Valve employee reveals secrets behind CSGO's economy

this is literally the people the woman that will be talking is the person behind csgo skins who pushed it forward you will see just a reminder before we start to silence your cell phones this is her I'm Bronwyn I'm a technical artist at valve and today I'm going to be discussing the what's hows and whys of the content that drives the Counter-Strike I'll give it a try economy so what is this talk I should first start by telling you what it isn't I'm not going to spend a long time talking about the advantages of adding an economy to your game I'm going to assume that the reason you're here is you already have an idea about that if on the other hand that is something you want to learn some some more about we recently give a series of talks at the steam developer days on economies chat just so you know this look Market boom it talks about skins and everything this is bro this is you see the the thoughts behind and that's what it will explain maybe why wife does certain things with skins and if they don't just watch it economy so what is this talk I should first start by telling you what it isn't I'm not going to spend a long time talking about the advantages of adding an economy to your game I'm going to assume that the reason you're here is you already have an idea about that if on the other hand that is something you want to learn some some more about we recently give a series of talks that this team developer days on economies all that content is freely available to watch on YouTube so just have over to steamedebase.com for some links so instead this talk is about how we generated a large volume of content with a really small team in order to Kickstart our economy I'll be discussing the things that our customers value is it okay if I pause a lot chat if I can give my input CS go team it is I think if you if you do the calculations amount of money earned per employee bro CS go is gonna be probably number one probably number one the amount of money that they generate with csgo cases with the Steam Community Market with cs go is ridiculous and the team that works on CS go is a handful it is ridiculous the team is so small this is why things are moving so slow it is nuts I think is it like 14 people or something it's literally a handful ridiculous economy content and how that information is helping us continue to make good decisions going forward Counter-Strike is an online multiplayer game it's a team-based first-person shooter and it's had several versions over the last 14 years Counter-Strike Global Offensive is the latest greatest version like we do with our other products we use steam to update CS go regularly as we strive to create the best experience possible in a multiplayer game a big part of having a good experience is provided by other players our customers generate a huge amount of value for each other just by participating in the game we want to encourage them to keep doing that the way that we encourage them is just by providing a bunch of fun and value to them and more importantly by making it easy for them to provide a bunch of value to each other involve products like Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 we found that a great way to help meet all these goals at once is to add an economy to the game we can measure the success of our economy by checking in just on a few broad metrics and they're maybe not the ones that you'd expect after all adding the economy isn't a goal in and of itself we're adding an economy in service of our other goals so the kinds of things that we're going to check on are things like player numbers player retention and individual play time because after all if our customers are having fun they're going to keep coming back for more that's me personally bro if CS go wouldn't have skins oh bro I what would I be doing what would I be doing Chad I wanna I would love to see a second Universe where where I'm living without me as a high school kid having found out about skins and going down that roadway it's just nerding out on skins and everything what would I be doing both McDonald's bro I mean McDonald's it's it's McDonald's why not maybe Starbucks no I probably would be it guy Microsoft something not gonna lie since Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 both have thriving economies we were able to crimp a bunch of ideas from them they both used multiple channels for Distributing items to their players this gives customers lots of options for getting items having lots of ways for customers to interact with the economy is a big positive because it means a broader participation and economies are essentially multiplayer games the more people participating the more fun it is in both Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 not every item is available through every channel this is perfect when the goal is to provide lots of different ways to interact with the economy and to see how our customers want to consume content but it's really difficult to directly compare the value of items in these different categories and at this point in csgo's economy design discussion figuring out the value of individual items was actually really important because leading aside the how for the moment we still weren't sure what our customers wanted to consume so let's focus for a second on the marketplace this is one of the ways that our customers can get out the content customers can list items from their inventories for sale for steam wallet funds the listings are in real currency amounts and they're set by the Lister because identical items can be listed for different amounts there's a constant downward price pressure as the price pressure makes the supply and demand at a given price point equalize so as a company we had a unique opportunity this was the first time that we were launching an economy since the market went live we decided that CS go would become our first game in which every item can be placed on the marketplace and individual items can't be bought any other way in fact the only thing that we plan to sell directly were the keys used to open our case drops so in this proposed market-centered economy the supply of items comes from our players they come from in-game drop so the more players we have playing the more Supply there is the demand also comes from our players they're always going to purchase things that they feel are being sold for a fair price and with enough listings the downward price pressure of the free market is going to ensure their fair price I always wonder if the Cs go team knows about the craziness going on 100 right that a Titan holder is worth fifty thousand dollars that there's a knife that's worth 1.5 million dollars because steam of course they have a market cap two thousand dollars or whatever of course they do yeah 100 probably right I wonder if everybody working on CS knows about it though I don't know found so this sounded like a great way to Simply ask our customers what they value so what did we decide to ship what the CS go Dot Game banana that's a real site bro I feel like I'm always getting hacked when I see these links game Banana bro I clicked on it once and it put out my my Malwarebytes uh thingy it's got game but not legit Urban Assault bro what is the skin though could make weapon skins character customization wait wait oh this is so interesting Chad look here she talks about character customization but agents got released so much later it's crazy look they have the thoughts and wow execution much later so what did we decide to ship we could make weapon skins character customization wow we could do new ones now she says something like shoes and then next month they really let's see or we could just do cosmetic mesh changes to existing weapons all these things have been modded by CS players in the past in fact all the examples that I just showed are Community mods from game Banana so clearly there is a demand for customization whatever it was that we decided to ship we needed to create a lot of items in order to fill out the economy so it's important that we make it as easy as possible to do so and in keeping with our goal of helping our players generate value for each other we'd like to make it possible for community members to contribute items to the game and make money from their in-game sales we also need a lot of variety in order to figure Workshop as we know it today you upload your skins create Community create skins and you get Juiced of course the numbers are not out there how much you make from having a skin in the game right but bro it's it's what our customers want we know that economies are more fun when there are more people participating they're also more fun when there are lots of items to compare and lots of different ways to compare them yeah so we didn't want to just create items with a broad range of value we also wanted to create items that could be valued in different ways because players with different priorities can actually care about different aspects of the same item yeah yeah pattern float condition some guy cares about the the the the nice pet on one guy cares about the nice float there's High float collectors there's low float collectors there's blue gem collectors there's a crimson web collector oh my God she [ __ ] they are so smart when it comes to building an in-game economy higher bro Priceless what she's talking to her knowledge Priceless I want to keep these goals in mind as we figure out which thing we want to start with the way we choose which of our options to go with is to assess the benefits associated with each type of product and then compare that against the risks associated with shipping it and the reasons oh my I'm so happy that we're watching this right now hearing this from the people behind the game chat is she still working at CS go 100 right bro look at this they talk about agents the risk versus the value oh my God to actually complete the task at the time csgo was actually a really small team our our team consisted of two technical artists and that's the whole list we were pretty resource limited so let's take characters for example we know that customizable characters in TF2 and Dota 2 are really valuable and popular but they work best when there's lots of chances to see the customization in Dota 2 the game is top down so you get to see your character all the time and in TF2 although it's a first person game there are taunts and kill cams that give you lots of opportunities to see your customization or show it off to other players Cisco is also a first person game but we don't have taunts so the chances to show off your customization are actually a lot fewer than our other products and so the value here isn't maybe as high as we first hoped there's a lot of challenges here