this is a rare interview of a csgo developer talking about csgo skins, csgo gameplay, and everything csgo from 2014. so many insane secrets behind the csgo skins economy! discussing csgo live on twitch: / ohnepixel GDC: / @gdconf
It's most mindblowing when ohne said there's only like 14 ppl that work on CSGO? This is indeed fking insane in terms of value per employee yet I wouldn't say they are complacent of it.
Its always been like that, valve simply gives 0 fucks about CSGO. Why put an actual development team behind a game that seems to be floating around and making decent profits even without being updated? With a bit of effort they couldve made this game into the e-sports breakthrough and the steam market a place for actual investors but instead they waited til the hype slowly died, competitors like Valorant arose, and the steam market evolved into a gambling site because with all the bugged and fucked up skins you can never tell when the next crash is going to be...
We have to realize that Valve is stupidly smart. If there is no update, it's for a reason, they don't want to make shit updates, they learn from mistakes, they try to implement old maps and listen to pros about different changes, they don't want to break balance. There is a reason there is still a good following
Lol not really. Every time a map has been added they add it to the rotation without proper testing so they can use those games to improve it. They're more reactionary than anything.
Also keeping people waiting build up the hype . Like eating sweets .. one may like eating sweets but give them too much of it they'll lose interest . Same for skin updates . and yeah operations are valued for skins too nothing else . It doesn't add anything significant gameplay wise .
@@SavouryLobster reactionary and smart . Let the community do the work of testing . Why waste time money and energy . Kind of like China smart .. copying and reverse engineering everything instead of reinventing the wheel .
So not only did they come up with the most automated way to create skins giving them billions of possibilities they then asked their community to do the heavy lifting for them. Holy shit they are genius.
@@davidmontgomery1442 nobody's forcing anyone to make skins... getting your skin picked is like winning the lottery, if someone set out with the goal of "I'm going to get my skin added to the game!" then they'd be delusional
@@davidmontgomery1442 how is a company saying "hey make a design for us and if we like it we'll buy the rights to it and pay you 200k" exploitative like there's some logical jump there that I'm just not understanding? your statement would be true if they used/benefitted from any/ALL skins that people made or something? Valve is not making money off of skin creators that they don't pay. if you're a graphic designer by profession, you can once again totally just not make a skin for Valve. Your strawman just doesn't even make any sense. *How* is that the same thing in any way? Working a job is something you need to live. People don't typically subsist off of entering art contests and hoping they win the 1/10000000 prize. It's something they do as a passion project if they have interest. Do you think the game would be better off if Valve took the approach of making every single skin in-house? Skins would suck and people would be constantly whine about how skins don't come out frequently enough/are boring/why can't I make a skin it'd be way better than this
A Dota 2 like big prize pool actually would be a problem for CS:GO. In Dota 2, The International prize pool is so high that no other tournament is important, just the international matters for the teams. Imagine a world with just one big CS:GO tournament a year, the competitive scene wouldnt be as strong as it is today.
@@leeroysass2426 Casuals don't care about that, and Tryhards can go to Faceit and Valve encourages platforms like Faceit because they hand over the responsibility for anti-cheat intrusiveness to an outside company.
Its so amazing to see someone be this enthusiastic as ohne about something. I have to say I was really excited and fascinated to see this video too, sat through the whole thing. Been playing since 2014 and trading skins and stickers too
24:50 After so many hours of just looking at skins and multiple variations to buy, this brought tears to my eyes. I don't know why, either I felt super silly or happy or both
the idea of that 'one person is going to be ahead of you on the ladder and one person behind' is such a smart pitfall that they avoided. when everything is valued because of the same things, the people who actually hold all those values at the same time become fewer and further between until you end up with no way to trade anything without having someone get screwed over. i also think it created the perfect world for expensive sticker crafts; people who value something like the heritage/nostalgia or super high floats can use stickers to add the aspects of rarity, aesthetics, or uniqueness through that system
@@OKKULTISM bro ive been buying x4 high tier kato 14 holo in the past by adding people that have crafted them in 2014 and gave them a 100$ knife for their x4 st dig holo ak redline and sold for 4k back then. Now it costs 40k
18:47 when I first started playing like 8 years ago, my mate told me grenades and bomb explosions damage the weapon skins lmao. I also didn't know how to join a game and my first ever game I played was a community server that took me 15 minutes to download all the textures and shit.
