More than 400 million CS2 cases opened in 2023

According to CS2casetracker, more than 400 million weapon cases have been opened by Counter-Strike players in 2023. Valve, the developer of the game, made close to $1 billion just from this source alone. That’s an absolutely massive amount.

Opening cases can be quite addictive. Naturally, people enjoy collecting things, whether it’s leaves, stones, postcards, or CS2 skins. But when you add a gambling element on top of this mechanism and you have a very successful game with a community of 15-20 million people, of course you’re going to make a lot of money selling in-game cosmetics.

However, this is a bit problematic because it develops the gambling reflex in people, which is not good for them.

How CS2 cases work

CS2 cases contain dozens of potential skins of different values and rarity. Each time you open a case, you have a high chance of getting one of the common skins or the Mil-Spec variety, a much lower chance of getting a slightly rarer skin, and so on. The percentages look like this:

• Mil-Spec: 79.92%
• Restricted: 15.98%
• Classified: 3.2%
• Covert: 0.64%
• Exceedingly Rare (gloves or knives): 0.26%

So you have to open around 400 cases on average to get a pair of gloves or a knife skin. Of course, one might ask, why not just buy such skins directly on the Steam Market or a skin trading platform like Tradeit.gg?

The problem is that high-quality skins are expensive. In fact, they’re obscenely expensive. A simple knife skin can cost $500 – $3000, while some gloves or rifle skins can cost more than $10.000.

So, in the buyer’s mind, paying such a high price doesn’t make any sense. But buying a case and hoping that it will give you something valuable is relatively cheap.

You only need to pay a few dollars for the case and around $2.5 for the key required to open it. So in total, for $4-5 you can open one case that has the potential to offer you a $50 – $20.000 item in some cases.

But when you consider the percentages and all the other factors, including the float value and the variety of skins available for the Exceedingly Rare Items, you start to realize that on average, you are much more likely to lose money than to make money from opening CS2 cases. But that’s how gambling works in general.

It’s not bad that CS2 has skins. They make the game a lot more enjoyable. What’s bad is that they’re monetized in a way that involves gambling. If you could simply buy amazing skins, that would be perfectly fine. But almost certainly, the profits wouldn’t be as spectacular.

Header: Valve