and there's a big risk that we can make team identification difficult since CS go is a team-based game team ID is a really big part of having a good experience so it's possible that someone could have a customized character be really happy that they had something different and unique but they made everybody else that they were playing with less happy because it was more difficult for everyone else to tell friend from foe it's also it's funny how she talks about the negatives of Agents but now Zoom forward to 2020 2022 and we have agents oh bro this is so exciting so exciting a big resource investment not only do we have to take time to try and solve our team ID problems but there's a lot of content that needs to be created and it's fairly complicated content with our small team it would take a really long time to make enough content to be able to ship the economy that's bad for us because we'd like to ship something as soon as possible especially something that we have doubts about because then we can get data back that either validates our decision making or indicates a different direction that we ought to go so on the whole it doesn't seem like characters were the best place to start interesting what about new weapons it could be really fun having a lot of gameplay variation on the other hand our players practice intensely with their favorite weapons right down to learning The Recoil patterns so that they can learn to compensate they're not going to throw away all that time investment and try something new just for the sake of variety that means if we realize they considered oh my God I mean I I probably this means she just put it in the list right so just so they considered it but bro this means you can you can buy an AK on the market right you can buy an RVP on the market and then people have default guns and then there's guns that you can get for for money lol imagine imagine bro holy [ __ ] with me weapons they have to have a unique tactical value that's going to attract players to them and really there's only so many different options that we can provide that are meaningful in variety and so actually the value of shipping weapons goes down the more of them we ship which is directly counter to our goal of providing lots of items there's also a risk anytime we ship new weapons that we're going to destabilize competitive play that could potentially make our customers so unhappy that they just leave the game and never come back exactly and that's the worst outcome that we can think of there's a fair amount of resources required to do weapon balancing to attempt to mitigate that risk on top of just the content words so again it looks like new weapons are maybe not our best place to start so what about weapon mesh changes so I think she meant unboxing is stock unboxing and you uh across not across here unboxing a holographic whatever it's called unboxing is silencer and then you can apply it oh bro imagine if if on the team there were actually some people trying to push it forward and now CS go CS go would have not been the same of course not it wouldn't have been popular it wouldn't have been compatible for a pro Plano everybody would have been pissed it would be paid to win it's actually a surprising amount of benefit here after all if you're changing your weapon it's something you're holding in your hands so even from the first person view you see your customization all the time it's also something that could make other players more happy that you have it not only do they get to see something new and cool because you're walking around with a weapon but if you drop it into the world someone else can pick it up and play with it and have a positive experience we did have a couple of doubts though so let's just see what those could be so we actually got pretty far along this path we customized the heck out of the AK-47 we played with it in game and we did find that our concerns were validated the first wait was this guy what's his name the guy that does the mods with like the what is it like there hey what's up Liechtenstein exactly brought at least the shot used to work this is exactly what he's doing no the RVP blah blah blah look at this AK bro magazine drum magazine RVP scope on an AK a oh my God the thing is that weapon identification is made a lot more difficult with all these different Silhouettes it's super hard to tell just by looking at these guys that the functionality for every one of these weapons is identical and that brings me to my second point we were a little bit worried about how it would feel to have different components that didn't actually affect gameplay yeah and the answer is that it felt really artificial in the real world if you changed out things like stocks and grips the weapons recoil and accuracy would change and the experience of getting weapon components that didn't affect the Gameplay at all was actually kind of disappointing so we reassessed the risk even upwards from where we thought it was there's also a bunch of work here obviously just to make the components so that leaves us with weapon scans at this point we were getting actually really concerned because how many different camouflage weapons weapon skins here we are can we make that people are really going to care about but as we got further along in gathering reference we discovered that there's a whole world out there we weren't even aware of people make crazy things for their weapons everything from uh intricate Victorian scroll work right up to straight up graffiti these things are essentially just blank canvases except there's room for Whimsy that's not the case with their weapon mesh changes where those things have to be based on real world components for weapon skins we can make pretty much whatever we can imagine so the benefit is a lot greater than we first thought they're also not very yeah they had already the idea for the Desert Eagle Blaze album risky there's a little bit of risk that the color changes would make the weapon identification a little more difficult but on the whole it's nothing compared to our other options and then there's just the work of making the textures Which is less than any of other our other options it's also really easy for the community to make these easier than anything else so we have a pretty clear winner in the real world weapon finishes come in a vast array of styles and colors so we already had a really good indication of how far we could go with creating variety now we just needed a way to make a lot of things really quickly since both our artists were technical artists we did a very typical Tech art thing instead of starting to concept what the weapon finishes might look like we jumped right into the task of trying to make them easier to produce we started with the basic idea painting detail into textures takes a long time it's a lot of work and doing that on a large number of items seemed really inefficient so we wanted to automate the process since csgo's art style is fairly realistic we started by taking a look at real world reference paint wears off metal in a really predictable way so there are certain effects that we know we want to reproduce for one thing it chips off the exposed corners and edges it was quickest where it gets the most contact and grime and discoloration decree in the cavities and another thing is that when people paint their weapons they typically don't and here comes float into play wow they take it from the real life reference your gun wears down you they they check where the usual wearing spots are from IRL examples and they apply that in the game boom and it is that way on the m4a4 things that are more worn in game will be more worn that are that are one that easily get worn out IRL those spots as well are put by Vive as well that they get faster one the the higher the floaters bro this is ridiculous bro paint the whole thing they're really careful not to get paint in the mechanism for obvious reasons so each weapon has its own characteristic areas where the substrate that's the original surface of the weapon is always visible so in this case only there's the receiver the grip and they're too excited painted what did she say I can't don't I can't miss a singular second sorry it's only there's the receiver the grip and the butt stock have been painted there is one thing about this example that isn't ideal though and it has to do with scale this has a really durable paint on it and so the way the paint chips off is in these kind of uh larger chunks that looks pretty cool on a rifle but if you try to apply that to a pistol it might look out of scale and that's an important distinction because we want to shift as general a solution as possible whatever we make it has to apply to everything so Chad I really wonder if she talks about the idea of whether because it's what's the number one question if you buy your first expensive skin you just booted upstairs for the first time number one question is will my gun go from factional to battle scarred if I play with it right I was wondering when I had my first skin everybody had that question I'm wondering whether they considered implementing that I think because it sounds like a valid idea so we kept looking through our reference and we found an example where the where pattern is filled with these smaller size scratches this indicates that this has a lower quality paint but this scale of detail is going to work well on every type of weapon that we have so we're going to try and Target this look wow it's pretty easy to replicate all of these features as long as we have good enough information about the topology of the mesh in fact the most important things to know are just the cavity and the occlusion that's going to tell us our low points and our high points for the mesh so that we can figure out where the paint should ship first scratches we can just tile a texture over the entire weapon we can start by just combining the cavity and the occlusion the brightest areas are the places where the paint should wear off first this is a pretty soft blend though and our scratches need to have hard edges so we can just use a smooth step in the Shader to adjust the contrast for the artists in the audience a smooth step is really similar to photoshop's levels operation so this gives us their blend between our paint and our original substrate Now's the Time to bring in our cap our Grime we can just do that using the cavity that tells us where to place the grind and the grime itself is another tiling texture similar to the scratches so next we'll add in the ambient occlusion to get the paint and the substrate to sit in the same world together it's already looking pretty good there's one seven year old video this is life problem though and that's that there are a couple areas where we have some