Shows that ohne is new to the valve scene if he hasn't heard of gamebanana. I remember dowloading all sorts of models and skins for 1.6 and css. Hell even for CS GO before the arms deal update. Good times.
@@alexandreiss0agr276 yooooooo dual mp5 man you unlocked me so many memories, now i need to go find somewhere models for awp crossbow, dual mp5 and sword for knife and hop into 1.6
The way she explains how they needed the different types of value of skins (i.e. aesthetics, scarcity, quality, etc.) to be orthogonal so that people would be more willing to trade them. People wilth different priorities of value (i.e. one person prefers the aesthetic of a weapon, another person prefers quality & scarcity) will feel better about engaging in the marketplace, whether that's selling or trading. They literally built an economy from scratch for what are basically pixels. This is crazy.
They are unlikely to release a new counter strike now they’re just going to keep updating GO. There’s already rumours of when source 2 drops the game will be renamed to just counter strike. And if they do for some reason eventually want to make a new cs then they would have to find a way to incorporate the existing skins into the new game. Personally I think there’s way to much risk involved in creating a new cs as it could instantly ruin the economy they worked hard to create and if the new game is not received as well they are probably still likely to lose a large percentage of csgos player base as they will more than likely no longer be adding new content to csgo.
@@woodygz9746 I’m not saying what I want to happen I’m saying what is likely to happen if they were to release a new CS… CSGOs economy would tank regardless of how the new game is perceived. Too many people would panic sell their skins.
@@DEN8Y they already said on another topic that they already have found a way to put old skins in the new game source 2 should be there 1-2 years probably
I was going to look up the original talk but I'm glad I watched this instead. I laughed my ass off hearing your commentary and how excited you get over skins. I really respect the level of passion and dedication you have. I wish I bought more skins back then. I remember thinking 15 dollars was way too expensive for a desert eagle skin (blaze). I was going to buy the glock fade too, but decided against it. Should have went with my gut and love for skins lol
Guys, she's not only smart because of her work on the economy around the game, but she's actually super smart when talking about decisions and interpreting data. You can see that when she answer the question about stickers being polarizing, she already understood back then that on the internet there's always a community who's vocal and another who just silently enjoys the game and would wait the release to form an opinion. She knew the person questioning was talking about a small anecdotal experience and was so sure their decision was right. It's also baffling how open and receptive she is taking about this compared to other companies (also happy where she works), it's clear she's talking about something she enjoys. It's nice to hear a human speak compared to all the corporate talks you see elsewhere were they speak as if everything is good, talk for hours but don't say anything, nothing is backed by data and they demonstrate there's 0 thought process on their decisions other than "someone else did it and it worked, we're not here to innovate but earn money with 0 risks". I really enjoyed listening to her.
I remember in 2010 when I first started trading on TF2 I had a dream of becoming an economist at Valve for this exact reason--such a cool team to be a part of in those early days especially
it's interesting to see how they came up with it all . I am glad they introduced agents. The skin itself is not important to me - it's the unique voice chat that I love the most. I could live with having the same basic models with ability to make slight tweaks , such as different colour helmet visors or type of camo (as an example of CT), but the voices is where they really nailed it, and it does not interfere with gameplay. It's the voices that I care more about. I had a break from CS GO and when I went back to it month before the CS2 was released, i was blown away when I first heard the Australian Bloody Darren voice. Went to the market right away.
Actually a big thanks should go to third party skin sites where you can get real money for your items . Steam community market is kinda worthless for players . But valuable for valve .
They know all about it. Before CSGO existed there was a thread on the steam community forums that had a lot of input, many of us explained how important extremely rare items were and the supply demand dynamic etc, but the other big thing that me and others made obvious was how important having turnover and data was. They didn't give us an item stats tool though, which was requested. Private inventories is possible while also having full stats of item existence.. instead we have to guess and assume there isn't some private inventory with 1000000 Kato 14 capsules
Holy shit, someone actually got the sound right in a reaction video. EVERYONE have a huuuuge gap between video and mic volume making it way too hard to either hear the video or not have your ears blown off whenever the content creator decides to talk. THANK YOU, to whoever made sure this was done right. It's still quite skewed towards content creator being more loud and pronounced, and it still annoys me but at least it's not as bad as most others.
