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Hate it all you want, but it's the sole reason Counter-Strike still exists today. Without skins, Valve would have shut the door on the game (and quite possibly the company entirely).

Skins is literally a money printing machine.

You don't think they make more money with Steam?

Yeah... selling games other than CS. The reason CS is still under active development is because the market economy rakes in huge amounts of money. Some analysts have added up figure for the numbers of case keys sold, and those alone sell $1 billion / year. Plus they take cut of all of the other market transactions.

> sole reason Counter-Strike still exists today

Every other live service manages with non-gambling skins. They have their own problems (usually around FOMO), but nowhere near the literal gambling that is CS.

> Valve would have shut the door on the game

In terms of not having any developers on it, sure, not impossible.

> (and quite possibly the company entirely)

Ahahahaha come on man, even without CS, Valve is one of the most profitable companies of all time.

> Every other live service manages with non-gambling skins.

Most games that are that old, don't survive.

Arms Deal came out in 2013 [0]. 1.6 came out in 2000, so that is 13 years (not considering CSS came out in 2004, and CS:GO was in 2012, without any monetization).

Fortnite is coming onto 8 years old now. The idea of it being around for 5 years longer is not particularly alien.

[0]: https://blog.counter-strike.net/2013/08/7425/

e: Actually, I should really be focusing on the time from Arms Deal to the present, which is 12 years. So, Fortnite has even less time to catch up to CS' current lifespan with gambling.

That's, excuse my French, fucking ridiculous. Steam is a money printing machine that affords Valve the capital to run its CS servers 100 over.

Skins are also a money machine but it's just false to claim without it Valve would close its doors.

Valve has already pretty much "shut the door" on its games relatively to how much money they have and how much dev effort they could put into it if they actually tried harder, because they're mostly just maintaining their gambling facades (cs/dota2/tf2) and abandoning everything else (l4d2/other stagnant games and ip).

You can sell and make skins without the literal loot boxes

#StopKillingGames

Did you miss the entire article? CS itself came from a dorm room. You can have excellent games that spawn from creativity instead of monetization.

I was really into the odd maps (NIPPER) and early Internet community around games (joe2). We hosted servers off of unused CPU cycles from oil exploration boxes.

This still exists all over the web, but the creators that figured out economics moved on.

I love CS, but I also hate the gambling shit. You can literally spend your death time gambling in the game.

Why does the gambling side affect you? Just don't care what your gun or your body armor looks like, and you can play the game normally. As far as I understand it, at least the way it was the last time I played like 7 years ago, the loot boxes didn't give you special powers in the game, they were just skins

> I would love to see a modern shooter with nice graphics and self hostable servers in the same niche as the old CS.

I mean, that is still CS: you want one without gambling (which is reasonable!)

#priming

Uhm, wow. Most winnable matches often enough end when the drugs wear off for hundreds of reasons.

You are looking at it from the wrong angle. From what I have seen, it's rarely a whole team that fucks up while winning. Also: often enough: they don't seem to be aware of the pattern that just occurred in their brains (are not, as far as I learned from Paul E.). I believe these kids are put on drugs without consent.

I have no proof, of course.

I noticed it first in soccer back in '16, I think. Which surprised me because it was not boxing or wrestling or the UFC, where such things are the standard.

What drugs would that be? Amphetamine?

As someone with 10,000+ hours in CSGO/CS2, I think your argument is weak clearly is coming from someone who is a boomer.

CS is one of, if not, the least egregious "loot cases" systems in the gaming industry. Every case you open, gives you a reward, which can be sold. Each case you open has fixed odds and is not manipulated by the gaming companies to psychologically torment you. You get no benefit from using skins or stickers on your gun. It is purely cosmetic. Compared to other games which rely on pay2win mechanics, CSGO/CS2's systems are great.

I think skins are one of the best parts of CS. It blows my mind you can have skins worth thousands of dollars, trade them between friends like collectables, sell them for real life money and make your inventory look cool.

I agree the third party skin gambling sites aren't good, although the whole base concept, within Steam and a handful of trusted selling sites are perfectly fine.

Your gripe with the eSports side of this is also stupid. Have you watched / seen any sport on the planet? Gambling is apart of sports and sports culture, its one of the main revenue streams. Gambling helps grassroot sports and helps get kids into sports.

The whole "often give a segment to gambling people talking about odds" is rubbish. At most ESL, Blast, PGL events, the most that is even talked about odds is a brief mention of the odds, no breakdowns, no match betting options, etc. It's very, very tame. I likely have hours watching CS than I do playing too.

CS eSports is in a weird place because the funding comes from two main places in 2025, Saudi sportswashing and gambling. There used to be tons of VC, although that dried up when eSports didn't take off exactly how everyone expected it to. CS was one of the more safe investments are the game has been around for effectively two decades and has always had a competitive scene, dating back to early 2000s. CS is one of the most enjoyable and easy to watch eSports so its pretty enticing for viewers (and advertisers) although the marketablility of CS is hard due to bombs, guns and terrorists.

eSports needs a pay per view option otherwise the funding is always going to come from sketchy places, but the average eSports fan does not care enough to pay because they are too cheap to pay for stuff, or too young to have the funding to do so. Unlike traditional sport.

You are seemingly fine with killing gambling, so might as well kill all tier 2 and 3 scenes, including local scenes. They are mostly funded by gambling and even so, people throw matches because they get like 1k a month for being a tier 2 pro. People need to live and throwing gets more than their wage.

Your final point is Twitch chat messages saying stupid shit about match-fixing, I am not sure why this is even relevant. Studying twitch chat is like studying The Onion, not sure why you would.

Richard Lewis has talked extensively about everything I've said above.

Saying its among the least egregious examples just isn't true. Doppler knives can sell for over $10,000. We know the sorts of psychological outcomes that occur from putting a vanishingly unlikely $10,000 jackpot on a slot machine.

People will willingly blow their paychecks, week after week, hoping to strike that 0.00275% chance for big money. This is bad for society, just like slot machines.

I agree that the gambling side looks bad, egged on by streamers pretending to be overjoyed when they win, but is $10000 really big money? I'd have thought a lottery ticket would be far more enticing.

I think the psychology is a bit different though, winning the lottery is a moonshot that everybody will at least say they don't think will ever, ever happen.

Meanwhile you can watch a video on youtube of a streamer pulling a $10000+ knife, several $1000+ knives, and a litany of $100+ knives and skins all in a single stream (where they sat opening cases for 8 hours straight and spending $18000 on 2000 cases + keys).

I think generally the way I've experienced people justify it is that $10000+ would be a life changing amount of money for them in a way that the $100 they have on hand isn't, and even if they strike out they still get cool skins for a game they play, so why the hell not. And eventually they are $2300 dollars poorer, with nothing to show for it but some in game skins.