markings and etchings on the original weapon that really ought to show through I don't think you can see it because it's a bit dark but trust me they're there we want to see those even over the paint so the cheapest thing we could think of was just to add them to the ambient occlusion since that's just getting multiplied over the surface of the paint anyway we can get our details back in dark over the top so another thing that we saw in our reference was that the paint wears off quickest where it's touched the most there's no way to know where things get touched just from the topology of the mesh it has to do with human interactions so we need to have an artist's control over this we added a wear influence texture that is artist created for the most part we just grabbed details from the original Source texture psds and then we just painted a couple of Blobby details over the group in the magazine with these big soft brushes we spent hardly any time adjusting this mask at all and this is the effect that it produces you can see especially on the grip the paint is wearing where it's touched the most is that how it's actually executed now I don't think so right I don't remember seeing like a like it like a hand grip on the battle scar M Force no is this is the final version let me check because I don't know if this was before or after the actually let me check M5 for Howell no I guess zarka High float abom suck highest foot Circa true right there little dick AKA this is right with the hand grips around exactly the same she's interesting so let's add lighting so at this point we've authored almost no new content by hand the only things that we've created are really the grime texture and the scratch texture and those things are going to be reused over every single weapon in the game anyway the fun part is since the Shader has a wear input we can just animate that input and see the wear crawl over the surface wow and this reminds me immediately of course this is exactly chat what does this remind you of the Cs go stash of course is exactly how Cisco stash visualizes as well I don't know if csgo is involved with the site but look probably not but boom exactly this reminds me of this right here suck oh bro yes sir yes sir you can get a wide variety of looks just by editing a single Shader parameter is around this time that we started testing the content in game under real game lighting and what we found was a little bit concerning so here's a typical first-person view of a weapon I'm showing it without the world or the view model arms just so you can focus on what's important you can see that the way that this texture has been authored it calls out all of the edges and plane changes so that even if we disable directional lighting all of the plane changes are obvious and you can understand the form really well but what happens when we add our paint onto it a lot of those planes my skin straight up disappear even with directional lighting we still have a problem surfaces that have the same normal but different spatial offsets still look as though they've been merged into one of our cars was a big model making nerd so as we were figuring out the paint system he recommended that we check out work by mink Jimenez I recommend this to any of you in the audience if you're a texture artist a Shader artist check this stuff out he's got a lot of amazing techniques that are actually really helpful he uses a technique called modulation it gets painted on as part of the base coat before he adds the details and it's used to call out geometric details as well as edges and plane changes so this isn't exactly lighting although some of the directions of the gradients could be influenced by lighting instead the goal is to create a value contrast at every single one of the edges the details are painted on afterwards and they reduce the obviousness of the effect but the Improvement in the viewer's understanding of the form remains we tried it out truthfully this was not at all fun the process was just to grab an element and then planar map a gradient onto it we then rotate the gradient until it's following the way that we want some of the more complicated weapons like the machine guns I swear these things are like the Death Star they have all these tiny little Greeley bits on it some of them took up to two days on average about two hours per weapon oh no sad valve up to two days of work no that's so much work I forgot though it works adding in the modulation shows us our plane changes again that means that we can move forward without having to worry about the paint destroying the viewer's understanding of the form we obviously don't want to just apply solid paints to every weapon though it's a pretty promising start but we researched a bunch of different finishing techniques and decided that our first technique would be inspired by hydro dipping this technique uses a film with a printed pattern on it it's floated into a tank of water chat what's the connection here you tell me yes pattern template oh my God bro this is where the idea comes from hydro dipping AKA you take a pattern-based skin like the akks or like any case hunt boom hydro dipping this is where the idea came from that you take a pattern template hydro dipping look the picture that you're showing boom and you dip in the skin you dip it into different positions you get a different pattern oh my god with an activator the activator dissolves the film but leaves the pigment behind and then you take your primed component and just roll it through the pigment to pick it up onto the surface we imitate this in a super cheap way since Hydrographics have seams in them from being different I'm gonna cry all this interview oh my God Chad this is like I don't know how to explain it to you Chad this is like history about the things that I'm living for that I'm breathing for um I could cry this is how amazing these words are sounding right now from multiple angles and because the weapons disassembled before it's dipped anyway we can just tile a texture over our unwrap if we have scenes in the results I just dialed up the realism so you think that the first thing we try would be to replace the flat color from our prototype with a bunch of different textures but that seems so single use and in the long run it didn't seem like a good first investment because we'd still have to create a lot of different images so in order to be more efficient we tried procedural coloration of patterns I'm showing this to you really small because it's super hard on the eye what is that m4a4 that's multiple skins this is in-game right this is is this Urban ddpat I think it's Urban ddpad huh wait no which one is it is it for real Forest it's for real Forest it's for real Forest it's probably a forest wait wait this one is this one yeah that's the one literally right now in the game oh my God and this got reapplied of course onto all different knives different uh skins m51s popular Forest eyes authoring these again is not super fun but once you have one use it in a bunch of different ways so you can change the scale it's orientation Drive different colors through it and create a bunch of meaningful variation again just by driving some Shader parameters we looked at it's the same surface for pausing the whole time it's exactly the same like how she explains right they don't didn't want as much work or whatever boom there's that eagle hypnotic for example they always reapply things what's this what's the Glock called GLOCK GLOCK high beam we have the digital hypnotic we have the Glock high beam it's exactly the same pattern and it's for so many things we have Slaughter knives boom slots and I've bail net Slaughter patter template right here keep this one in mind we move on to any Dark Water skin look how many there are four different dark Waters against boom exactly the same pattern template reused resized recolored boom essentially different examples of hydro dipping and we found that for the most part people don't dip the entire weapon they'll take certain components and just use an accent color on them we thought that this look was more appealing than the head to toe camo in order to replicate it we paint a bunch of paint by number textures for our weapons so they combine with the patterns in order to create a weapon specific color mask the colorized paint ends up looking like this this everywhere that's blue gets the same color everywhere that's green gets the same color it transforms our head to toe camel gun into something she left Vive in 2020 and is now self-employed you might be able to hire her to design the skin for your brush it up but maybe I would like in an interview or something like ask maybe about some ins and outs do you think it would be possible to talk to her on stream it's a little bit more appealing the results of the composite can be randomized by varying the rotation and the offsets of the texture the wearer is randomized whoa whoa whoa what is that skin oh my God I want that we don't have that in game by varying the rotation in the offsets of the texture the wearer is randomized also and that means that every single item we generate with the system is perfectly unique so this is all looking really promising but the so it's meaning that it's pretty heavy on memory as well what so obviously it would be better not to run this thing every frame in fact we'd like to run it for just one frame and then save out the results I don't know what that means I've been showing everything so far in the context of the weapon meshes but actually all of our inputs are just texture information and so we can run this thing in a flat plane like a render Target and still get the exact same results that's cool because we can just save this out and use it as a normal texture that gives us an interesting Advantage it means that we don't have to edit any of the materials for our weapons we can just swap out the base texture and still get all the variety that we want so our first foray into generating the new texture through a render Target wasn't all that promising we had a two second hitch every time we generated a weapon which for a competitive game is plainly unacceptable what so we asked for some help we stopped trying to do everything with just technical artists and involved a rendering programmer uh-huh he made some optimizations to the way that we copied the information out of the render Target and save it out I'm not going to go into detail on this stuff if you're interested I can come back to the slide during The Question period the upshot is that it only takes about six milliseconds for a single frame usually towards the beginning of a round when it doesn't matter and then the rest of the work happens in a separate thread so there's no gameplay hitch no so now that we have a fully