In 2023, Valve earned about $1 billion on Counter-Strike loot boxes
Valve has earned a respectable $1 billion from the sale of keys to loot boxes in Counter-Strike 1/2, reports the CS2 Case Tracker website.
In 2023, players opened more than 400 million boxes in Counter-Strike 1/2. For this purpose, 359.6 million keys were used, which, at the current cost of keys, is approximately $980 million. The largest number of boxes was opened immediately after the Counter-Strike 2 announcement in April 2023 – 50.3 million boxes, and after the game’s release in October 2023 – 45.1 million boxes.
To recap, although Counter-Strike 2 initially received a mostly negative reaction from players and even received the dubious title “Valve’s worst game ever, except for Artifact”, CS2 is doing well now. From the moment of release until the onset of Palworldmania, the game confidently ranked first on Steam by the number of players and attracted more than 1 million users online every day.