Last week brought a new update to Counter-Strike 2 that, among various tweaks to the game, added a brand-new way to obtain the game's latest set of gun skins. The set is called the Genesis Collection, though sadly Valve neglected the chance to name them all after Phil Collins songs, and can only be bought through an item called the Genesis Uplink Terminal: which is kind of a case, but not as we know it.
A quick primer before we get into the functionality. Both CS:GO and CS2 award their players weapon skins or cases for hitting various in-game milestones. The way they've been awarded has changed over time, and the game's added additional cosmetics like graffiti, but these gun skins are the bedrock of a vast marketplace, the true size of which is unknown. And yeah: the ones you get just for playing can look nice, but generally hold little value, while the finishes worth hundreds or even thousands of dollars are almost exclusively found in weapon crates (unlocked with a case key that costs $2.50).
Weapon crates are pure RNG, and have their share of critics: some would say that the upfront cost and unknown outcome make them gambling. The new Genesis Uplink Terminal seems like a response to such concerns, inasmuch as it removes that upfront cost: but hold off on the celebrations. The Terminal also adds some potentially hefty backend costs, and one player posted a screenshot of it offering a rare M4A4 for just under $1,600.
You're awarded one Terminal weekly for playing the game, and get to "unseal" it for free. The game then switches to a view of an encrypted laptop connected to an arms dealer, who over text chat offers you a gun skin—and a price. You can refuse the offer, and the arms dealer will make another, up to a maximum of five offers (some players have reported receiving six offers, and it may be that on rare occasions you can get even more). But you can't go back to previous offers and, if you turn down enough offers, you get nothing.
One final kink is that any gun you buy comes with an Original Owner Certificate, which is lost if the gun is sold or traded.
In my attempt the first gun actually turned out to be the best the dealer had to offer: a Restricted M4A1-S that he wanted roughly $8 for. I turned it down, for science, and the subsequent offerings were lower rarity guns with much reduced prices, the cheapest being 21 cents. None especially grabbed me, and so I got to experience the Terminal's endpoint, where it self-destructs and that's that.
Oh and: Valve being Valve, you can sell your unwanted Terminals rather than opening them: they're currently going for $5.35.
Costly Business
The Terminal's appeal or otherwise is in this transparency. Rather than paying a fixed amount for a guaranteed if random reward, players now get a chance to buy specific weapons with an upfront pricetag. I found my first experience of it quite stark. I've bought plenty of crate keys in my time but the game just showing me a desirable gun, and requiring I deposit $10 in my Steam account if I want it there-and-then, felt a bit like being strong-armed.
Before we get on to the community reaction, one of the issues here is that Valve hasn't been totally transparent about how the Terminals work when it comes to things like the pricing. The prices are dynamic, but it's unclear what the driving factor is: presumably player behaviour, with guns that are generally rejected dropping in price, and the more desirable ones either holding value or in some cases increasing. But we don't know. I have asked Valve to provide some clarification on such, and will publish any response.
As ever, the type of player who cares enough to post online is self-selecting, but broadly speaking players seem unhappy with the new system. The most common complaint is about the wild prices some are seeing, but oddly enough there's also resentment about the fact that, with the weapon crates, at least you had a chance at something good for a few bucks.
"Aside from me finding the case options rather lacking in appeal, I'm not paying 1000+ bucks for a skin," says DankMemeRipper1337. "With the random loot box, you had at least a chance to open something good—albeit the numbers not being in your favour at all. Now you need the gambling luck, a lot of money and the offer is also one and done. Feels rather predatory and kinda poorly implemented."
"Possibly the worst monetization strategy I've ever seen in a video game," says jmsdnt. "The whole reason cases were so enticing to open was because of the chance your three dollars could net you a much more expensive item. Now your rolls are free, with still crap odds, but you have to pay hundreds to keep the rare roll? Who thought of this?"
"Somehow asking for 1500 USD for a Stattrak red feels so much worse than opening 1500 USD worth of cases," says zrx74, a widely shared sentiment. There's obviously plenty more where all that came from, but perhaps we should change lanes for a more academic reaction.
"[The Genesis Terminal] might not be a loot box in a traditional sense, but signs point to there being a possible chance of problematic consumption, compulsive behaviour and as always, no check on underage consumption," writes Harshdeep Mangat, a doctoral researcher specialising in responsible gaming. Mangat adds that elements like the Original Owner Certificate and re-rolls create FOMO, and says the Terminal "does nothing to address the tradable nature of skins and third-party websites using the Steam API to allow users (including underage users) to use skins as tokens for gambling."
The sense here is that Valve is testing the waters with the Genesis Terminal and, from Mangat's perspective, are looking for ways of "keeping the FOMO and compulsive behaviour mechanics into their (non-loot box) micro transactions. This would ensure their users keep coming back for more purchases while they avoid complying with as many (present or upcoming) regulatory or legal frameworks around the world."
This isn't the first time Valve has tried to dance around the edges of legislation concerning loot boxes and gambling: back in 2019, CS:GO added an X-Ray container in France whereby users could see the item before paying to open the case. The Genesis Terminal has not replaced CS2's weapon crates, which still abound, but is clearly going to be a big part of the game's future—and there are major questions about how it will affect things like the third-party skins market, and even whether this monetisation strategy does get far enough away from gambling.
As a long-term player, I've dabbled in skins and have some pretty nice ones just by virtue of being around for a while. I've never spent huge amounts in Counter-Strike but, maybe two or three times a year, enjoy spending $10 or $20 on keys and working through some of the crates you accumulate. It never especially bothered me that most of the rewards weren't so great, because I love the game, and every so often you do score big. But there's no world in which CS2 offers me a gun for hundreds of dollars and I buy it. I can only imagine it's the same for an awful lot of those 30 million monthly players.
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