I think the "Facebook bad" horse has been beaten down to Earth's inner core.
Yes, Facebook has its downsides just as any other social platform would. Yes, you can live without it. But I don't believe that the negatives Facebook has enabled comes close to the utility it has provided to society.
You're testing recall only when asking about TLS. You may be testing recall for "how to implement a known algorithm", but there's still plenty of room for testing actual problem solving too.
If you are the interviewer, even if you are asking a standard "how to invert a binary tree" type algorithm question, you hold the cards to keep pushing the bounds for problem solving by extending the question.
> we'd lose out on the marketplace cut (10% of all sales I think?); we didn't want people grinding the game to earn money from rare drops;
My naive understanding is that by having skins be worth tangible and significant value; this was the primary motivator for players to purchase keys to unbox cases, which was the dominant direct revenue generator for CS.
I would guess that the revenue generated from keys (and cases, from the market cut) eclipses the potential market cut revenue from limiting the value of items to the marketplace limit (now $2k I believe), as the consequence of that is significantly less demand in keys and skins as a whole.
Without the prospect of extremely expensive chase items, the $2.50 + ${case} slot machine pull loses its jackpot. With a knife being dropped once every 400~ unboxes, the EV of a knife would be $1000 + 400*${case}. Obviously the actual EV would be lower in practice, but the point I'm trying to understand is how the monetization model works if skins are any less expensive than they were.