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Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

nytimes.com

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Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#151

Post by skeaker »

Gunax wrote: post #115
simlevesque wrote: post #32

Heads up to those who played CS:GO years ago and like money. I was a pretty active player from 2012 to 2014. Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.

I have some old crates, including the oroginal 'Weapons crate'. But looking at the steam store, it's only worth about $100 usd. Is there a more valuable one?

If your inventory is set to public you can calculate its value with a third party tool like backpack.tf.

Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#152

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

jjcm wrote: post #81
simlevesque wrote: post #32

Heads up to those who played CS:GO years ago and like money. I was a pretty active player from 2012 to 2014. Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.

Likewise for Dota 2 players. Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price. A friend of mine I used to play with had a $500 item. Getting rid of them may fund your game purchases for a bit. There are plenty of sites out there that can give you a value of your inventory. Just make sure your privacy settings for your inventory are set to "public": https://steamcommunity.com/my/edit/settings (though I'd reco…

> Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price

"Back in my day" you brought your own skins, maps, and mods to your clan's Quake 2 server and they'd be automatically copied-into other players' q2base profile directories when they connected: free and fast. Making skins in a cracked copy of Photoshop 5.5 or PaintShopPro (don't forget to save to PCX!) was trivial and because nothing really mattered no-one could possibly get angry at anything.

...but now you're telling me that if I want to add custom skins to CounterStrike I have to pay other people hugely inflated sums for the privilege of something that was still free and open to all only yesteryear? And we're surprised at how toxic the "gamer" community has become over the past 15 years since tradable lootboxes, cosmetics, and microtransactions became the norm?

Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#153

Post by protocolture »

zppln wrote: post #80
ViktorRay wrote: post #6

I’m glad Valve never sold out with Counter Strike. The game still has that raw brutal aesthetic that works so well with the gameplay. It’s a big part of the reason the game feels the way it does. Other games have lots of wacky skins and stuff but the Counter Strike games never had that and hopefully never will. Some of the unofficial servers are pretty wacky which is fine as they are unofficial.

The same Valve that one day decided to put ads in spawn on de_dust2? :) They pretty much refused to fix anything related to Counter-Strike until they realized they could use it to sell the equivalent of hats. I'd argue that the only reason Steam survived when it came out was because Valve forced people to use to play Counter-Strike. They've done better in the past 15 years though, I'll give them that!

I refused to install steam until I had to for my owned copy of CS Source.

Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#154

Post by coderenegade »

alexjplant wrote: post #9

I started with CS: Source and quickly got into 1.6 because of the more expansive funmaps and modding scene. It was like the Wild West (or literally as was the case with de_westwood) - Nipper's penchant for glitchy drivable vehicles, ridiculously huge maps with teleports galore and weird music, fy_iceworld, gun game... it was so wonderfully weird. The fact that the core of the game stayed the same for so many years wi…

When CS:Go came out, one of the younger guys on my team got into it, and invited me to come play some rounds at a LAN cafe. A lot of the skills were rusty, but the muscle memory was still there from playing the original starting from beta 0.7. He was stunned, not realizing that I had many more years of practice playing what was essentially the same game.

I don't really play games anymore. The last one I got into was Tribes: Ascend, and when that died, I never started another one. I enjoyed the community aspect of it, and I was never one for RPG elements in games that weren't RPG games, which seemed to become an increasingly emphasized strategy for driving engagement and retention.

I don't recognize the industry anymore, and while I used to feel sad about that, I've since come to realize that, for me at least, the experiences I had playing those games were as much a product of the time and place as they were about the game. I can't go back and see stormwind for the first time again, but I'm sure kids these days are experiencing their own version of that, even if it's not quite the wild west that it used to be. The gambling aspects can piss right off, though.

Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#155

Post by bigstrat2003 »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #47

Something that wasn't mentioned in the article is that Counter-Strike spawned the creation of the most iconic FPS map ever: de_dust2. If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it. There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans. I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by some…

Blood Gulch from Halo has to be up there, they remade it in a few of the other games due to its popularity.

Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#156

Post by Lammy »

jokoon wrote: post #145
rimunroe wrote: post #72

I will forever mourn the general demise of server browsers. Too many games require you to use matchmaking systems, which means it's very hard to build up a small community in-game anymore. You either have to rely on forming small parties with people you've stumbled upon one by one, or you have to seek out people from some much larger area like Reddit or Discord. It takes a lot of the serendipity out of the experience…

Toxicity is what killed the game for me. I was really involved in how serious cs was being played in 2002 or 2003, but valve did not seize the opportunity. 5v5 is the best format. Even today, the matchmaking is horrendous and toxic teammates ruin the fun. When you solo queue, individual performance is ignored, so you must carry your whole team if you want to gain rank. The game is great but generates too much frustra…

> toxic teammates ruin the fun

Relevant myg0t: https://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/171762 (2004, NSFW)

This Flash was my introduction to Refused though so that's cool

Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#157

Post by skeaker »

PicassoCTs wrote: post #150

Counter-strike is a industry nightmare. Endless fun, with almost no need for upgrades, hat-sales etc. A game like that eats int a whole industries subsections revenue for years and years.

I can't really agree. If you mean specifically the tac FPS industry, similar games have since broken through and do plenty well, such as Valorant. If you mean the games industry in general, CS isn't really relevant to its current state in the grand scheme.

Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#158

Post by qudat »

TheAceOfHearts wrote: post #47

Something that wasn't mentioned in the article is that Counter-Strike spawned the creation of the most iconic FPS map ever: de_dust2. If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it. There's actually a mini-documentary about the creation of de_dust2 [0] which I think will be of interest to FPS fans. I wonder if de_dust2 is the most played FPS map or if it has been dethroned by some…

Whenever I jump into CS I only play dust2. It’s such a perfect map.

I also have a soft spot for Aztec because of the rain. I would join empty servers just to hang out on Aztec for the aesthetic.

Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#159

Post by jccalhoun »

Melatonic wrote: post #25

1.5 was peak CS in my opinion. No shield bullshit and massive amounts of customization and maps and servers. as_oilrig ftw

jeepathon2k was peak CS.

Seriously though, I miss the VIP and hostage rescue modes. I guess hostage rescue is still there but hardly played.

Re: Counter-Strike: A billion-dollar game built in a dorm room

#160

Post by simlevesque »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #122
simlevesque wrote: post #32

Heads up to those who played CS:GO years ago and like money. I was a pretty active player from 2012 to 2014. Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.

We're in a bubble.

Oh, absolutely!
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