FORWARD Skin in the Game Counter-Strike has spawned a wild multibillion-dollar world of online casino gambling—it’s barely regulated and open to any kid who wants in. BY SHAUN ASSAEL IN COLLABORATION WITH OUTSIDE THE LINES n Aug. 9, 2015, two young million- viewers. An estimated 26 million copies of the $15 aires worked their way through a game have been downloaded since its debut four pool party on a hotel rooftop in the years ago, helping make its manufacturer, Valve, the Hollywood Hills. One was clean- world’s leading distributor of PC titles. cut, with hypnotic green eyes, the While other titles such as Call of Duty offer similar other more rakish, with a British accent slightly mut- gameplay, one distinctive feature has helped fuel ed from the time he’d spent in LA. Trevor Martin and Counter-Strike’s growth: collectible items in the Tom Cassell had rocketed to fame as teens by stream- game called “skins.” Although they don’t improve ing themselves playing video games and now, at 22, anyone’s chances of winning, the skins cover weap- were two of the most recognized gamers on YouTube. ons in distinctive patterns that make players more The sky was a turquoise blue and the weather a identifiable when they stream on services like Twitch. perfect 86 degrees as the pair, known to their fans as Users can buy, sell and trade the skins, and those TmarTn and Syndicate, found a quiet spot to chat. used by pros become hotly demanded. Some can Both had already leveraged their fame to make them- fetch thousands of dollars in online marketplaces. selves wealthy. Martin, who has 3.2 million subscrib- Valve controls the skins market. Every few months, ers on YouTube, was dabbling in real estate; Cassell, it releases an update to Counter-Strike with new de- whose videos are seen by his 10 million followers, had signs. It decides how many of each skin get produced his own clothing line. Fans would line up to meet and pockets a 15 percent fee every time one gets them at conventions, and their endorsements were bought or sold on its official marketplace, called enough to make or break new games. Now, as they Steam. Valve even offers stock tickers that monitor settled in under the shade of a palm tree, the men the skins’ constantly shifting values. plotted their next fortune in esports. They were But Valve also leaves a door open into the pro- about to move into a new multibillion-dollar world gramming of its virtual world, one that allows skins that had virtually no regulation—a burgeoning Wild to move out of Steam and into a murky constellation West of gambling centered on a game they’d spent of gambling websites, where they’re used as cur- countless hours playing online, Counter-Strike: rency. Some $5 billion was wagered in skins in 2016, Global Offensive. according to research by the firms Eilers & Krejcik The first-person-shooter game pits terrorists Gaming and Narus Advisors. While about 40 per- against counterterrorists and was played by an aver- cent of them are bet on esports matches and tourna- An estimated age of 342,000 people at once in 2016. Its biggest ments, says Chris Grove, who authored a study for 26 million copies of Counter-Strike: tournaments, such as the ELeague Major scheduled the companies, roughly $3 billion worth flows to a Global Offensive have for Jan. 22-29 in Atlanta, can have million-dollar darker corner of the internet—one populated by fly- been downloaded prize pools and as many as 27 million streaming by-night websites that accept skins for casino-style since its 2012 debut. 34 ESPN 02.06.2017 ILLUSTRATIONS BY TAVIS COBURN 02.06.2017 ESPN 35 COUNTER-STRIKE’S IRON IS HOT There are plenty of ways to measure FORWARD the popularity of Valve’s massive hit. Here are a few. gaming. Here, the games are simple, the action is products. Once dollars become credits, the company fast and new sites open as soon as others close. Plen- TOTAL VIEWING HOURS ON TWITCH, 2016 does not convert them back. ty of adults visit these sites, but with virtually no age That trade-off was fine for most. But it became restrictions, kids are also able to gamble their frustrating for players who wanted to cash out their skins—often bought with a parent’s credit card—on 6.3M 12.1M 15.7M gains for real money. Here, some saw opportunity: slots, dice, coin flips or roulette spins. At least one Valve operates Steam on what is called an “applica- site even has pro sports betting. tion programming interface,” a bridge that lets third- None of this could happen without Valve, a pri- LEAGUE OF DOTA2 COUNTER-STRIKE: party developers engage with a platform. Facebook’s LEGENDS GLOBAL vately held company run by its charismatic co-found- OFFENSIVE API, for instance, allows outside companies to design er, Gabe Newell. The billionaire, who according to the myriad apps that link into the service. It’s re- Forbes owns more than 50 percent of the company, ferred to as an “open API,” meaning that the pro- NUMBER OF COUNTER-STRIKE has watched his personal wealth rocket to $4.1 bil- PLAYERS ON STEAM gramming code is publicly available and accessible. lion, due in part to Counter-Strike’s success. 