functioning prototype we felt confident enough to start creating some new styles the first reference that we've looked at consisted of spray painted weapons we started with Hydrographics because it was easier to solve those problems here's the thing with Hydrographics we don't care if there's seams in the results but with spray paints really they should be seamless so normally we just do a ketchunga spray triplanar mapping so we project the texture from the cardinal directions and then blend over the surface normals this requires having mesh data to work with though and far from having the position and normal information from our mask it's just the flat plane of our render Target with no normals at all so what we actually need to do is get all of that position and normal information into a texture format now that normal information is not that complicated we just render an object space normal map but you should bear in mind that we never authored the UVS for any of these weapons for procedural Solutions in fact all of the content had shipped to our customers months before so there are some areas here where we have overlaps or mirrors in the UVs this would be a problem if we were shading with this information but actually it turns out to be plenty good enough for just doing the blend between the different texture projections our position didn't turn out quite that well we need a lot of precision here in order for it to look accurate we say about 32-bit uncompressed textures for the position and it's still not enough we end up with some pretty serious blockiness in the mesh is this why op lightning strike was so ugly for all the time I mean no they fixed it I guess the old lighting strike was one of the lowest restings ever we solved this by multi-sampling we just use a gaussian kernel to average the positions and the result is actually pretty credible in terms of visual range though the difference between Hydrographics and spray paints is not all that large so we've managed to add some variety but we want to go quite a lot further as we were looking at our reference we found that another common way that people customize their weapons is through anodization oh our standardization weapons does actually let us achieve this effect so we don't need to make any changes to the way we're rendering engines all we do is just tint the specular highlights by the base textures color and so we can get some nice juicy highlights like this hot rod so in this example the paint's colored red and baked into the base texture and then we just hit the specular highlights where the paint appears and not over the substrate it's pretty but it looks really weird having it over the entire weapon so remember that mask that we used to create accent colors for our Hydrographics we didn't use all the channels did we we still have one left so we added another Pro weapon mask to limit the anodization effect after the mask is made for a particular weapon I need that oh my God bro this this almost made it into the game 100 it is as well this one together with an info on this case hardened those are all mentioned in the workshop guide where they explain how to use the workshop um crazy we got instead the info on a short rod and of course the akk sergeant could have been info on this case had an m5400 or both interesting anodized style is just picking a new color oh we didn't stop there how could we we have so much texture information that has so many useful things in it we haven't taken full advantage of it yet so we have some more Styles we finally got around to creating an uncolorized hydrographic this one these are these Skins are all in the guide as well the picture that she's showing are all in the workshop guide as well M5 for Blaze and of course m4a for Slaughter oh imagine bro hydrographic and spray paint Styles into anodized looks we made a solid paint Style just using our paint by number mask to generate a paint that has up to four colors in it and lastly we created a patina style then instead of wearing down to the substrate whereas to a thicker patina so smart we didn't create any new per weapon texture inputs for any of these we just remixed the stuff that we already had using our Shader I really want to stress that this is pretty much just procedural art it's the cheapest kind of art that we can make and it communicates the copper material really well the video playing guys yes yes yes excellent in any case the copper material really well and it also looks interesting and different at all the different so we've managed to create a game a bunch of variety just by driving a single Shader parameter yeah how she says it a game and that's how I feel collecting low floats it's a game it's just highest float lower slot it's so much fun it's just fun oh my God and they achieved that I I'm not gonna it's it's perfect so to recap so far we have a procedural compositing system that works at runtime that we can use to generate an essentially infinite number of Textures in order for the system to work we need the following inputs the original Source texture which was authored before we even had this idea the cavity AO position in normal all of these things are just generated using out of the box tools from our existing mesh we create a paint by number texture done just by colorizing elements of the mesh and then rendering to textures so it takes hardly any time at all and then our artist generated wear influence map now we mostly just crib some layers from the original Source texture PSD so again this isn't a big time investment in fact the only texture that took a significant time at all was the Mig Jimenez style modulation the sky chip on average about two hours per weapon so if we add all these together it took us about a half a day to create a paintable weapon wow even though they're half a day what the how many skins did CS go release this year 34 skins but probably of course it's not because they're lazy right they just want to keep the economy healthy right don't want to either less skins get released the more scans money gets put into the old skins right because those are the only ones available to buy yeah yeah thank you so much thank you a really small staff of just a couple of artists that means that we could blow through all 30 weapons in the game at the time in about a week and a half sauce too right an awful lot of texture inputs to our Shader some of them are grayscale though so we just combine them into a single texture by copying those into the textures individual channels the other component that we need aside from having the weapon be prepped to be paintable is the finish that we're going to apply to it yeah what we author depends a little bit on the finished style but for the most part we create a pattern and then choose the colors for that pattern and then set just a couple of Shader parameters like the specular intensity once all the weapons have been prepped we can very easily author a single finish and apply it to any one of the weapons let me zoom in in our random one here and you can see all of the detail that's been procedurally placed and I'll show you another variant just because they're so darn easy to make so a single weapon finish can create a huge amount of variety both by randomizing its parameters and by applying it to different weapons at this point it's time that we stop focusing on attack and move on to the art over the course of gathering our reference we discovered that people in the real world create hideous hideous things whoa whoa bro what is that [Music] oh hell no it really begs the question what do our customers want the game's art style is grounded in the real world and we've already gone down the path of replicating some real world finishing techniques but there's a really broad range of service providers in the real world creating a broad range of things that cater to a broad range of tastes bruh Brony on the on the magazine World we're the only service providers and our taste might not match demand so we needed to focus Less on the things that we personally liked and More in creating a broad range of variety in order to measure people's reactions ship things with a big range of Aesthetics and we deliberately shipped items that were contentious within the team so among all these items you can see a bunch of things that are people's least favorite out of all the test content that we made those skins all on release well this these were the release guns right weapon case one yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah wow look at this bro some of the most legendary skins were the first skins bro akk son Boom the test content that we made we also shipped an in-game tool for creating finishes that we call the workbench it allows the community to author weapon finishes for themselves and upload them to the community Workshop they've done that with enthusiasm creating over 30 000 finishes we've already started shipping some of the highest rated items letting our community Express their aesthetic preferences directly by just putting the things they make right into the game we called our economy update the arms deal update and it introduced the weapon finishes that people can collect and Equip to customize their play experience our initial offering contained over a hundred weapon finishes all created in-house which we've since expanded almost fourfold with the help of our community contributors each of these finish has random variations created by the pattern placement and the wear meaning that there are actually tens of millions of unique items in our economy oh it's so perfect so smart the three pillars of csgo skins pattern template pattern indexes so different variations of the pattern template and then float it's perfect it is perfect so checking back in with our goals so far they got it right from the beginning you have to realize that [ __ ] there were no adjustments once you create an economy the economy is there they they nailed it from the start it's it's perfect how it is to meet the first three it's really easy to make a weapon finish the community contributes to their creation and we have a large variety of different looks our last tools are to have a broad range of value and to create items that can be valued in different ways so to know if we're meeting these two goals we're going to have to check our data is she going to talk about finishes are by definition luxury goods they're things that our customers like to have but they're not actually necessary in order to play the game in fact they don't have any gameplay impact at all there's plenty of academic discussion on the dimensions of luxury goods I've collected together just a few of them that we can use to identify what might contribute to the value of items in the economy so let's start with