Valve vs The Gaming World
Tags: Digital Goods, Gaming, Future, Counter Strike, Valve

Valve vs The Gaming World

How CS:GO’s Approach to Digital Goods Trumps the Competition

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive revolutionized the video game industry when it came to creating microtransactions that wouldn’t affect gameplay but would still incentivize purchases. The CS:GO skin market is one of a kind, and while other companies have tried to emulate it, none of them managed to do so to Valve’s degree.

In this article, we’ll look at Blizzard, Ubisoft, Riot, and Epic to see how their offerings failed to live up to the CS:GO hype, and why CS:GO’s model is so hard to implement for others.

Using the information from Brownwen Grimes’ awesome GDC panel on economy design, we’ll discuss what Valve did right and what others did wrong. Let’s start with the basic differences between the two approaches and go from there.

To Each Their Own

We’ve outlined the CS:GO skin economy before, so we’ll keep it short this time. For players, skins are a way to modify the look of their weapons. These skins have no bearing on gameplay and can be sold and traded between players using the Steam Marketplace for the currency which can be used to buy other skins, games, and even VR Headsets.

Meanwhile, the likes of Overwatch, Rainbow Six: Siege, Valorant, and Fortnite all also have the basic same idea — skins to customize weapons. The problem? They’re not freely tradeable, they’re locked behind loot boxes and season passes. While in some cases, players can “grind” their way to other skins by destroying other skins for in-game currency, all skins are pretty much set in stone in terms of rarity and accessibility. Their only value? In-game.

Thus we come to the first crux of the problem. If I get a really popular skin in Fortnite, there’s no way to securely swap the skin with others — you can gift the skin to another player, but you have virtually no guarantee that the other player doesn’t renege on your deal all of a sudden. The other games don’t even have workarounds like this for trading. If you want to sell your rare skin, you can only do so by breaking the Terms of Service and selling your account.

This makes skins much less of a commodity, and more of a participation trophy. You play enough, and you’ll probably get a cool skin, which most of the time, you’re stuck with. Don’t like blue skins? Tough luck. Can’t really build an identity around it? You’ll need more money for that.

These skins thus become incredibly impersonal, they become achievement showcases rather than expressions of your visual and thematic affinities. This is further boosted by another aspect differentiating the two approaches.

One of A Kind

When watching Grimes’ video, you will notice the emphasis she puts on making every skin unique, not just in their design, but also by differentiating every skin with wear levels and pattern variations. This may seem like a gimmick to decrease the value of more worn skins at first, but it’s actually a way to increase the uniqueness of each skin. Some wear and pattern combos are capable of increasing a skin’s value exponentially. No one skin is the same as the other, and with customization options such as stickers (scratchable to achieve a unique look), StatTrak (tracking the number of kills with a weapon), and Name Tags, you can truly make your weapon feel like a thing you own.

An example of a name tag added to the weapon skin by its owner

While the other games sometimes offer similar solutions, they offer no real variation within each weapon skin. For example, the AWP | Asiimov, one of the most popular CS:GO skins, which people enjoy using both in its least and most worn variants. Compare that with the sameyness of any single Valorant skin, where you can end up in a match with 9 other players sporting literally the same skin as you, with no real differences will make you feel as if your skin was made by H&M.

The patterns are an even bigger deal. They can change a lot in how a skin presents itself. Sometimes it’s as subtle as the placement of a few buildings on a city landscape, other times they’re varying colour patterns that will completely change the way a knife looks. This means that the hundreds of skin designs can actually mean hundreds of thousands of variants, even when discounting wear. All of this works towards Valve’s goal as described by Grimes: to create a luxury good. CS:GO skins are like fine wine, collector items made with care to ensure every single one is, at least in some way, unique. The other companies instead produce repeatable, consumer-grade products. They’re usable and nice, sure. But they’re not unique, and that makes them feel artificial… for more than one reason.

A Labour of Love

Grimes places a lot of emphasis on the fact that Valve wanted the community to get involved with the skin creation process. While a lot of the skins in-game were created by Valve employees, more and more are being created by the community. Community skin creators reportedly earn 6 figures a year per in-game skin, making it a lucrative business opportunity for any up-and-coming artist.

On top of engaging the community in a unique way, this approach makes every skin tell a story of sorts. They’re more personal than the ones found in other games because they come from real people and represent their artistic influences and personalities. Artisanship over fabrication. Users appreciate that aspect of skins, and that definitely helps Valve sell the concept.

Redefining Digital Goods

The difference between Valve’s approach and the other can be summed up in three words: ownership, uniqueness, and community. Valve understood that in order to sell their goods, they needed to make them tangible. Thanks to Steam, Grimes’ and co. could play around with these concepts more than Epic, Riot, Blizzard, or any other company.

That allowed them to explore skins as luxury goods and see the factors that make them unique. Other companies never had that opportunity and decided to go for a far less intricate approach, that mind you, still works for them, but hasn’t created a whole new market.

With Epic looking to challenge Valve’s platform with a store of their own, who knows. Perhaps we’ll soon be living in a world where community-created skins will be bought and sold in exchange for video games and other digital products. But with nothing of the ilk on the horizon yet, what’s left is to applaud Valve for how well their design philosophy translated into the gaming world nearly 10 years after they first came up with their revolutionary concept.