Tag: Counter-Strike

Valve Made About A Billion Dollars On Counter-Strike Loot Boxes In 2023

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Image: Valve / Kotaku / Jag_cz (Shutterstock)

According to new data, it appears that Valve likely made about $1 billion from digital Counter-Strike 2 (previously Global Offensive) cases and keys in 2023. Yes, that’s billion with a “B.”

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In Valve’s immensely popular free-to-play tactical FPS Counter-Strike 2, players can get cases by playing and earning them through level drops, or purchase cases from Steam’s community market. These cases come in different variants and can contain extremely rare and valuable cosmetic items like weapon skins. But once you have a case, you don’t just open it. You also need a key, which must be purchased either directly from Steam or from other players on the community market. And because CS2 is very popular, this lootbox system is making Valve a lot of money.

As spotted by Dexerto, third-party website CS2 Case Tracker recently released its 2023 year in review for cases. And the biggest stat is the estimated $980,000,000 that Valve earned from players buying keys to open cases. Because keys are just digital items that unlock cases, it’s not like it costs Valve all that much to make them or maintain them so the company likely absorbed almost all of that staggering figure as profit.

But wait, that massive $980 million stat is only how much money Valve likely made from the sale of keys. It doesn’t factor in the 15% cut they get from every case sold on the community market. When you factor that in, it becomes very likely that Valve made well over $1 billion on cases and keys in 2023 alone.

That probably is one of the reasons Valve isn’t in a rush to make new video games. They don’t really need to. Instead, they can sit back and let Steam and Counter-Strike fund all their virtual reality experiments and other hardware projects. Honestly, it’s a miracle we ever got Half-Life: Alyx.

One last stat for the road: According to CS2 Case Tracker’s data the most popular day to open cases was Wednesday. Why? I don’t know. But there you go. You can now likely win a bar bet with this weird bit of trivia.

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Zack Zwiezen

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January 23, 2024
Starfield Pushes Baldur’s Gate 3 Off Steam Top Spot, And It’s Not Even Out Yet

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Though you still can’t play it, Bethesda’s massive spacefarer role-playing game Starfield recently beat out one of 2023’s biggest games, D&D RPG Baldur’s Gate 3, as a Steam top seller, GamesRadar first noticed.

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Starfield, out in Early Access on August 31 and globally on September 6, has successfully dragged its 1,000 explorable planets and eager players’ mounting expectations to the number-one spot on the U.S. Top Sellers chart. It’s also the number one seller for a huge number of additional countries, including Australia, Switzerland, Norway, and Germany.

Most other counties, though, are concerned with neither Bethesda’s big space game nor Larian Studios’ big Dungeons & Dragons game. China, Denmark, Spain, Poland, and many others are still downloading free-to-play multiplayer first-person shooter Counter Strike: Global Offensive, which was initially released in 2012, more than anything else, making it the current worldwide top seller. CS:GO has been assuming different rankings on the Top Sellers chart for 577 weeks, or the full 11 years of its existence. How is there still anyone left who hasn’t picked it up already?

We’ll have to wait a bit longer to find out if Starfield has that kind of longevity, too. Director Todd Howard certainly hopes so, telling GQ in a recent interview, “[Starfield] takes [Bethesda’s oeuvre] all to a level that we weren’t sure even that we could do. This type of game is still unique. When it clicked, and we could play it, we realized we had missed it. No one still does this.”

“We don’t get many of these in our careers—we don’t get many shots,” he said.

For Bethesda, the developer behind Fallout 3 and The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, Starfield presents another opportunity to catch lightning in a bottle. So far, we know that it is stocked with plenty of sidequest content, a silent, customizable protagonist to augment it, and, apparently, answers about God. Whether or not they are satisfactory, only spacetime will tell.

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Ashley Bardhan

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August 29, 2023
Twitch Bans Promotion Of Counter-Strike Gambling

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Streaming megasite Twitch has updated its community guidelines, and now prohibits streamers from promoting or being sponsored by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive skin gambling sites. This new ban could impact many CS:GO streamers who have lucrative deals with these controversial websites.

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In CS:GO, trading and gambling of skins and other cosmetics has long been big business, with some rare, sought-after skins selling for hundreds or even thousands of dollars online. This has led to many players spending money on CS:GO skin gambling sites, effectively turning the in-game cosmetics and Steam’s trading system into a slot machine they can pull over and over again for a fee, rewarding players with items that can (sometimes) be very valuable. These skin gambling sites—which some players condemn due to accusations they prey on minors—often pay or sponsor streamers to promote their sites, with some players even streaming themselves spinning for rare cosmetics on Twitch itself. But now, it seems that might be coming to an end.

On August 2, Twitch quietly updated its community guidelines, adding a new section that directly prohibits Twitch users who feature or promote CS:GO skin gambling sites. Here’s the new guideline after today’s update:

Is sponsorship of skins gambling, such as for CS:GO skins, allowed on Twitch?

No, promotion or sponsorship of skins gambling is prohibited under our policy.

This is bad news for streamers who have deals with any of these cosmetic gambling sites. One big-name example that might be impacted by this new ban is G2 Esports, a large-scale organization that employs numerous players and content creators.

In May, the group announced a big partnership with CSGORoll, a site that calls itself a “CS:GO skins trading market” but also lets players win skins and other in-game items by placing bets and making rolls. It’s likely CSGORoll would be considered a skin gambling site by Twitch, which would—if the Amazon-owned service enforces this new rule—likely mean G2 Esports won’t be able to promote CSGORoll during its streams. Awkward, as the site’s logo is on G2 Esports’ jerseys, and its players appear on the CSGORoll homepage.

Unanswered questions about Twitch’s new rule

Beyond G2, many other streamers might be affected by the new ban, as pointed out in a popular video condemning skin gambling published in July 2023 by YouTuber HOUNGOUNGAGNE. In their video they report that an estimated 75 percent of the top 300 CS:GO Twitch streamers have skin-gambling sponsors. If this new guideline is enforced, all of these players would have to quickly cut ties with these sites and the lucrative sponsorship deals they offer or face a possible Twitch ban.

Of course, there are still some questions. Does this new rule ban streamers from streaming themselves using CS:GO skin gambling and trading sites? The wording is a bit vague and only specifies promotions and sponsorship deals. Another question some have is if this new rule takes effect immediately, and what that means for folks who might have signed deals with sites and have certain obligations to uphold.

Kotaku has reached out to Twitch for more information about the ban. But for now, between Valve cracking down on skin traders over the last few years and Twitch’s new rules, it seems the era of CS:GO streamers hawking skin-gambling sites to thousands of viewers is coming to an end.

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Zack Zwiezen

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August 2, 2023