conspicuousness this is the public display of your status as a person with access to luxury goods this is a graph of the sale of sorry the sale price of a black laminate AK-47 over its first three months this isn't privileged information anybody can see any graphs that look like this for any of the weapons in our economy just by visiting the marketplace you can see that the price is pretty stable around ten dollars so that means that the Community Values this item pretty highly here's another item the doom kitty from us prices for this item started pretty high around 750 and dropped really rapidly over just a couple of days now it maintains a fairly steady price of about seven cents so this guy isn't a huge hit so what's the difference between these two items well the finishes themselves give it a guess the pharmaceutical kitty looks disgusting it's Superfluous the weapons that they apply to aren't so this is a graph of weapon utility over several rounds of the game it shows which weapons get used most frequently the status from last October when we'd first shipped the economy the AK-47 has the highest utility of any weapon in the primary weapon category the M4 and the op are next with roughly the same utility each and then the rest of the Primary Weapons don't have a big share so our Famas is the one that I prematurely pointed to that's the one from the previous slide that had a really low price on the marketplace you can see it gets used a little bit in the beginning rounds of the game but by the time it's interesting it has this tiny little share sandwiched between the much higher utility weapons this shows us that if you have a fancy AK-47 you have a lot of chances to show it off and if you have a fancy Famas you don't if we look at the prices of weapon finishes that have the same scarcity we can see exactly this breakdown oh my God CS go price over time by weapon AKA black lamb okay ak's on top and then the M4 is in the off and then a cluster of the rest of the weapons down below this shows us that the amount of time that you spend holding a weapon influences its value quite a lot that's just what we'd expect more time holding a weapon means more chances to show off your customization and also to enjoy it for yourself so conspicuousness that's why I say do you remember the clip chat here what was it one of all one of the most popular Clips I've ever uploaded I wasn't thinking anything about it when I was uploading it what was it you don't need a Cisco knife yes why why because the gloves you always see you hold your AK you see the gloves you hold your M4 you see the gloves you rip out the nade you see the gloves gloves always always every single round always there knife only when you pull it out only when you have time for it smell me definitely a big factor on price that means that when we create a weapon finish just applying it to different weapons can create a big range of value the next item on our list Heritage and personal history encompasses things like historic value Nostalgia personal meaning it's really easy to see how those kinds of things can influence the real world value of an item things like heirlooms items that belong to famous personages items created as part of a venerable brand but what about in a video game maybe it's less obvious but Counter-Strike as a product has a 14-year history this is the Desert Eagle more commonly known by its nickname the deagle it was a very popular choice in previous versions of the game where it was a weapon with a very high utility we have made some changes since but last October when we shipped our first round of content the utility of the what the P250 Ain't No Way deagle in CS go was actually not particularly High in fact the utility of the P250 outweighs it quite considerably Nova palette since that's the case we'd expect that the P250 would have a higher value but it doesn't the depot is actually the one on top it retains its high value because people are used to valuing it highly so this is an example that shows that Heritage and personal history can actually affect players valuation of items in a game interesting scarcity is easy to explain the less of something there is the more value each unit has we sorted our items into collections each collection contains items from different quality tiers the quality tiers correlate roughly with scarcity so it's more common to get an item from lower quality tier than an item from a higher quality tier we do have two different types of drops we drop cases and individual items the cases can be opened with a key and it gives you one item from a collection that's associated with that case so this collection here is from a case and this one is made up of individual items so we control the rate at which both the cases and the individual items drop relative to each other the thing that we don't control is the rate at which cases are opened we've used our best guess at case opening rates before shipping the economy in order to try and balance the number of drops so that our quality tiers would stay roughly correlated with scarcity but in our first couple of months our customers opened way more cases than we'd expected and that means that case items are actually more common sorry than drops so as a result the quality tier of an item doesn't actually represent scarcity relative to items that have a different provenance so there are two items here that I particularly want to call your attention to this is the red lemon AK-47 and the black laminate AK-47 love the black laminate the red lemonade visually they're fairly similar the red one is actually a little bit punchier so that's one way that we might have expected that it has a higher value because it's more striking it also has a quality tiered two tiers above the black laminate AK-47 so that's two ways in which we could expect it has a higher value except due to the volume of cases opened there are actually more red laminates in the world than black laminates so the red lemon AK-47 which we expected originally to have a high value is consistently around four dollars cheaper than the black exacerbating this effect is the fact that if you have a red line it says a small existence but I wonder which like what is she referring to do 100 they have a chat we have CS go float we used to have CS go exchange we used to have CS go Zone skin starter basis right Community made databases but we can see how many black laminates have been registered by uh by by by uh just crawlers right made by the community look they have as well probably their own system where they can see how many black laminates are in Steam accounts how many bro this is so interesting I would love to like I don't know ah talk to one of these people man I would have so many questions so many questions Gaben if you're listening right now please hit me up on Twitter AK-47 you're twice as likely to list it on the marketplace as if you have a black so scarcity's influence on Price is pretty extreme in fact it's one of the clearest predictors of value that we have there's one more interesting graph feature on this graph that I want to call your attention to it's right here where the price of both of these items got depressed this is actually on the date where we shipped a bunch of new weapon finishes including some for the AK-47 so the value of the older finishes actually decreased relative to the new more unique more scarce finishes we have found over time that as the pool of items increases this effect gets a little bit diffused but when we first shipped the economy it was a pretty obvious drop of a couple of bucks we still see it today though new case gets released of course people quick selling their [ __ ] right to open some cases we see it nowadays with operations a lot operations because then everybody wants to buy the operation pass case is a little bit less excellent in real world quality assessment would be polysexual kinetic feel and smell would give you indications as to the quality of materials and assembly in our game World our only indications are visual and descriptive but we found to our surprise that they are just as influential we expected that where would influence desirability yeah for one thing we thought the worn beat up weapons looked really cool because we're artists and we think that way we also expected that the worn weapons would correlate with this kind of Veteran status a kind of fictional bonus on top of the aesthetic interest [Music] they thought battle Scott would may may it may be more desired sfm that's so funny to hear because of that we considered making our weapons where over time so the more you use a weapon the more warn it gets feminists oh my God what I was mentioning earlier they did consider it holy smokes veteran status you use your AK case on in game you start at factual this is where it's unboxed when the dance inventory and it wears down and it becomes a veteran status at Battle scarp oh my God bro that's crazy pretty much everybody we showed the tattoo had the same idea it was a really popular idea we wanted players to show off their worn weapons as Badges of Honor we ended up not doing it for two reasons the first reason is that some of the paints look better with less wear rather than more or at least that's how we assess them and so it'd be really difficult in order to get the weapons to always wear towards an ideal state the other thing is that in order for people to show off worn weapons as Badges of Honor they have to represent a significant time investment and that means that the wear could happen too slowly for our players to perceive now we don't want to affect people's inventories in a way that's difficult to communicate and so we ended up not shipping that instead each item let this flows my mind bro in a different universe oh skins actually were oh my God this blows my mind right now am I the only one mind blown I feel like some of you it doesn't kick as much this blows my mind right now bro hearing this out of their mouth the people who actually were pushing the buttons could have released it we're thinking about releasing it oh my God bro as a random amount of wear applied to it at Grant time the where has a bell curve so that it's um it's most common to get an item with just a middling amount of wear so the items with the most and the least amount of wear have the most scarcity even our previous bad cuff just you know for quick understanding boom field test or 0.07 yeah filter yeah filter it does it looks weird huh or yeah yeah filter yeah yeah this is back off it looks weird though it looks weird I don't know why they put no this no yeah but look if Baker attack you know if you tested much more like as you can see 0.15 2.38 and then you have here F and just a 0.07 range yeah um these examples then we could expect that the