In 2023, March turned out to be the month with most number of case unlocking by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS: GO) players, breaking the highest number of case unlock from previous year. A report from CS:GO Case Tracker reveals that 39.5 million cases were opened during the entirety of the month.

This is thanks to the new case release along with the confirmation announcement for Counter Strike 2 by Valve. The game also broke its own highest player count multiple times this year and is currently sitting at 1,519,457 players in all time peak, taking over the second spot in steam concurrent player numbers.

The fact that many players are willing to spend record-breaking sums of money on the original indicates that Valve’s choice to provide the player base with an enhanced version of the game is likely to pay off, especially all the weapon skins will be transferable to CS2 at no cost.

Making an estimate of revenue earned by Valve from all the case unboxing, the company has made an estimated amount of over $100 million according to Dexerto.

These skins from unboxing, especially rare ones and knives, sell for huge sums of money in the steam marketplace. While the numbers are record-breaking, if one gets a close look at the previous numbers, they’ll know that case unboxing is CS:GO easily reaches 20 million every month.

The upcoming CS2 have made several technical and visual changes to the game with new Source 2 engine. These changes will also apply to the weapon skins and give them a fresh new look, according to the official Valve reveal.

While there is no doubt that CSGO cases are quite popular, many controversies have also surfaced regarding the gambling aspect of these case opening. Due to this, Valve previously introduced an X-ray scanner for CSGO cases for players in France.

The X-ray scanner allows players to scan a case and simulate what reward they will be getting, the player can then choose to open or not as they already know the outcome. The catch here is, unless you open the scanned case, other cases cannot be scanned.