They're of no value at this point in time.
If you're into that sort of thing, you can just consider them bragging rights.
There are no immediate plans to change this. It was once thought that we'd do something with the credits, according to one or two comments from our head admin.
If you're into that sort of thing, you can just consider them bragging rights.
There are no immediate plans to change this. It was once thought that we'd do something with the credits, according to one or two comments from our head admin.
thanks for the answer
i were just wondering what they are. (i am a member at one gaming + game item trading site where there is "credits" and those are worth money (you can buy game items with em) so it peaked my curiosity.
@////// :-
Just an indication, really, of how active individuals are in the community.....and as AI told you, gives some idea of how much folks have contributed over time.
Tons of forums have similar systems, most of which have no other meaning except to foster a sense of community participation.
Your mention of the 'game trading' site is the first I've heard of where such things can actually be used, by individuals, for "material gain"!
Mike.
^^^ What David said.
Just an indication, really, of how active individuals are in the community.....and as AI told you, gives some idea of how much folks have contributed over time.
Tons of forums have similar systems, most of which have no other meaning except to foster a sense of community participation.
Your mention of the 'game trading' site is the first I've heard of where such things can actually be used, by individuals, for "material gain"!
Mike.
kibasnowpaw
Well-Known Member
its a place where you can sell game items that you have found while playing online game with other people. game items can be extremely valuable. there is items that can be 5-10k in value, in dollars or euros. but those are really rare, finding one is like winning in lottery.
i did but didnt find info about credits. maybe i missed that thread.
kibasnowpaw
Well-Known Member
Mike, that is exactly the problem with the whole skin economy. A few individuals can get lucky or profit from trading, but the companies running the system earn money regardless of who wins or loses.
Counter-Strike 2 is the clearest example because Valve owns both the game and Steam. You can receive a case while playing, but opening it normally requires buying a key. Since Valve is both the developer and publisher of CS2, that purchase stays inside Valve’s own business rather than going to an unrelated game company.
Then, if you sell the resulting skin on the Steam Community Market, another part of the transaction is taken in fees. Steam’s FAQ lists a 10% game-specific fee for Counter-Strike items, in addition to the standard Steam transaction fee, which is normally 5%. Because of minimum fees and rounding, the exact percentage can be slightly different on cheap items, but it is usually around 15% in total.
The money you receive is not real cash that you can withdraw. Valve’s agreement says Steam Wallet funds have no cash value outside Steam and cannot be exchanged for cash. You must spend the balance inside Valve’s ecosystem.
Valve can therefore benefit at three different stages of the same economic cycle:
- First, Valve sells the key.
- Second, Valve collects fees when the skin is sold.
Third, the resulting Wallet balance must be spent on Steam. If it is spent on another Valve product, Valve receives the sale. If it is spent on a game from another publisher, Steam receives its platform share. Valve reported that developers received 76% of the gross revenue from non-Valve games sold on Steam in 2025, although the exact division varies because of taxes, refunds, regional pricing and revenue agreements.
It is not literally the same banknote being charged three times, but economically the value is being kept circulating inside a system where Valve can earn at several stages. The same skin can also be resold repeatedly, generating new market fees every time it changes hands.
I sometimes sell the free drops I receive in CS2 and use the Wallet credit to buy a game. I do not buy keys and repeatedly open cases while hoping for a rare knife. Even when I only sell a free drop, Valve still controls the marketplace, receives the fee and decides where the resulting balance can be spent.
Third-party skin sites are not automatically better. There is an important difference between a marketplace that simply lets people sell skins for cash and a site that allows people to gamble skins in roulette, coin flips, case battles or esports betting. They are not all the same, and not every outside marketplace is fraudulent. But they all help give skins a visible real-money price, which strengthens the lottery-like attraction of loot boxes.