items of the most in least amounts of wear would have the highest value if that were true our graph would look like this sorry so much given our previous examples then we could expect that the items of the most in least amounts of wear would have the highest value yep if that were true our graph would look like this we have vowel's guard on the left and Factory new on the right you'd think that there would be an uptick in value for both of those just because of scarcity but almost with that exception the battle scarred exteriors are most worn exteriors are seen as significantly lower quality than the factory new finishes this definitely shows that the impact of quality valuation affects the price on the marketplace so cleaning our scratches that it did actually give us a broad range of value even if we had originally imagined the value spread exactly backwards do you always want inventory reviews from me right I wouldn't have an inventory review from her looking at my number one highest float skins and then I nerd out on it but I'll say like yes this is look and I have two different ones that have the same float exactly the same from they're both number one different Paradise not duped oh my what the Aesthetics of individual finishes Aesthetics in the context of luxury as a consumer's ability to discriminate value just based on visual characteristics we created a broad range of Aesthetics from subdued military Styles all the way to flashy items that were shiny so because the game can have a stealth component to it we actually expected that players I'm sorry items that they felt gave them a camouflage so how do we test our assumptions we can't just look at price on the marketplace it's way too heavily influenced by all the other factors on this list it's also worth noting that the price on the marketplace doesn't capture the total value of the items in our economy less than two percent of our items are listed on the marketplace wow the rest of them are collected and equipped and they provide a value to their owners that isn't expressed in dollar amounts so let's look at some not an interesting I could make an interesting tangent here the one thing for I know it becomes t-gen but nfts I know sorry but nft is one of the things that people always look into like I've heard like I have friends that invest into nfts and one thing that we always said listing percentage what Jesus mentioned right only two percent was it two percent only two percent was it two percent are listed on the market it's important to check on nfts like if 50 of the items are listed let's say 50 of all AKA Redlands would be listed for sale AKA nobody wants them nobody like wants to keep them everybody wants to quickly get rid of them interesting that she as well talks about that on Market data oh we added crafting to the game shortly after the economy went live crafting nah look at the innocent signature okay she wasn't aware that everybody was about to just draw some big fat juicy ass [ __ ] you already know crafting is just taking a number of items and trading them in with the game instead of with another player in order to get a different item back we used the fiction of a contract with the Arms Dealer it's essentially a way of trading in with a game controller instead of the player and we use specific contracts to Define which items can be crafted into which other items we've organized our items you have to remember like you don't think about this like you just take it as a given trade-up context yeah you put 10 skins you can't run out no they all have to set they have to set the perfect variables who decides that you put in 10 skins into trade-up contactor not five not two those are all perfectly aligned metrics oh my God float ranges that it's a bell curve not just linear or whatever oh my God man it's so smart I can't options and we allow players to trade us inside of those collections 10 items from one quality tier will get you a random item from the next tier app we can identify our most desired items by looking at just a couple of factors for one thing we'll look at our crafting data we can see which items are traded in more frequently than usual we can also look at the origin of an item if lots of them are created via crafting we're either looking at the item that was desired or we're looking at an item in the same tier as the one that you hoped you thought or were looking at an item that's transitional it's something that someone crafted in order to work their way towards a get higher tier but I would love to look into this databases did you just hear what Jesus said they can look into the percentage of blah blah blah for example uh this randomized Nova that gets traded up the most popular trade up skins everything all database is all in for that they can look at that we have no access to I would love to have a look behind the curtains oh my god of Cs go so if we look only at the items that are created via crafting but not subsequently traded in sorry for policies all the time oh should I try no I thought about like just emailing CS go just emailing them see what's up you know they they know that we are talking about Cisco skins all the time maybe like you know more people are interested in skins as well like surely they would be like I don't know imagine like oh like a v-lock in wife's office we're working on Source two don't show Jimmy he's working on Source too oh my god oh bro oh my God bro behind the scenes oh this gives us a pretty clear picture my favorite items from this collection we can further narrow aesthetic preferences by looking at equip rates items that are equipped at an unusually high rate that are also worked towards via crafting give us our best picture of our most loved items equip rates so for example if you own a desert eagle with the Cobalt disruption finish you're 16 more likely to equip this one than any other finish even if you have lots of them so if we look only at the craft targets that satisfy these two qualifications we actually end up with a pretty small list oops sorry no problem so people like anodized finishes a lot more than half the items on this list are either anodized or metallic they also like saturated colors on black or very bright finishes and they also like weapons that have a Sleek kind of spy movie aesthetic the easiest thing to see though looking at all of these items is that most of them have a single predominant color I should note that this is really different from looking at price on the marketplace although some of these items do have a high price on the marketplace that's not true for all of them in fact some of them are worth only about 50 cents and some of them are worth as much as sorry thirty dollars thirty dollars live that's so much money for CS go skin 30 bucks holy [ __ ] I'm so happy that nowadays like the times are different and that we're looking at I don't know that's just ridiculously reflected very well here some of these items are really rare and some of them there's a lot of them in the world so looking at crafting and equip rates for these items gives us a new window into what players value about our economy so the fire service so this covers the high end of our aesthetic range what about the low end everybody starts with the default loadout as you play you get drops of weapons with finishes the first time you get one you are 90 likely to equip it at least that's true for most weapons for some of them even when you get it you dislike it so much you'd rather have the default if we look only at the rejects we can see again a pattern these are all camouflage inspired in fact these are all items that look like our original inspiration so although we started off thinking that the military camouflage was really cool it turns out that what our community really values our finishes that look more like paint guns go crazy this is great we needed a reminder we went from how they thought that we would like this and everything right and now we're in a world where where this is a thing sort of kiss love Yeah Boy let's go no I just really cool it turns out that water Community really they did not know what we like our finishes them look more like paint guns it was great we needed a reminder that although Counter-Strike is military inspired it's not a military simulation it's a sport when our customers play they don't aspire to be soldiers they aspire to be elite Counter-Strike players so maybe it's not that surprising that the closest real world analog we've got to our preferred aesthetic comes from a sport I do Sports I play Counter-Strike value actually that wasn't what we were thinking it was a risk mitigation strategy we were genuinely worried that people wouldn't like the bright items so instead of thinking of these as being sorted by value we originally sorted them by risk after all if you got a rare item you'd like it because it was rare even if it was an aesthetic that you didn't appreciate and for everybody else if they don't have a rare item they're happy because they don't have to see the bright stuff very often because there aren't very many of them in the world well now we know we were wrong would that have changed our design it may have and let me explain how oh let's see we need to properly map out our design space we can think of the facets of luxury as the axes in that space we figured out the bounds of the axis by examining our data conspicuousness varies with the utility of the weapon scarcity um oh sorry Heritage and personal history from the novel to The Familiar scarcity varies with Supply as well as how frequently you encounter an item sorry a finish for a particular weapon quality varies from our original scratches aesthetic to factory new and our aesthetic style which was the most difficult for us to tease out of the data varies from our original military aesthetic to visually Salient Sports inspired styles the last thing that we want is for all of these axes to be aligned collapsing our design space that would be possible if we didn't understand how these axes were defined in fact weed align scarcity and Aesthetics by putting most of our visually Salient items at the top of our collections fortunately our design space has more than just those two axes or we could have had a serious problem what the worst scenario is that each item in the economy has all the facets of luxury good each in equal degrees Yeah Yeah that doesn't imagine the case where it's all flashy skins and so on now she's talking about the lower like there have to be some skins that do look worse attractions in which players both feel they're getting the better end of the deal someone's always going to be ahead of you on the ladder and somebody behind and there's only one direction to trade in that makes any sense that is the best way I can think of to stifle