To understand esports betting, it’s important to understand the culture and history that has shaped the modern esports community. CS:GO has become one of those games that have determined the entire industry. Considering the betting culture in CS:GO, you can see how they keep in touch with the audience. Keep reading to learn why CS GO rank lookup looks like this.
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The Role of CS:GO Today
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and its community have shaped large parts of the thriving esports community we see today. Being one of the oldest and largest esports titles, it has grown from being featured at small-scale tournaments to being a mastodon selling out large arenas in France, Germany, and Brazil.
The game itself is easy to learn yet hard to master. In its premise, one team defends a site while another one attacks it and tries to plant a bomb. This is how CS:GO delivers a competitive experience that forces players to polish their gaming skills to perfection and learn gaming patterns and lineups to compete at the highest levels.
Skins and Their Role in CS:GO
After the official release of CS:GO in 2012, one of the first updates was known as “Arms Deal”. It featured “skins”, a customization for in-game weapons. Weapon skins quickly became a popular way for players to express themselves, with one crucial nuance – they were hard to get.
Players had to play to receive skins through random drops or purchase special cases. The skins as strategic items come in various levels of rarity. Many skins only exist in small, finite batches, comparable to NFTs these days. Some of them were quite scarce, which took their price to the sky. It made players collect them as status symbols, allowing a third-party market to get skins for real money.
The Grey Area of Skin Gambling
Skin gambling became very popular 7-9 years ago. Skins can replace real money in the game. Or they can be used for the sake of rolling a rare skin. They were widely popularised by different streamers. Unfortunately, not all of them were affordable enough to proceed with a purchase. For example, some skins were available for thousands of dollars, which made them unavailable for purchase.
Skin betting was a legal grey area in many countries due to a complete lack of regulatory oversight, boosting the risk of underage gambling. There were also several scandals and controversies related to skin betting. Some streamers demonstrated skin betting as an easy purchase or reward, which obviously affected the bettors’ behavior.
While some skin betting sites are still relevant, the skin betting market seems to be replaced by a regulated betting market. Many sportsbooks have already added CS:GO to their offering.
CS:GO Esports and Fan Behavior
The followers of CS:GO watch video game content from live streaming services. There are many of them so you won’t have a problem picking one. In 2022, 55% of CS:GO’s live stream hours watched were spent on esports. This speaks to how engaged CS:GO fans are in the esports environment, and how far they are ready to go.
CS:GO has been around for a long time. This means that its customer base consists of people of different generations. Those, who don’t feel like playing the game, may still continue watching the tournaments and other events devoted to the game.
Implications for the Well-Regulated Betting Industry
Regulated sportsbooks used to have their prejudices towards esports in the past. Today, they address the sheer size of the skin betting market to make the CS:GO community enjoy gambling activities.
Around 30% of esports fans happen to be between 25-35 years of age. So a relatively mature audience realises the responsibility taken on their shoulders when betting online. It will be and to make more reasonable decisions when playing and betting.
The CS:GO betting market provides a fast and simple, yet entertaining form of gambling. For sportsbooks to reach the same type of experience, it can be a good idea to add similar types of markets. It can cover fast markets that allow bettors to bet on the next player killing an opponent or the team winning the next round. This needs to be space in which bettors can establish their own market.
