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Counter-Strike: Global Offensive’s gambling fiasco hit its boiling point in 2016 when two YouTubers were unearthed to have been behind one of the biggest sites, advertising it on their channels to millions of impressionable young gamers, all without disclosing their involvement. They were Trevor ‘TmarTn’ Martin and Thomas ‘Syndicate’ Cassell. Valve decided to take action against their site and the countless copycats popping up, announcing plans to tackle gambling operations using their game and its market—but seven years later, not much has changed, as one Google search will present a wall of lucrative betting and roulette games.
CS:GO added skins in 2013, taking inspiration from another Valve game, Team Fortress 2. Only in Counter-Strike, you get them in ‘cases,’ i.e. lootboxes, that are opened with keys that cost $2.50. Each case has a chance of netting you profit, but in all likelihood, you’ll get a skin worth less than your key. These cosmetics, which value anywhere from a few cents to thousands of dollars, can then be traded on the Steam marketplace for real money, or at least, real money only usable within the confines of Steam. You can pick up more skins, continue spinning slots, or buy other games.
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Gambling sites remove the limitations. Using Steam’s open API, they can create automated programs and bots that let you bring your skins out of Steam and into the real world. There, you can cash out for actual money. Through these sites, which are often advertised to young audiences across YouTube due to its lack of age restrictions, skins have even more value, and we’ve seen countless cases of kids using their parents’ credit cards after being sucked into this world, some as young as 11. It’s still a problem, and Valve’s crackdown is one big game of whack-a-mole, but the blame lies at its door. CS:GO’s cosmetic system is already built like a casino even before third-party sites take it a step further.
Case openings are framed like spinning the slots, as you watch the skins fly past, all while waiting for the line to stop on the good ones. It’s not subtle, and it’s no wonder that an entire gambling network has formed around it. CS:GO has the most egregious lootboxes of any game, and by tying into Valve’s own Steam marketplace, there’s an incentive to keep opening them, since you could go from losing $4 on a key to earning $300 with a new knife. But it’s backed itself into a corner, since upending that entire system would crash a marketplace it’s carefully cultivated and fueled for years.
This is where Counter-Strike 2 comes in. Valve has claimed it is trying to combat gambling for years now, ever since that tipping point in 2016, and while there are fewer sites (most of which are built around betting on esports games with cases and skins), CS:GO isn’t helping things by continuing to release new cases. I easily found a YouTuber opening cases on a gambling website to his audience of 77,000, continuing to spend money in the hopes of getting a good cosmetic. All of these are new, because CS:GO has not stopped adding cases with more skins, essentially introducing new slot machines to its ecosystem.
The new Counter–Strike has to come to terms with its past, and looking forward, it cannot make the same mistakes. Adding new cases gives gambling sites more tools to squeeze money out of young and naive people, but even without knowledge of third-party sites, attaching a dollar value to skins explicitly makes these cases gambling more than any other lootbox in the medium. That alone is an incentive for people to buy, buy, buy, and spin, spin, spin.
Valve will inevitably lose a lot of money if it changes the system. It takes a 15 percent cut of all marketplace sales, so those huge hundred-dollar and thousand-dollar value cosmetics make Valve a pretty penny, which is why CS:GO is so profitable despite being free-to-play. But Valve is a huge megacorp with a stranglehold on the PC market, it doesn’t need a gambling ring to keep itself afloat. Instead, CS:GO 2 needs to drop lootboxes altogether. It’s an archaic mechanic, and one that has been controversial for years, with games like Overwatch 2 dropping them altogether. Releasing a new game in 2023 with a lootbox system is fueling an outdated monetisation method that continues to draw scrutiny for good reason.
CS:GO 2 could instead sell skins standalone, with Valve dictating the prices. $200 M4s that are valued by the community due to their rarity could sell for $20. It’s still a lot for some nice-looking pixels in a video game, but it’s better than the alternative, and by taking away the community’s ability to set prices, gambling sites would have nothing to work with. You wouldn’t have slots to spin or huge money pools to tap into since everyone would just go directly to Valve.
Countless stories still surface about people plunging themselves into debt or emptying their parent’s credit cards because of a predatory system that preys on vulnerable people with a roulette game that appears as though it could make you wealthy. It’s an unhealthy, flawed system that makes money in the same way as any other casino, without the rigorous age verification checks. Continuing to build on these foundations would make Valve every bit as culpable as the gambling sites that let players cash out their chips.
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