Without cash markets, a rare skin is mainly a cosmetic item inside a game. Once websites tell players that the same skin is “worth” €500, €5,000 or more, opening a case begins to feel like buying a chance at a cash prize. That does not mean every loot box is legally classified as gambling, but the Danish Gambling Authority says the legal gambling criteria can be met when there is a stake, an element of chance and a prize that can be converted into monetary value. It assesses loot boxes individually rather than declaring all of them legal or illegal as one category.
That is why third-party cash trading benefits the loot-box business model. The sites create stories about people finding extremely valuable items, and those exceptional winners advertise the system to everyone else. Players spend money and time chasing the remote possibility of receiving something valuable, while the game company earns from every key rather than only when someone gets a good item.
It is similar to a lottery in its economic and psychological structure: many people pay relatively small amounts for random outcomes, most results are worth less than the cost of participating, and rare jackpots receive nearly all the attention. The individual jackpot winner may profit, but the operator earns from the total volume of attempts.
Third-party markets also introduce several additional risks.
The first is account theft and fraud. Valve explicitly warns that hijackers use fake Steam login pages and fake third-party trading sites to steal login information. Trade-redirection scams can replace the intended recipient with an impersonation account just before the victim confirms the trade.
If the items leave your account, Steam Support normally does not restore them, including items lost through trades or market transactions. CS2 now has limited trade protection for certain recent trades, but that does not turn every outside transaction into a safe or reversible purchase.
The second problem is consumer protection. On Steam, the rules and fees are at least published by Valve. On a third-party site, the operator may control deposit values, sales commissions, withdrawal fees, identification requirements, exchange rates and the circumstances under which an account or payout can be frozen. If the company is offshore, anonymous or unlicensed, recovering money can be extremely difficult.
A 2025 UK government evidence review found that many skin-gambling operators exist in legal grey areas, sometimes with vague terms, weak age gates and offshore structures. Its audit found inadequate age verification and limited consumer-protection tools across many of the reviewed sites.
This is not only a theoretical issue in Denmark. The Danish Gambling Authority says that no operator has applied for a Danish licence to provide skin betting, and that it obtains court orders several times a year against skin-betting sites illegally targeting Danish players, after which those sites are blocked.
The third problem is children and young people. The British Gambling Commission’s 2024 survey found that 37% of participating young people had paid to open loot boxes, packs or chests, while 4% had bet using in-game items. That does not mean all of them had developed gambling problems, but it shows how early these systems can expose players to spending, chance and items with perceived monetary value.
The 2025 evidence review also found associations between loot-box purchasing and later participation in skin gambling. It stressed that this does not prove every person who buys a loot box will begin gambling, but it shows that the different systems are connected rather than existing as completely separate activities.
The fourth problem is that the player does not truly own the market infrastructure. Valve’s agreement describes Steam items as licence rights rather than property owned by the user. Valve does not recognise transfers made outside Steam, and it reserves the right to change fees, features or even discontinue its marketplace.
That means the real-money value on third-party sites ultimately depends on decisions made by Valve. A change to trading rules, item supply, account restrictions or market access can affect the outside market immediately. People may talk about skins as investments, but they are speculative digital licences whose value depends on continued demand and continued permission to trade them.
The fifth problem is that trading sites help normalise the idea that gaming items are financial assets. Once players begin looking at every drop as something to cash out, gaming becomes less about playing and more about grinding, speculation and chasing value. Influencers displaying expensive inventories, opening hundreds of cases or promoting betting sites make the exceptional results appear more common and attainable than they really are. The UK review specifically identified influencers and online creators as contributors to the normalisation of skin gambling.
So I do not believe supporting third-party trading sites solves the problem with Steam’s marketplace. Steam traps the money inside its own ecosystem and takes fees along the way. Outside sites allow cash withdrawals, but that cash value is also what makes cases feel more like lottery tickets and enables unlicensed gambling, scams, weak age controls and speculative trading.