the economy instead what we'd like is to have ways to create value in every axis understanding not only what the axes are but how to place an item along it lets us determine if we're providing enough variety of value ideally there wouldn't be any items in the economy that had perfectly equal value on every axis having that range of value is really important we can create a range of items that have different value on different axes and then players with orthogonal goals can trade with each other and each feel like they're getting the better end of the deal even if the total value of the items is unequal so I could for example want to collect rare items but maybe I don't care if they're bright or shiny or I could want to collect items that are bright colors but maybe it doesn't matter to me if they're Factory new those trades can happen even if the value is unequal and players with different goals can value different items in different ways so the final we slice our axes the more nuanced trading and Marketplace transactions can get by creating our content in a semi-procedural way we were able to slice our axes very fine indeed creating a broad range of value and creating value on multiple axes so with that phase exchanging over 30 million items with each other on the marketplace so far certainly seems like we've met our goals wait wait what was that multiple axes so with our players exchanging over 30 million items with each other on the marketplace so far wow it certainly seems like we've met our goals so let's wrap up by checking back in with our product level goals we'd hope that the economy would improve the longevity of our game provide fun and value to our customers and make it easier for our customers to provide fun and value to each other and God in my opinion like this absolutely no long-term goals for the Cisco improve longevity for the game without skins would CS go be right now where where where it is probably not probably I wouldn't be here I think I wouldn't be here if I'm being fully transparent I I I would probably still play CS but I wouldn't play 24 7 the play considerably playing no other game and just talking about Cisco 24 7. you know I will be probably playing I don't I don't even know I will probably be playing League of Legends I don't know if you're getting allow Top Lane you already know number one you remember that we only have to check in on a couple of broad metrics to see if we're meeting our goals it's our player numbers player retention and our individual play times oh what the [ __ ] is this when they release skins there's no way taken from steamgraph.net it's a community website that monitors the numbers we publish about who's playing what on Steam no no it shows our Peak concurrent player numbers daily so here's some notable landmarks hear the games in beta okay sorry this is the launch of our game I always shot the fact there are a couple of free weekends this is the Steam summer sale that preceded the economy launch that's it how much is that it went from like 30k 36 yeah 30 30k ish to like 50k I mean that's crazy so after our economy launch we had a pretty dramatic increase in Peak player numbers bringing us to regular highs that we'd only achieved previously by making the game temporarily free it's a big tournament for CS go with a high viewership what dream hack got this many more new players and this is the csgo Skins update LOL I thought skins would be like nah also on uh our game was also on sale for this time period and that caused a huge player Spike nearly doubling our player count there was a large influx of new players around this time and they stuck around at a really high rate in fact they stuck around at a much higher rate than players from previous sales and so we can see that not only are our player numbers up but our player retention is up since that event we've been able to reach a new plateau of about a hundred thousand peaking current players daily and about 2.3 million monthly unique players in the aggregate it certainly looks like we've met our goals for adding the economy and individual players are sending us the same signal they're playing more frequently frequently and for longer which is our best indication that we're providing them with lots of fun and as they continue to play together and exchange items with each other they're creating loads of value for each other as well our one or main goals that we increase the longevity of the game now only time will tell but with such a large community of returning players csgo's future looks really bright Goosebumps I literally ah but you said brown run Grimes Bronwyn crimes Twitter oh is that her Brown no that's not her that's not true I don't think she has Laura for questions now so if you have questions please step up to the mics hi I'm a little light in here for the audience audience questions you mentioned that there were only two technical artists yourself from one another working on CS go to bring the economy update about how big was the rest of the team and I'm particularly interested uh in uh how the decisions were made to either proceed or not proceed with doing the economy in the context of how many people there were so we had let me think back around the time we probably had about 12 people on the team total and I don't think that changed much I don't think that changed much holy [ __ ] CS go 12 people what the f and you have to remember Chad 12 people were on the team when the game was launched and super close to what we have right now like the amount of work spent on those 12 people compared to everything that came until now that those 12 people did everything right they put the foundation for the game they created the economy they did everything all that came after that was new guns introduce new skins new weapon updates some engine updates of course that is crazy 12 people creating CS go ain't no way today one employee team size has increased since then which is good because it means we can how many more stuff um but everyone was was really behind the economy I mean looking at the success of TF2 and DOTA 2. we really wanted to improve our player numbers um typically after you launch a product the the product cycle goes like this right you have this big spike at launch and then it just continues downwards until you have this long tail TF2 and Dota 2 both have this big spike and then they just just keep going up and that's the model that we wanted to to go for right so pretty much everybody on the team was really pulling for the economy it wasn't like we just had technical artists going hey let's make an economy yeah it was a whole team decision w ow next question the links that you guys might want to check out no questions no no nobody cares or if I would be in the crowd bro one more question please please just one more please don't go yet one more question bro nobody has questions um you have this game mode where you unlock um that's me for the weapons the more kills you earn right uh where you like start with a pistol and then you perform your first kill and then you use the machine again and whatnot right so there's there's an in-game economy that's a game mechanic that's totally separate from this kind of meta economy and uh what happens is if you make a kill you earn more money in game which allows you to buy a more expensive weapon later on and that that's actually a good catch because that graph that I was showing about weapon utility it wasn't actually showing the rounds sequentially it was showing how much money you had to buy a weapon at the start of round so it's not exactly what I said it was but I didn't want to explain the mechanic I meant to certain that the special game won't where you like start with the pistol and then oh you're talking about the the arms race yeah did you like look at stats of pairs that like only play this particular game mode and who cares like you purchase a weapons differs for those players into person to like that much players as well um so there aren't actually a lot of players that play exclusively arms race in fact our players here I totally have a slide for this um if I can get my cursor back from there what a stupid question sorry sorry um so we we actually have different populations of players let me see if I can find the slide it's way way at the end here um so we have players who they mainly break down into three categories they break down into players who play on casual players who play on competitive meet players who play on community servers so uh arms arms race is going to fit into the Casual section of our players and we didn't really break it down a lot further from there because the populations got really really small it's a shoot game mode sorry okay thanks Bronwyn um I wanted to ask now that uh CS go is kind of in a different place than when you decided to start doing um uh weapon skin as items if you've got if you guys have considered any of the other uh kind of more resource intensive expansions to it um that stuff is always on the table it's just a matter of making sure that we have a goal for it we don't want to ship something just for the sake of it we want to work towards actually improving the customer experience and um I mean you might be thinking of things like the the character customization um until we can solve the team ID problems that that wouldn't be something that we would want to shift so there's there's a lot of which means that may have solved the team problem a couple of years ago agents boom got released work to do there uh that doesn't mean that we won't consider it okay cool thanks well right right right on your um on your graph there for the dream hack you know it's a spike in players staying online now did you guys have the Esports uh line of your economy plan before you notice that Spike or after oh absolutely before yeah absolutely before so um for those in the audience that don't know we sold a special key for a special case it's called the Esports case we've actually had a couple in that Series so far and what that case does is we take a portion of the proceeds from that case and we use it to fund Community tournaments dreamhack was actually the first recipient and they had a 250 000 prize pool that was funded by our community wow and so the community was actually heavily invested in it in order to you know go watch it and see the the results of something that they've been carrying about all this time that's what DOTA still does and that's why they have 44 million dollar prize pools the biggest prize pools in free spots which is ridiculous now CS go sadly I wish for imagine imagine like a CS go major blast France and then boom 40 million dollar price per wrong not wrong they they put money not from the cases like they I don't know if they have cases but they put money from the