How Much Money CS:GO Make In A Day?

It’s no secret that Valve Corporation is one of the major players in the video game industry. Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington, two Microsoft employees, founded the firm in August 1996. Half-Life and its 2004 sequel were the company’s first big successes. 

The Dota, Team Fortress, Portal, and Counter-Strike series are now the company’s most well-known titles. The latter of these actually started as a Half-Life fan mod, and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO), the fourth installment of the series, has developed into the dominant force in the competitive Esports market. 

Your mouth should drop when you realize how profitable this game has become for the publisher. Join us as we explore how Valve allegedly generates $54 million in monthly revenue from just in-game case sales. 

What Is CS:GO?

We should first define CS:GO and explain why it is such a major deal in the gaming industry before delving into how Valve has wrangled the wealth of a small country out of microtransactions. 

CS:GO is a video game that features two teams of five players on opposing Terrorist (T) and Counter-Terrorist (CT) teams. It was first launched in 2012 as the fourth major installment in the Counter-Strike franchise. 

A best-of-16-round format is used for each game, with rounds lasting two minutes. In order to win a round, the terrorists must either eliminate every Counter-Terrorist or successfully plant and detonate a bomb at one of the two designated bomb sites on each map. Defusing the bomb, eliminating every terrorist before they can plant the bomb, or finishing the round before the bomb is planted are the ways that Counter-Terrorists win rounds. 

The gameplay of CS:GO places more focus on quick, strategic bursts of action than the all-out Rambo style that casual gamers would be used to seeing, in contrast to other first-person-shooter (FPS) games like Call of Duty. 

The in-game economy, communication, accuracy, and quick reflexes all give the game a high skill ceiling, which is why its competitive scene has become so popular.

Headline events like IEM Katowice have started to blur the lines between competitive competition and entertainment extravaganza. CS:GO betting at Unikrn has become a popular way to increase the enthusiasm for tournaments of all skill levels across the globe. 

Since becoming free-to-play in 2018, CS:GO has often surpassed the one million player mark and smashed its all-time player record in the first few months of 2023. 

How do the game’s creators make money while it is totally free to download and play? 

One of the first businesses to fully embrace microtransactions in gaming was Valve. Microtransactions are transactions that gamers can conduct to exchange real money for virtual goods. These purchases in CS:GO take the shape of various decorative appearances (also known as “skins”) for the various types of weaponry in the game. 

They can then advertise them on Steam’s marketplace and exchange them for real money with other gamers. Because different skins have varying degrees of rarity, trading them on the market has grown into a significant source of income for some people. 

For comparison, the Blue Gem Karambit knife cost over $100,000 when it was offered on Steam.

How Much Money CS:GO Make In A Day?

So, with a blossoming player base and a potentially lucrative open marketplace – how much does Valve make off of CS:GO cases? 

YouTuber and skin trader Anomaly claim to have the answer. Working off of the calculations by user Fjedjik on the CS:GO Open Market subreddit, he has been able to work out how many cases are being opened and, with his own database and mathematical formula, has been able to work out how much the developers are making off of these purchases. 

In total, 458 million cases were reportedly opened by players between May 2021 and January 2023, according to Anomaly. That equals a daily average of 714,509 cases over the course of 641 days. Given that each case costs $2.50 to open, Valve might make up to $1,786,271.45 day. This amounts to $651,989,078.25 annually, or $54,355,263.16 on average per month.

This doesn’t even factor in additional costs Valve charges for CS:GO, such those for weapon name tags, and doesn’t even scratch the surface of the money the business brings in from its other properties, like Dota 2.