342K While Steam’s open API allows users to do positive 400K As they sipped cocktails in the Hollywood Hills things—many suggest new skins or maps or ava- that day in 2015, Martin and Cassell decided that as 300K tars—it also leaves the door open for mischief. Out- long as the casino was open, they would get their cut. SKINS ARE side sites can cross Valve’s bridge to insert “bots,” or 200K INTRODUCED automated programs, which allow gamers to transfer COUNTER-STRIKE SHOOK up the world of first-person- 100K their skins from their Steam accounts to the other shooter games when it was introduced in 2000. Un- sites. There, they could be cashed out for real money. like other war titles made for PCs, it emphasized a 2012 2013 2014 2015 2016 OPSkins, for instance, is an eBay-like peer-to-peer striking realism. Its designers slowed the game’s pace platform where users can freely buy and sell to one so the conflicts had more tension. And it emphasized another. Those websites also do away with the $400 MONEY BET ON COUNTER-STRIKE teamwork, allowing players to become skilled at TOURNAMENTS, 2016 limit on trades that Valve imposes on Steam. With working together. the open door in place, the skins market outside of In its earliest form, Counter-Strike limited gam- INTEL EXTREME Steam is free to set whatever prices it wants. MASTERS SERIES $26.5M ers to a menu of nine weapons and a handful of All this free-market buying and selling made maps. But as fans began suggesting improvements MAJOR LEAGUE $42.5M CS:GO white-hot. Seven months after the arms up- GAMING and game technology advanced, Valve added rocket date was unveiled in August 2013, Valve had 150,000 launchers and grenades and more elaborate plots. ESL ONE $46.8M users playing it at once—a sixfold increase from a COLOGNE Counter-Strike became the company’s most visible year earlier. title as well as the anchor for Steam, which opened ELEAGUE $63M The skin trade meant a river of new revenue for in 2003. A decade after its introduction, though, Valve, which profited from game sales and the fees it what was once novel had become commonplace in $0 $20M $40M $60M collected, not to mention new visitors to Steam. But a crowd of first-person-shooter games. In 2012, it also created opportunities for entrepreneurs who Valve tried to breathe new life into the franchise by were imagining other uses for skins—namely, betting. Sources: Twitch viewing hours according to Newzoo.com; releasing an update called Counter-Strike: Global number of CS:GO players according to Steamcharts.com; In early 2014, Elijah saw $100 worth of skins sit- Offensive, or CS:GO. money bet on tournaments according to Narus Advisors. ting in the Steam account of a classmate and asked, Elijah Ballard was in sixth grade in St. Louis when “Dang, where’d you get that?” His friend told him he used his father’s Visa card to open a Steam ac- about CSGO Lounge, a site that posted odds on pro- count and download the game in 2012. “Once I got to come away with a common one that might be val- fessional Counter-Strike matches and accepted skins it, I didn’t really like it,” he says. ued at a few cents, but some are so rare they can fetch as bets. “You’d watch the games on Twitch and it In August of 2013, Elijah decided to check out a thousands of dollars. made it really fun because you had money on the line, newer version of CS:GO called “The Arms Deal Up- Using his father’s credit card, Elijah started buying and your friends would bet on teams too,” Elijah says. date.” The weapons in the game stayed the same— keys in the hopes of getting a skin for his Tec-9 gun Since he already had a Steam account tied to his AK-47s, knives and the like. But now players could called the Nuclear Threat. Then valued at $120 on father’s credit card, it was simple enough for Elijah buy new decorative covers for them, known as skins.