Valve to start charging 1$ a month for better CSGO statistics

[Andreas Lilja]

Quote

As Rock Paper Shotgun reports, the release notes for the latest version of the game make reference to CS:GO 360, which is described as "A subscription service for players that want to continue collecting official Competitive and Wingman stats." The Steam Support page offers further details and confirms that Valve intends to charge $0.99 per month to access the service.

Once subscribed, CS:GO 360 will automatically renew on the same date each month, unless you cancel. While active, it offers access to detailed stats for "official Competitive, Premier, and Wingman game modes and the Round Win Chance report introduced in Operation Broken Fang." In other words, this is a subscription aimed at competitive players and anyone trying to monitor how they are improving when playing the game.

 

https://www.pcmag.com/news/valve-launches-a-1-counter-strike-global-offensive-subscription

 

This is ridiculous, even if it were a one-time kind of DLC. 

[dizmo]

I don't see the issue. If you're competitive, or play it enough to really need those stats, I'd say you owe them a little money.

[SorryBella]

Just now, dizmo said:

I don't see the issue. If you're competitive, or play it enough to really need those stats, I'd say you owe them a little money.

The issue is the fact that these statistics are usually already provided for free, first party or third party. And this applies industry wide, as far as i know this is a first time that competitive statistics will be locked behind a paywall.

[dizmo]

1 minute ago, SorryClaire said:

The issue is the fact that these statistics are usually already provided for free, first party or third party. And this applies industry wide, as far as i know this is a first time that competitive statistics will be locked behind a paywall.

That doesn't change the fact I don't see a problem with it. They've decided to change that, and it's their game.

[Paranoid Kami]

Tekken fans: We pay for frame data...

[WereCat]

20 minutes ago, dizmo said:

That doesn't change the fact I don't see a problem with it. They've decided to change that, and it's their game.

I have to agree. 

That is as long as a free alternatives exist out there and Valve won't go after them. 

 

For example the SBMM that was recently shut down by Activision. 

Have they provided bulk of the stats for free? Well, yes but they've also hidden the more advanced stuff behind a pay wall. 

 

And there are many of such a "free" stat tracking websites and often the stats are not even that accurate. 

 

Getting that info from 1st party is so much better and people are already paying for the less accurate stuff so why shouldn't Valve claw back at this market? 

 

I don't like it but at the same time it doesn't affect anybody whose is not already paying. To those people it may even look like a good deal. 

[Master Disaster]

By the time the newborns of today are my age they'll be paying subscription fees for the right to buy food and water and access to a toilet.

 

44 minutes ago, dizmo said:

That doesn't change the fact I don't see a problem with it. They've decided to change that, and it's their game.

And you're the gold standard customer big industry hopes to turn everyone into using the slow exposure method.

[givingtnt]

57 minutes ago, dizmo said:

I don't see the issue. If you're competitive, or play it enough to really need those stats, I'd say you owe them a little money.

Competitive IS  CS:GO.  They make money with Prime status (buying the game VS FTP) and skins and Operations.

54 minutes ago, SorryClaire said:

The issue is the fact that these statistics are usually already provided for free, first party or third party. And this applies industry wide, as far as i know this is a first time that competitive statistics will be locked behind a paywall.

What's annoying about this is that it was free in the last operation (Broken Fang) with Premier Mode. 
We can still play in PM, but the stats are now  locked.

While there are free alternatives, they are nowhere near as detailed.

[Master Disaster]

17 minutes ago, WereCat said:

I have to agree. 

That is as long as a free alternatives exist out there and Valve won't go after them. 

 

For example the SBMM that was recently shut down by Activision. 

Have they provided bulk of the stats for free? Well, yes but they've also hidden the more advanced stuff behind a pay wall. 

 

And there are many of such a "free" stat tracking websites and often the stats are not even that accurate. 

 

Getting that info from 1st party is so much better and people are already paying for the less accurate stuff so why shouldn't Valve claw back at this market? 

 

I don't like it but at the same time it doesn't affect anybody whose is not already paying. To those people it may even look like a good deal. 

Perhaps I'm missing something but why would/should you ever need to pay to look at your IG Stats? What happened to the days when you could hit the stats button on the main menu and be shown everything?

[WereCat]

4 minutes ago, Master Disaster said:

Perhaps I'm missing something but why would/should you ever need to pay to look at your IG Stats? What happened to the days when you could hit the stats button on the main menu and be shown everything?

As I said, I don't agree with it. 

 

Also it depends on what kind of stats you get. The basic K/D/A, accuracy, etc... are quite useless if you want to improve competitively. 

 

If they can track stuff like rotation time, positioning, smoke effectiveness, etc... that's a lot more valuable information that may be difficult to obtain by 3rd parties for comparison reasons besides actually watching the actual gameplay demo. 

[Nobaris]

I don't agree with this, but hey, it's your money, feel free to do what you want with it. 

 

Charging a dollar a month for stats that F2P players have no access to is pretty dumb, making the first step in widening the gap between F2P and P2W. (which was never present in CS before, prior to this)

 

But if you're super competitive I don't see why $1 would stop you from becoming the best you can be. It's extremely important and useful information that is locked behind a paywall, so F2P players will definitely suffer a little from this update. At the end of the day I believe it's just a small issue so I can't justify all the fuss and rage behind this. 

[Sauron]

2 hours ago, dizmo said:

I don't see the issue. If you're competitive, or play it enough to really need those stats, I'd say you owe them a little money.

