I have a recurring nightmare: I’m sat at my desk and everything is soft-focus and great. I feel happy, and turn to say as much to my girlfriend. But she’s not there. It’s Gabe Newell, who is definitely not my girlfriend, and he’s using one of those old school accounting machines. On the floor is a pile of paper that he gathers up and hands to me, saying: “In Half-Life 2, destroyed 1200 crates. This is your bill.” And I say I don’t have that kind of money, then I wake up crying. I don’t think Valve would retroactively charge me for opening crates, but then I didn’t imagine that their strangely popular unlock system that drives both Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 would end up in Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. But that looks like it’s going to happen.



The information was uncovered by Redditor wickedplayer494 , who dug into a recent update and found crates, keys, and skins. What’s all that about then? Well, according to the official Counter-Strike Twitter account, they’ve been working on an update “to help build up prize pools at competitive CS:GO events.”One of those crate and key combos is labelled “E-Sports”, which would suggest this is Valve’s method of gathering up the funds to build the aforementioned prize pool. But there are non e-sports crates as well, so I’m guessing there will be regular purchases as well.

All the items listed are cosmetic, which is good because you don’t want to mess with that stuff in Counter-Strike. That said, I always hated that teams could dress up in different clothing, because the millisecond it took to parse is enough to get me killed. Lord knows what will happen when I see someone with a fancy molotov.

Via PCGN.