e have to focus less on the things that we personally like and more on creating a broad range of variety in order to measure people's reactions," said Bronwyn Ferland, Technical Artist at Valve, during her insightful GDC talk on building the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) economy.
With a small team of just two technical artists, Ferland helped implement a robust cosmetic item economy in CS:GO. By using procedural generation and community involvement, they were able to quickly create a large volume of unique weapon skins. Analyzing marketplace data revealed what attributes made items valuable to players. This enabled them to design compelling content catered to user preferences.
For game designers with limited resources looking to add economies, Ferland's techniques offer invaluable guidance. Here's how her team brought the CS:GO economy to life.
Goals of the CS:GO Economy
Adding an in-game economy served several key goals for CS:GO:
"Improve the longevity of our game," Ferland said. An active economy keeps players engaged over the long-term.
"Provide fun and value to our customers." The economy gives players more ways to enjoy the game.
Enable players to "provide value to each other." More participation makes the economy more compelling.
To measure success, the team tracked player numbers, retention, and playtime. More players spending more time indicated the economy was working.
With clear goals defined, Ferland's next challenge was determining what type of items to offer...
Choosing a Starting Point
Given CS:GO's small team, Ferland knew they needed to start with something efficient to produce. She evaluated different options:
Characters - Allow custom skins, but require lots of content. Also risk destabilizing team identification.
Weapons - Could enable gameplay variety, but disrupt competitive balance. Significant development work needed.
Weapon skins - Easy to create procedurally. Enable self-expression without gameplay impact. Community can contribute.
Weapon skins emerged as the ideal starting point. As Ferland explained:
"We have a pretty clear winner here. Since they don't affect gameplay at all, there's room for whimsy."
With the item type decided, Ferland's team got to work developing an efficient procedural system for generating weapon finishes.
Building a Procedural Weapon Finish System
Instead of manually painting textures, the team took a parametric approach.
"We wanted to automate the process," said Ferland.
They started by analyzing real-world reference to understand how paint wears off metal over time:
It chips off edges and corners first.
Wear accumulates in high-contact areas.
Only certain components get painted.
The system combines the weapon's texture, normals, ambient occlusion, and other maps to procedurally apply realistic paint effects based on these principles. A key insight was using mesh information baked into textures instead of accessing it directly.
"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."
This allowed the system to work on existing content with no changes needed. A shader parameter controls wear amount, enabling easy randomization.
The team spent minimal time hand-painting additional textures like grime and scratches. The parametric system did the heavy lifting.
Involving the Community
With the foundation built, Ferland's team invited the community to get involved:
Players can design and submit their own weapon finishes through the Workshop.
Top-rated community skins get added to the game for everyone to use.
This achieves two goals:
Rapidly expands the available items with minimal internal effort.
Content aligns with player preferences by having them directly create it.
In the first few months, 30,000 community finishes were submitted. The most popular are now part of CS:GO.
Understanding Player Valuation
To make compelling items, Ferland's team needed to understand what attributes players valued most. They analyzed various data sources:
Weapon Utility - How often a gun is used in matches. Skins for high utility weapons like the AK-47 hold more value, as players get more opportunities to use and show them off.
Marketplace Prices - Compare prices of items with similar rarity but different aesthetics or weapon associations. This reveals the impact of visual style, nostalgic heritage, and utility on an item's worth.
Crafting Targets - Which specific items players actively craft towards by trading in other skins. Shows the most desirable options.
Equip Rates - How often players choose to equip obtained items, indicating desirability. Can filter out items used just for trading up.
This multifaceted data analysis revealed insights such as:
Players strongly prefer colorful, vibrant skins over drab camouflage patterns, favoring self-expression over realism.
There is lasting value in skins for legacy weapons like the Desert Eagle pistol due to nostalgia, even if utility is low.
An item's condition greatly impacts desirability, with pristine factory new finishes being valued highest over worn and scratched.
Understanding these player valuation principles allowed the team to make informed decisions when designing new items and aesthetics. Data drove the creation of compelling skins players wanted most.
Balancing Scarcity Across Rarities
With hundreds of weapon finishes planned across a tiered rarity system, controlling relative scarcity between tiers was critical to maintain value integrity.
Ferland's team sorted finishes into ascending rarity tiers. Items in higher tiers have progressively lower drop rates from matches and cases. This intentional scarcity makes them more rare and valuable.
But an unanticipated factor skewed the team's carefully planned scarcity balance:
Players opened cases faster than expected in the early days after economy launch.
This flooded the market with case skin drops, making them significantly less rare than individual item drops from the same rarity tier.
For example, a Red Laminate AK-47 skin was meant to be one of the rarest finishes. But due to the abnormally high volume of opened cases, it became far more common than the rarer Black Laminate from a lower tier.
As Ferland explained, "Our quality tier doesn't actually represent scarcity relative to items of a different provenance."
This example highlights the need to closely monitor supply dynamics after launch and regularly adjust drop rates. Failing to do so results in mismatched scarcity between tiers, undermining the rarity pyramid.
Creating a Spectrum of Aesthetic Styles
To appeal to a wide spectrum of player aesthetics, Ferland's team explored many artistic directions:
Photorealistic military camouflage mimicking real-world reference
Abstract hydrographic patterns with liquid motion
Bright colors and chaotic paint splatters reminiscent of paintball culture
Heavily worn finishes that appear weathered and battle-hardened
Minimalist solid color coats with clean lines
Gleaming anodized chrome and polished metallic skins
The team wasn't sure initially which styles would resonate best with players. So they created finishes across this entire stylistic range and let community preferences guide future focus through sales and engagement data.
This approach allowed them to discover that vibrant, non-realistic designs proved most popular, contrasting with the game's otherwise grounded visuals. This key insight shaped the team's aesthetic direction going forward.
Evaluating Success
With the procedural system, community involvement, and broad spectrum of styles in place, Ferland's team launched the CS:GO economy.
They evaluated success based on key metrics aligned with their initial player-focused goals:
Player numbers - Saw dramatic increase after launch, with new baseline of ~100k daily peak players.
Retention - New players acquired during sales had markedly higher retention rates post-launch.
Playtime - Average play sessions grew notably longer per player, indicating greater engagement.
The team also closely tracked proprietary metrics:
Item volume - Over 1 million new weapon skins entered the economy in the first month.
Community content - 30,000 player-created skins submitted through the content portal.
Market transactions - 30+ million trades executed between players on the marketplace so far.
By every measure, from commercial to community-driven, the CS:GO economy vastly increased overall player engagement and value delivery. The combination of efficient procedural content generation, data-driven design, and community involvement was a proven recipe for success.
"Our customers are having fun, so they keep coming back for more."