DOTA battle pass or whatever right that goes into the prize pool well now of course sticker money goes to the teams directly but it just chat like I'm now wondering why not instead of just giving the sticker money to the players right and if that number just goes under the table why why not just like say oh like we give the money to the players and then it's like you know boom it's a 10 million dollar uh major another one million dollar major but everybody gets thicker money I don't know it could be so nice for hype and everything maybe they just want every player to get nice money and not just you know not just not just the winners of a tournament I don't know what are you saying do you not mean do not care what I say and actually we just had the second one which was ems1 and ketovize what they should do though no is take money from people buying the the major pass or whatever what is it called the major yeah when to do your pickups and everything imagine boom even if it's just 25 I don't know the percentage in Dota 2. if it's like some percentage goes to the prize pool of every single major a fixed amount imagine bro 10 million dollar friends uh major oh my God bro it would just be would just be nuts viewer pass yeah yeah that's what I mean uh that was just last week umizo that was just last week um our Peak concurrent uh player numbers during that event went up to 165 000 so and we were also on sale so we'll see how many of those players are so happy for the next couple of weeks I'm actually kind of excited because I think we're going to reach a new plateau okay thank you hi uh I know in the past few months you've also shipped an update that allows players to apply stickers to their guns yes and uh one I'm I'm a big counter straight player myself awesome so were a lot of my friends but I found that they're a lot more polarizing than the skins and I was wondering if that was something you guys knew going into shipping that update no we we had no idea they'd be polarizing we thought people would think they were really cool um there's you have to be careful when you're talking about things being polarizing because there's some data that you can get anecdotally that isn't actually represented in players purchasing behavior and so there's a large community where actually a large community of players that that never speak up right that are perfectly happy with the things that they get and so when we're looking at um things to add to the game we're assessing you know whether something was was valuable and whether it's working we can't just look at what people are talking about in the forums although we obviously do read that stuff all the time and take into account we also have to look at how our players behaviors are changing and whether they're actually consuming the content and enjoying it and it turns out that people actually love stickers for the most part anyway I want some more details on that in CS 1.6 you guys had a spray paint on the world right yes have you guys considered adding uh user customized spray paints which are obviously you guys will have to monitor what goes in and what goes what goes out and the ability to maybe like uh if I didn't like a spray paint and I was playing the game I could uh actually spray something on top of that and kind of hide it and so on would you did you guys consider something like that so um there were a lot of abuses of the original system because there wasn't any sort of gating system you could just put in whatever you wanted and so there were a lot of obscene images just sprayed around the world and actually um sticks my favorite and the worst is that people would take a picture of themselves they're in you know weapon pose standing against a wall and then they would spray it on the wall and then other players would come by and start like targeting shoes you know so it was like this this weird strategic kind of emergent gameplay sort of thing um we're not sure how much value sprays have relative to some of the other things that that we could do I know that people do want them back because they're well again it's kind of a Heritage thing people are used to having them but we haven't made any decision one way or the other where we have graffiti is now not the custom ones but I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about how knives factored in uh were they always supposed to be the ultra rare uh kind of item from these cases and obviously their effects are just aesthetic so um knives yes we we always plan to make them the most rare items and the reason is that these are weapons with an extremely high utility you use them in every single round of the game you whip them out all the time because whipping them up makes you run faster relative to carrying a heavy weapon right in front of you um we thought that just giving them out um would be would be kind of a waste because there was such an opportunity to to drive value by making them rare and desirable how how is it so perfect Chad the things that could have went wrong in them doing small mistakes when releasing an economy they didn't have any data look the knife could have been I don't know could have been a load here bro it's just perfect it's just all perfect it's just so smart she is so smart and the whole team behind it and um we even see Within These Guys that there's a value spread like uh all the different finishes the fade is the most popular and then the slaughter and then the Karambit is the most popular because you're here this is how it actually is supposed to be pronounced you hear it from csgo themselves she created it it is the most popular and then the slaughter and then the Karambit is the most popular knife and so there's a good range of value here too um it's a little bit worrisome because the value of these items is so high actually for a long time we were watching the price of them just keep Rising on the marketplace which is really scary because we we have a calf on the marketplace yeah of four hundred dollars back if it was 400 I thought it was 800 or something that's so interesting to hear from her I wonder if she's going to mention third party marketplaces what so peace can speak back in the day off this could get interesting we only have three more minutes you have an item that's worth more than four hundred dollars you you can't actually get the value of it from the marketplace yeah and so people end up doing things like taking their knives and trying to sell them on eBay and they get scammed at the time it's it's not really all that positive for players um finally the prices stabilized and now they're around like 200 bucks so so we feel a little safer but um yeah we always plan to make those the the highest tier items and I didn't talk about them very much because interesting interesting interesting so probably was fuming when they realized oh my God boom dragonar all of a sudden suck above the market cap and then third marketplaces come up cash outside because they don't really fit into any of the collections or any of the other things that we talked about and they have such a high scarcity and such a high utility that they're just off the charts on pretty much all of our other ranges thank you by the way there's still people buying and selling skins on eBay sometimes I just search for csgo knife on eBay and there's always people like showing a screenshot of a butterfly knife or something they sell like the knives on eBay bro nah think that guys hi oh hi I was curious about uh so you have some weapon skins that are tracking in terms of kills that's right oh yeah how does that play into against like the Aesthetics of the weapon and everything yeah yeah nothing um well so we call these items stat track items they're kind of like the strangers from TF it tracks how many kills you get so I I think in TF um your strange weapon just tracks it as as part of the name or description and you don't actually see it as like it's not on your weapon we created modules or like especially on the knives they have these little scratched off bits where you can actually see it on the weapon and people really seem to like that um we have found that the value of these things there is some value there just for intrinsically they're fun to have but most of the value of them on the marketplace comes from their scarcity which is sort of interesting so it's another way that we can generate a range of value um ten times Herrera does that answer your question or was there thank you cool so you have uh Dota 2 and TF2 that are both free to play games yes so when you guys develop the economy are you able to say would some of the tension that you were running into maybe making CS Go free play or not let's see um that's a question that we get a lot um the one thing that we're concerned about that's stopping us from going free to play is cheating right now there's a friction if someone gets caught cheating they have to re-buy the game in order to come in and keep ruining other people's experiences uh if the game's free to play there's no friction at all they can just keep rolling over accounts and so until we solve that that problem we probably wouldn't go free to play right problem not solved we still made it free to play it's something that we talk about all the time thanks do you make the same kind of Assessments when choosing map map Workshop levels huh oh yeah absolutely well map Workshop oh no this is like this is like T-Rex in the who's map designer bro come on man bro we talk about skins about you the Skins come on up dragon law what do you like bro map hello come on map map Workshop novels oh yeah absolutely yeah um there there are different things that the the different Maps bring there are some maps that are just absolutely gorgeous and they draw people into those worlds and there are some maps that are you know slightly less gorgeous but they play really fantastically what you do find is that the um the value of the maps to the community uh is almost all about play it's like if they play really well so uh you guys if you're Counter-Strike players probably heard of cash um it's a really popular map it's a community created map that has um a really good play style to it so that one's really popular compared to some of the other maps that might be visually more attractive rest in peace but they aren't as popular because the the gameplay isn't quite as strong no don't end I think we're out of time so thanks oh chat what this is cool employees Forever This is Loki historic talk that influenced a lot of the concepts in my transactions today now PC games yes nobody didn't like them

Channel: ohnepixel raw

Views: 496,076

Keywords: csgo, cs:go, csgo skins, ohnepixel, csgo interview

Id: 4odPJMmeNnc

Length: 84min 25sec (5065 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023