Gaming

as someone who has a few fortnite skins, I can speak to that side of the market. When you're playing a game like that, which is high budget and also free-to-play, it's easy to talk yourself into spending a few dollars. You get sick of using the default skins, everything else looks so cool, and you've been getting hours and hours of joy out of the game, haven't you? In a way, it's like you're showing support to the kindly devs that gave you this game for free. Then once you have a couple, you might get addicted to the rush of joining a party with your friends and hearing their reactions to your new skin or dance. Plus, if you're like me, you might just enjoy the inherent humor to watching Master Chief do a TikTok dance. It's actually enhancing your enjoyment of the game. Then, $50 later, you finally realize that you've been getting diminishing returns on the enjoyment with each purchase, or you just get bored with the game overall, so you finally stop spending money on new skins.

That's been my experience. When we talk about the potential for "billions", most of that money is coming from the whales. The people for whom money is no object, so they never hit the point where they realize that buying the skins isn't bringing them any real happiness anymore. And of course, in the CounterStrike market, these skins are resellable, so there's also a collector's mindset that takes hold. Either you treasure your collection of high value skins, or you get caught up in the rush of pulling an expensive skin from a crate because you know how much you can sell it for.

Unless it's the web host for the file, because the nft is just a link. The AWS outage showed that quite clearly.

Those still exist. Use the community server browser instead of matchmaking.

The Minigame maps in source days were crazy good!

counter-strike at this point is pretty much it's very own thing, if you change the game to much it won't be counter-strike and a lot of people don't play counter-strike to play a multiplayer shooter, they play it because its counter-strike, this makes it a pretty much ideal candidate to "just sell mtx with" and change the map pool a bit to keep the casual crowd happy.

cs itself evolved for a long time without any input by valve at all, the same way chess or modern soccer evolved without drastic changes.

The missing vehicles thing is a major one. Remember CS_Prodigy in 1.5/CS:S? Give the CTs back the APC. IDGAF how utterly useless it is.

CSGO was peak, before they added agent skins. Then competitive integrity was thrown out the window. CS2 actually downgraded a lot of the game, I'm still not sure it functions fully now.

They butchered community servers and don't seem interested in supporting that scene the same as in the past. So there's no "fun" until they give it to us. The game is just for siphoning money, more than it has been in the past. The entire industry is like that and new consumers are accustomed to it, so it's never going to change and it's probably why Valve jumped on CS again.

I don't think they got rid of it or made it slower. They did introduce a bug where you randomly stop when sliding IIRC. They've "fixed" this bug multiple times now, but it never actually fixed it. It could be actually fixed now for all I know, but I remember hearing that surf in CS2 is practically dead because it's bugged.