Fun story: when they added skin lootboxes to CSGO they intended to make the dull, serious looking skins rare ones and the flashy wacky ones common. It quickly turned out that the players like flashy skins more and now the wackiness and silliness of a skin is positively correlated with its rarity and price.
Instead they are a transparent system that enables literal children to get addicted to gambling and valve takes a cut of every payout and they are well aware of this.
CS is not a billion dollar game. CS is a fairly unprofitable game with a giant tumor of a marketplace attached, a significant point of which is being a faux currency that escapes most currency controls
The CS2 Skin market-cap is above $5 Billion itself. The eSport scene is massive and one of the largest in the industry. The game is almost always the most played game on Steam.
Not sure where you are getting your idea that CS isn't a billion dollar game.
"Fairly unprofitable [if you ignore all the parts that generate revenue.]"
I will admit that gambling $0.16 in skins on pro matches when I was 15 was a lot of fun. Maybe I'm lucky to have gotten away (relatively) unscathed, but I do have a little nostalgia for those days.
Honestly, I’ll take what CS2 is giving any day of the week over the Bevis and Butthead/Nikki Minaj/Terminator anime laser skins that call of duty has been putting out lately. At least they stick to the standardized models.
It is worse than the typical lootbox scheme because the entire CS ecosystem is now saturated with marketing of third party skin trading sites and casinos. And at the end of the day it is still gambling. Just because you can resell your skins (and let Valve take a cut in the process) does not make it ethical.
Being able to resell them makes it infinitely better in my mind than not being able to having money wasted permanently see other most other games with gambling mechanics like gacha...