CS:GO Ecosystem

When there is this much money on the table, it shouldn’t be surprising to hear that many entrepreneurs have started to create businesses around this niche economy.

OpSkins is by far the most successful company that has capitalized on CS:GO skins. In short, OpSkins serves as a middleman between buyers and sellers of skins. Players come to the website and put their skins up for sale. OpSkins will then keep the item on hold until money from a prospective buyer is received.

As a result of mitigating the risks associated with high-value transactions, they keep 10 percent of each sale. As of June, 2015 — Vice reported that OpSkins was earning over $12,000 in pure profit per day.

CS:GO Jackpot is super simple skin gambling site. You simply deposit items into a prize pool and your odds of winning the pot are determined by your percentage stake of the entire pot.

For example, if you deposit $5,000 worth of items and the total pot is $20,000. Your chance of winning would be 25% ($5,000/$20,000). This is an extremely common way for people to gain really valuable inventories of skins.

CS:GO Jackpot, again serves a middleman, thus they charge up to 5% of the entire pot as a service fee.

CS:GO Jackpot is just one of many sites that compete in this space, and there are many variations of gambling within this niche.

Disclaimer: If you decide to use CS:GO Jackpot, please be careful and smart. You can lose a lot of money.

CS:GO Lounge is also one of the go-to sites for CS:GO players. This site is typically used to find trades and bet skins on competitive matches.

CS:GO — Today

Bronwen Grimes, a technical artist for Valve, was quoted to have said there were three main goals that they were hoping to achieve by introducing the item economy:

Improve the longevity of the game Provide fun and value Allow our customers to create more value for each other.

Given the fact that the average number of players, viewership of major tournaments, and prize purses have all grown exponentially — it is undoubtedly clear that this update played a critical role in accomplishing these goals.

The most recent major tournament for CS:GO, ESL One, had over 27 million unique viewers watch the tournament via Twitch. At the peak of the event, there was over 1.3 concurrent viewers. This was an increase of more than 30% from the last ESL One Counter-Strike event just five months prior.

It is hard to give The Arms Deal update total credit for CS:GO’s success.

Instead, I would argue The Arms Deal update sparked the growth and popularity that we, now, associate with CS:GO.

Valve’s direct involvement and clear understanding of it’s community’s needs and wants is the main reason for their success. Not only do they routinely ship patches and updates to the game, they have also invested heavily into the ecosystem. For example, Valve has launched: “eSports Cases” for CS:GO, where a portion of the proceeds from sales goes towards prize purses for major tournaments.

Recently, Valve demonstrated just how in-sync they are with their community by reverting back to an older version of CS:GO after making some drastic changes to gameplay. There are very developers that are as in-tune with their community as Valve. For that reason alone, I am extremely confident that this is just the beginning for CS:GO.