Some people will make money. Some people may simply buy the exact skin they want and never gamble. But the overall system survives because far more money enters through keys, fees, commissions and losses than leaves through the hands of a few lucky traders.
The occasional €10,000 skin is not evidence that the average player wins. It is the jackpot story that keeps the average player opening cases.
CaffeineAddict
Well-Known Member
If you accumulate 1M you get Mercedes Benz 
awesomeIf you accumulate 1M you get Mercedes Benz
Audi a8 would be what i want though
I don't care for things like this because some people think it's a rating on how good a member's answers are. I saw a post where someone thought that was the case on Linux Mint's forums (i.e., the bar graphic that gets colored in orange the more one posts there).
yeah, it isnt important how much credits anyone has.
kibasnowpaw
Well-Known Member
Yeah, exactly. The old explanation already says that Credits is a legacy feature from the forum software and is not actually used here. So the number has no real practical meaning on this forum.
Even on websites where likes or reputation points are still active, they do not measure the objective quality of a person’s answers. They mainly measure activity, visibility and how other users reacted.
YouTube is a good comparison. A video with one million likes is not automatically better than a video with ten likes. The first video may have been shown to 100 million people, while the second was only seen by 100. That would give the large video a 1% like rate and the small video a 10% like rate. Even that comparison would not prove which video was better, because the two videos may have reached completely different audiences.
YouTube itself explains that recommendations are personalised and influenced by viewing history, searches, subscriptions, device, time of day and previous behaviour. Its ranking systems also consider whether people click, how long they watch, likes and viewer-satisfaction signals. Therefore, a video’s exposure is not distributed equally or randomly. Some videos are given millions of opportunities to receive reactions, while others are barely shown at all.
The same problem exists on a forum. Someone who has posted for ten years, written thousands of messages and is known by most regular users will naturally receive more reactions than a newcomer, even when the newcomer writes an equally good or better answer. Some users press Like on nearly everything they agree with, while others never use the button. Some reward technical accuracy, while others reward humour, friendliness or simply an opinion that matches their own.
Popularity can also generate more popularity. A controlled online experiment involving more than 100,000 comments found that an artificially added positive first vote increased the probability of later positive ratings and raised the final score by about 25% on average. The first vote contained no information about quality; it merely influenced how later users reacted.
A separate experiment involving 14,341 people created several artificial music markets using the same unknown songs. When participants could see what other people had downloaded, success became more unequal and less predictable. Quality still had some influence, but social popularity substantially changed which songs became successful. The same songs could achieve very different results in otherwise similar groups.
This is why a Credits or Reaction Score cannot tell you whether a specific answer is correct. A highly rated answer may simply have been posted early, appeared in a popular thread, agreed with the majority or come from a respected long-term member. A technically correct answer may receive almost nothing because it appeared late, addressed an unpopular fact or was only useful to a small number of people.
A meaningful assessment would have to examine the answer itself:
Was it factually correct? Did it answer the actual question? Did the person understand the problem? Was the explanation clear? Did the proposed solution work? Were important risks or limitations mentioned? Could the claims be verified?
Grammar, tone and length may affect readability, but they cannot decide quality alone either. A long and perfectly written Linux answer can be completely wrong, while one short terminal command can solve the problem immediately.
The same popularity effect appears in entertainment. Products aimed at the largest possible audience are often designed around familiar trends, immediate engagement and commercially proven features. That may increase the potential audience, but it does not automatically create originality, depth or long-term appeal.
Ubisoft’s XDefiant is one practical example. It entered the large free-to-play, live-service shooter market and initially attracted attention, but Ubisoft later discontinued development because the game could not attract and retain enough players over time to justify continued investment. Following a popular market and generating an encouraging launch were not enough to create lasting success.
So even in a fully functioning system, Credits would mainly represent accumulated activity and community approval. It would not prove knowledge, accuracy or answer quality.
A popular answer can be useful, but popularity is evidence of popularity not evidence that the answer is correct.
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