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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

#81

Post by jjcm »

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 recommend changing it back to private after you use one of the tools, since scammers will try and target you if you have public high value items).

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

#82

Post by kube-system »

Loudergood wrote: post #63
mervz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate it all you want, but it's the sole reason Counter-Strike still exists today. Without skins, Valve would have shut the door on the game (and quite possibly the company entirely). Skins is literally a money printing machine.

You don't think they make more money with Steam?

Yeah... selling games other than CS. The reason CS is still under active development is because the market economy rakes in huge amounts of money. Some analysts have added up figure for the numbers of case keys sold, and those alone sell $1 billion / year. Plus they take cut of all of the other market transactions.

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

#83

Post by evilkorn »

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.

Made $350 selling all my crates when csgo 2 came out

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

#84

Post by kube-system »

pityJuke wrote: post #64
mervz wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hate it all you want, but it's the sole reason Counter-Strike still exists today. Without skins, Valve would have shut the door on the game (and quite possibly the company entirely). Skins is literally a money printing machine.

> sole reason Counter-Strike still exists today Every other live service manages with non-gambling skins. They have their own problems (usually around FOMO), but nowhere near the literal gambling that is CS. > Valve would have shut the door on the game In terms of not having any developers on it, sure, not impossible. > (and quite possibly the company entirely) Ahahahaha come on man, even without CS, Valve is one of…

> Every other live service manages with non-gambling skins.

Most games that are that old, don't survive.

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

#85

Post by ToDougie »

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

Used to play CS1.6 for 30-40 hours a week in a DFW-based server called A Better Place to Play. Every time as_oilrig showed up in the rotation, people would scramble to join me on the CTs. We had so many great strategies, we could win almost every round. (And mind you this was a 32-person pub.) Greatest of times, and only possible because the server had a dedicated community and our clan was meticulous.

Also there were some killer WC3 mod servers out there. My goodness the fun that was had....

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

#86

Post by ToDougie »

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…

Played an insane amount of WC3 mod with you guys. Thank you for all the memories.

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

#87

Post by daviding »

I had a mild addiction to this game about 7 or so years ago. Purely casual but lots of hours. I found it sort of a stress relief.

On the upside it gave me all sorts of free items as in-game 'drops'. I ignored them all at the time as didn't care about buying keys or cosmetics. Last year I saw that they'll worth a bunch of money now (!) and had about $1500 if sold on the steam marketplace. I got a Steam Deck with money from some of them, and it's basically my C:S 401k for steam games. What a weird world.

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

#88

Post by frou_dh »

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…

> If an FPS supports custom maps, it's inevitable that de_dust2 will get ported to it.

I gotta imagine that sucks to play in most of them. Maybe it occasionally 'works' in another game?

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

#89

Post by nullandvoid »

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…

Similar story, running modded COD4 dedicated servers largely got me into programming.

It's depressing the modern COD lobbies - chucked in with skill matched randoms on a small range of gamemodes, comms kept to a minimum so no one gets offended.

Then don't get me started how 50% of playtime is spent loading / in lobbies so eye balls on store can be maximised - I'll pass.

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

#90

Post by time0ut »

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…

I have so much nostalgia for that time period.

Counter-strike was my introduction to how the Internet and TCP/IP worked. I built my first PC to play it. I learned linux to run servers for it. It inspired me and my friends to learn C to try and make our own mod. I made a website for my clan, self hosted it, and registered a domain for it.

The community was incredible, partly because of the server browser, as you point out. There was also a massive IRC community around it that was way more cohesive than what exists today. So CS was also my on ramp to IRC and the technology communities there.

I don't play a lot of games any more. Every now and then I'll try something. I have the GPU anyway and everything works great on Linux now. I found out there are third party server browsers for CS2 with modded servers. It is so tiny compared to the old days, but they exist. I played around on a couple around a year ago and had a good time. If you are feeling nostalgic, you should check it out.

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