![]() ![]() This kind of betting is far from mainstream, but plenty of people are figuring it out. Valve has sold 21 million copies of the game and made $567 million in total revenue from the title since it debuted almost four years ago, according to research firm SuperData, and a range of websites now let players trade or sell skins, or use them to gamble. Because there’s a liquid market to convert each gun or knife back into cash, laying a bet in skins is essentially the same as betting with real money.ĬS:GO’s popularity skyrocketed along with the skins gambling markets. People buy skins for cash, then use the skins to place online bets on pro CS:GO matches. For CS:GO, the introduction of skins led to a thriving gambling market. Reasonable people can debate whether competitive video gaming is a sport, but it has at least one thing in common with football, basketball, and soccer: People like to bet on the outcome. ![]() But the reference to black markets was prescient. When it introduced the skins, Valve said in an announcement that the online arms bazaar would let Counter-Strike players “experience all the thrills of black-market weapons trafficking without any of the hanging around in darkened warehouses getting knifed to death.” It was supposed to be a joke. Today, there are 380,000 people around the world playing the game at any given time. ![]() Within two years, the number of people playing CS:GO had grown 1,500 percent. In-game purchases weren’t new, but the cash trade was Valve’s special twist. ![]()
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