Counter-Strike Players Spent Nearly $1 Billion On Cases Last Year
Counter-Strike makes Valve a lot of money. There are a whole variety of cases (which are essentially loot boxes) that you can earn in-game and trade on the market to make some cash, but you can't open them without buying keys directly from Valve.
As reported by CS:GO Case Tracker (and spotted by Insider Gaming), over 400 million cases were opened in 2023 alone. That means players bought 359.6 million keys, making Valve around $980 million, just shy of one billion.
Case prices also increased by 178 percent last year. The Danger Zone Case's value, meanwhile, increased by a staggering 492 percent.
It's not too surprising given that, early last year, CS:GO players bought 39.5 million cases in March, spending over $100 million. At the time, it was the biggest month in Counter-Strike's 11-year history. Of course, it was quickly topped.
Counter-Strike's skin market is incredibly lucrative, to say the least, with knives and other rare, hotly sought after cosmetics going for as much as $400,000. This has created problems in the past as gambling sites sprung up as a means to transform Steam Wallet currency into real, tangible cash, but Valve has cracked down on these over the years.
Regardless, Valve makes a lot of money from CS:GO's monetisation. Not only do players have to purchase keys directly rather than via the community as with most cosmetics, but Valve also takes a 15 percent cut on all marketplace sales. Not all of the 400 million cases will have been sold on the marketplace, with some no doubt earned in-game just from playing, but those that were pawned at an increased price of 178 percent will have also made Valve money. Not to mention the skins people got from the cases.
It's also worth noting that not every case requires a key. The Anubis Collection Package, for instance, could be unboxed freely. As such, its release caused a surge in unboxings, with 6.6 million cases opened on April 25 alone. Unboxings also spiked when Counter-Strike 2 was announced, with 50.3
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