Just because you start making money off a product you bought doesn't mean the manufacturer can then start charging you more... CS:GO is now free to play but it didn't use to be and it's a bit of a dick move to place features that were already included behind a paywall. I mean, if this is ok then who is to say you won't suddenly have to start paying to access competitive ladders in games you already paid full price for when that feature was included?

[Wictorian]

Data is not free. 

[Master Disaster]

51 minutes ago, Cvet76 said:

Why would a company give their data out for free, when we live in an age where data is the master?

How is your gameplay stats their data?

[Master Disaster]

2 minutes ago, Wictorian said:

Data is not free. 

Data might not be free but GDPR says my data is mine and I have a right to look at it whenever I want for free.

[Master Disaster]

2 hours ago, Nobaris said:

I don't agree with this, but hey, it's your money, feel free to do what you want with it. 

 

Charging a dollar a month for stats that F2P players have no access to is pretty dumb, making the first step in widening the gap between F2P and P2W. (which was never present in CS before, prior to this)

 

But if you're super competitive I don't see why $1 would stop you from becoming the best you can be. It's extremely important and useful information that is locked behind a paywall, so F2P players will definitely suffer a little from this update. At the end of the day I believe it's just a small issue so I can't justify all the fuss and rage behind this. 

If you're super competitive then you'll be making local recordings/demos of all your matches anyway.

 

Unless I'm missing something the type of data Valve is hoping to charge for is of very little value to the semi pro and pro eSports types. They will be recording their own data, hosting scrims within their team and with other teams for practice and doing performance reviews and team meetings to discuss tactics etc etc.

 

Its just yet another recurring revenue stream for a company worth $12 billion that hasn't made a good game in years (outside of a single VR game) and that they know the "gamers" will all pay for because its marketed as essential to being a good player.

[cj09beira]

2 hours ago, Sauron said:

Just because you start making money off a product you bought doesn't mean the manufacturer can then start charging you more... CS:GO is now free to play but it didn't use to be and it's a bit of a dick move to place features that were already included behind a paywall. I mean, if this is ok then who is to say you won't suddenly have to start paying to access competitive ladders in games you already paid full price for when that feature was included?

this is likely them trying to not to have to save all that data for all players and instead only save the data of those who pay, seems more like a move to make csgo cheaper to maintain server cost wise

[Master Disaster]

9 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

this is likely them trying to not to have to save all that data for all players and instead only save the data of those who pay, seems more like a move to make csgo cheaper to maintain server cost wise

Yeah, no. You really think one of the biggest CDNs on the planet really cares about a few thousand SQL databases holding some strings & ints? (and yes I realise its very unlikely they would use SQL for something of this scale but the point is still correct).

 

Compared to what running Steam across the entire globe needs, storing a few million player stats is nothing.

[Sauron]

11 minutes ago, cj09beira said:

this is likely them trying to not to have to save all that data for all players and instead only save the data of those who pay, seems more like a move to make csgo cheaper to maintain server cost wise

I can't imagine this type of statistic takes up that much server space... and still, this is their problem, not the players'.

[Master Disaster]

18 minutes ago, Sauron said:

snip

Off topic but I just noticed that command in your sig.

 

Yeah, I actually did something similar to that on my webserver last weekend. I intended to do ./ but missed the . and ending up recursively changing the owner and group of every file in my /bin, /boot, /dev, /home, /etc and /lib folders to www-data:www-data (after about 30 seconds I thought "Hmm, this is taking a long time for a small amount of files").

 

That was about as fun as chewing on a brick

[Doobeedoo]

Yeah no.

[Master Disaster]

58 minutes ago, Cvet76 said:

It's a service. Or rather will probably be one. They're just gamifying it and making it prettier. If you don't like that, you're well within your right to not subscribe. But I doubt you'd let such a service pass if you were a competitive player or part of a team. Especially if all the tools were provided, to make analysis easier.

You hit the nail on the head without even realising it.

 

Its not a service, its something that up until now has been provided for free to everyone as part of another service.

 

Valve choosing to carve parts of what they offer up and then attempting to resell them as an extra subscription is exactly the problem.

 

The issue is this is the gaming industry we're talking about, once EA, Acti/Blizz & Ubi see Valve tacking on subscriptions for a free to play game, you can stake your entire life savings it won't be long until one of them takes it further. At that point you'll be buying an $80 game then be having to pay an extra $5 a month to play it online, earn achievements and get unique rewards not available to non subscribers.

[n0stalghia]

Not a CSGO player, but I absolutely hate the fact that they do the same thing in Dota. Despicable decision on Valve's part that once again shows that the original creators of lootboxes are always looking for new ways to squeeze money out of people. 

[Franck]

4 hours ago, Master Disaster said:

GDPR says my data is mine

Not exactly true but close. There are many exception and it's a mess for us dev to go back and forth with the lawyers and implement it correctly. A recent exception i had to deal with is when I made some changes in the software system for a family member large business and had some formulas directly linked to the client identifier as the formulas are custom tailored for each user and it uses their personal information in the formulas themselves. The formula does contain personal data but as is it fall into the trade secret category and therefore is protected as releasing the information outside the company and people that are allowed to know about is prohibited by the law.

 

But back to the point technically as it is It would fall under the GDPR (if you are in the country protected by it) unless they pulled out a sketchy way to make the data fall in the grey zone like mentioned above.

[Master Delta Chief]

This is just another way to leech of money from their customers. They've done a similar thing on Dota 2 with Dota Plus. It might prove to be a useful feature, but shit like this doesn't belong behind a paywall, even if it is like 1 dollar (for now, can go higher in the future). There are some free alternatives to check your stats, but they may be limited in terms of data or even features.