NetEase's success will depend on their willingness to understand and adapt to EU mentality. There are many big failures of marketplaces that tried to expand to different continents, look at Rakuten's failed EU expansion for example. Also one of the reasons why we don't do an expansion to Asia or the US (yet).
So NetEase is the least of our worries for the future, macro factors and the success of CS:GO including Valve's strategic decisions with the game play a much bigger role than any competition in my opinion.
Why do we take high fees? We could obviously outsource employees and other expensive tasks to lower the cost base significantly, but it would not be needed. The margin is very good with our current cost basis already.
Raising our fees from 10 to 15 % was a decision made after OPskins and BitSkins both played themselves and went offline / took a pause. We had more inflow of users than we could handle. Now we can handle the inflow, but don't see a reduction from 15 to 10 % as the right decision to drive user growth. Of course if the market adapts as a whole and everyone takes a lower commission, we would have to do the same in the end.
And what would prevent us from accepting minors as our clients or lowering our commission? Both would be possible with the push of a button and some changes in our TOS. We probably won't do either and there are reasons for that. Just trying to dismiss this point.
Interesting discussion overall...greetings from Hannes (CEO SkinBaron GmbH)
So NetEase is the least of our worries for the future, macro factors and the success of CS:GO including Valve's strategic decisions with the game play a much bigger role than any competition in my opinion.
Why do we take high fees? We could obviously outsource employees and other expensive tasks to lower the cost base significantly, but it would not be needed. The margin is very good with our current cost basis already.
Raising our fees from 10 to 15 % was a decision made after OPskins and BitSkins both played themselves and went offline / took a pause. We had more inflow of users than we could handle. Now we can handle the inflow, but don't see a reduction from 15 to 10 % as the right decision to drive user growth. Of course if the market adapts as a whole and everyone takes a lower commission, we would have to do the same in the end.