Steam marketplace exploits networks effects in perfection to generate value to players and themselves at the same time. No new invention of digital marketplaces, but they strengthen the value to an extreme by providing interactions and trading between players.
Gamebanana has been around for a long long time it was where you could download skins for your guns for cs:cz, 1.6 and source. It used to be named FPSbanana. However, they branched out from there to include more games than fps's. FPSbanana and gamebanana used to also be where you would download maps for your servers and if you wanted to download a map so you didnt have to wait for the crappy game server to download the map to your pc. THE MORE YOU KNOW!
This woman was thinking ahead of the time man. All CSGO devs were ahead of their time. The thumbnail of this video is so true. Id prefer blacksiimov over normal one and battlescared flashback skins
Wow, what a great content you brought up there. Didn't know this conference exists. I was in wonderland too just by listening to her ❤ Thanks for bringing it up again to show it to us. Greetings from Cologne, Germany
I would love to see the slide, where they talk about how cheaters are profitable and one should not ban them totally. Better ban a few of them periodically, so that they invest again and again. While annoying us normal players again and again...
dude the little bits of money they make on a pass versus the effect it has on their reputation is unbalanced too many hackers and the whole house of cards comes crashing down. besides do you realise that csgo rakes in some 95 million a month from skin transactions these days ? bruh they dont need more profits on a ten year old game. its very profitable w/o the extra 5million from hackers accounts and thats a generous estimate
Honestly I hate the fact I can't get a skin I like because anything decent is over $50-$100 (which i cant jystify spending outright) but if I get a good skin, then it feels way more special tbh
I doubt skins would ever have become so popular if that was the case. The appeal of skins is an investment you can show off in game but you can sell them if you get bored. I'm not going to buy a 500$ knife just to not be able to use it
Factory new would be more common and battle scared would be the rarer ones So you could have gotten a skin and over time the more you played with it the rarer it got Man ngl I kind like the scared and stained skins they look cool
this is soo nicely played, a genius invention and perfect data analysis and adapting to the findings. BTW: Today it's breaked over 1.5 Min players: Which is ca. 15 x the amount of the chart of 2014 holy shit! - More players means more money in game ;)
has no one opened up about how the prices/payment work for the people who get a skin in the game? she's a straight game economy Yoda and people who have played warzone will know all about character skins Rose skin for example lol
when she talks about new weapons she was talking about CZ, revolver and other new weapons that werent in CS before. Not implementing new weapons you have to buy completely.
i dont think ohne realized it took them two days just to finish the lighting effect for a skin of a weapon. hundreds of skins and many guns... thats a lot of work
they know about the hyper sought after skins and don't worry about not being able to list them on steam market because the percentage of items there are for that is too minuscule in comparison to the overall market and it fits their free market strategy because its only the players who see that knife as $1,000,000
unfair if not even a little bit of a market manupilation if you see the data they got (43:12) vs. the date they give the buyers/sellers on the community market don't ya think? Interesting video tho for sure
Oh man this was the hardest watch man, ohne just pausing and having a full 2 minute stroke and just ending on “…. JA??” And continue like nothing happened
The market is food for those standard 0.01-2,000.00 value skins the rare uber price ones need those sites. And those sites also need people bloating them full of 1$ plus skins for real cash instead of steam wallet
Execution much later happens for so many games. I seen how World of Tanks is developed than i saw the stuff they had finished and two years later it was in update.
When i started watching this i was like "She looks ight..." and when i finished i was like "Damn shes hot!". Crazy how intelligence and the things someone says influence how visually attractive you find someone.
I watched about 16 minutes of this and then checked how much time was left on the video..... I'll be real though, she doesn't seem to be as passionate about this presentation as you would expect a game dev to be when talking about their game.
gamebanana AKA Fpsbanana has been around longer than you and i for sure. 2001 if im not mistaken and was widely uses back in source & 1.6 for skins & maps before skins were preloaded into the game.
