I totally agree with this. Thankfully I've never been into buying loot boxes. But I know from friends that it's just a big rip off as most of the loot boxes contain virtually nothing of value and you rarely get more than you paid for. A friend of mine spent hundreds of dollars on loot boxes. I asked him what he'd got then I looked at how much it would have cost if he'd purchased the items separately from the in game store and he'd received around 40% of what he'd paid for the boxes. I'm sure there are those that receive valuable items?
I know from selling items in the Steam market that some gamers are willing to pay a lot of money for items that are rare. I sold a CS:GO operations ticket that I'd purchased for less than £3 at the same time as I purchased the game (this is before the main game became free to play). When redeeming an operations ticket you get a campaign medal and the ability to play new maps specific to that operation that are locked to those not buying the ticket. When new campaign ticket is added several months later, the previous campaign is removed. I never redeemed the ticket and a few years later sold it on the Steam market for around £50. I'd bought most of the campaign tickets up to this point and had only redeemed a few. I sold all the others as well and made a significant amount of money. I also used to sell the trading cards that drop when you play a new game for the first time as soon as they became available because I always bought the games as pre release or on the day of release. If you played the game as soon as it was released on Steam then placed all of the card drops on the market immediately you could sell them for ridiculous amounts of money. I sold one card for over £20 and made over £1400 over a period of 18 months selling various marketable items that I'd either paid a few quid for or had received for free for playing the games.
After they added telephone authentication it became harder to make money on new releases as you had to wait up to 14 or 15 days before you could sell without telephone authentication and at least a day with authentication (this was to protect the community from scam traders who would offer money for items, then as the trade was going through, they would cancel it. At the time there was a way of cancelling the trade from the buyers side before their money was taken, but they still got the goods. They would ten tranfer these goods to a different account so that Valve couldn't recover the items from the original buyer. Cards that I could originally sell for several pounds or more would over the period of 2 or more weeks be reduced significantly. Most cards sold are eventually reduced to around £0.03 pence once the market becomes flooded. The more popular a game is, the quicker the value drops. Valve always takes a cut of the money you make from selling; however once the price drops to 3 pence (£0.03p) Valve take 66%, leaving you with 1 pence and making trading pointless at that level. I have over 4300 items in my inventory that sell for this price, so there's £43 worth, but the time it would take to actually add all of those items would be many days. I think there is a limit on how many items you can add to your market sales; so they become worthless unless you can create full sets as when redeemed these will give you a discount voucher for at least one game you have in your wish list. Discounts vary from 25% to 80%. It's pot luck which game and discount you get. I've had a few 75% vouchers, which were worth having because they also stack if a game is on sale. I bough a AAA game a few years ago that was on a 50% sale I got a further 75% off it because I had the discount voucher as well. So the £30 game cost me less than £4 i.e. the initial 50% off reduced the game to £15 plus the 75% voucher reduced it to £3.75. Discount vouchers are time limited, so the best time to redeem a full set of cards is just before a big sale such as the Summer or Christmas sales. If you redeem a set during one of these major sales you don't get discount vouchers; instead you get the cards they release specific to that sale, for example the Lunar New Year 2020 event or the Winter 2019 events. If you manage to collect all of the cards from one of these events you get a badge that you can display on your profile page that tells others that you partook 'significantly' in the sale.
'Scuze my waffle, I drifted from the original point.
