This completely ignores the fact that teenagers play the game, it’s essentially gambling, streamers spending decent time opening cases, FOMO, the status that comes with rare skins, skin markets and so on. I sorta of get what you’re saying insofar as not being PTW and cosmetics being the least obnoxious of this type of practice but it’s still super scummy. To the exclusion of CS2 and maybe a handful of other being free is the point, so they can get you into the slot machine that is these sort of mechanics and squeeze money from people (mostly kids). Don’t get me started on Valve generating billions from this and CS2 is still a mess.
This completely ignores the fact that teenagers play the game, it’s essentially gambling, streamers spending decent time opening cases, FOMO, the status that comes with rare skins, skin markets and so on. I sorta of get what you’re saying insofar as not being PTW and cosmetics being the least obnoxious of this type of practice but it’s still super scummy. To the exclusion of CS2 and maybe a handful of other being free is the point, so they can get you into the slot machine that is these sort of mechanics and squeeze money from people (mostly kids). Don’t get me started on Valve generating billions from this and CS2 is still a mess.