as someone who has a few fortnite skins, I can speak to that side of the market. When you're playing a game like that, which is high budget and also free-to-play, it's easy to talk yourself into spending a few dollars. You get sick of using the default skins, everything else looks so cool, and you've been getting hours and hours of joy out of the game, haven't you? In a way, it's like you're showing support to the kindly devs that gave you this game for free. Then once you have a couple, you might get addicted to the rush of joining a party with your friends and hearing their reactions to your new skin or dance. Plus, if you're like me, you might just enjoy the inherent humor to watching Master Chief do a TikTok dance. It's actually enhancing your enjoyment of the game. Then, $50 later, you finally realize that you've been getting diminishing returns on the enjoyment with each purchase, or you just get bored with the game overall, so you finally stop spending money on new skins.

That's been my experience. When we talk about the potential for "billions", most of that money is coming from the whales. The people for whom money is no object, so they never hit the point where they realize that buying the skins isn't bringing them any real happiness anymore. And of course, in the CounterStrike market, these skins are resellable, so there's also a collector's mindset that takes hold. Either you treasure your collection of high value skins, or you get caught up in the rush of pulling an expensive skin from a crate because you know how much you can sell it for.

Unless it's the web host for the file, because the nft is just a link. The AWS outage showed that quite clearly.

Those still exist. Use the community server browser instead of matchmaking.

The Minigame maps in source days were crazy good!

The missing vehicles thing is a major one. Remember CS_Prodigy in 1.5/CS:S? Give the CTs back the APC. IDGAF how utterly useless it is.

CSGO was peak, before they added agent skins. Then competitive integrity was thrown out the window. CS2 actually downgraded a lot of the game, I'm still not sure it functions fully now.

They butchered community servers and don't seem interested in supporting that scene the same as in the past. So there's no "fun" until they give it to us. The game is just for siphoning money, more than it has been in the past. The entire industry is like that and new consumers are accustomed to it, so it's never going to change and it's probably why Valve jumped on CS again.

... CS2 doesn't have destructible environments, it doesn't have vehicles, it doesn't have any innovation at all other than being more like a slot machine than the last Counter Strike which was basically the same as the Counter Strike before it.

Honestly, I think that's part of why it has lasted so long. None of what you listed are necessarily better. They're just flashy. They would ruin the design of the game though. CS could have vehicles, and some custom maps did, but it doesn't work to improve the game so it never became a part of the primary game.

The need to always do something flashy and new I think is a reason why so many modern FPSs suck. They don't understand their game and ruin it with features that don't improve it.

I say all this while my primary game for ~2 years is The Finals. It's easily the most innovative shooter I've played in a decade or more. It has the best destruction I've seen in a game ever. However, they understood how it work with their game. They didn't just do it to advertise it as a feature without it adding anything. It actively combines with the other parts of the game to make one cohesive thing.

I don't think they got rid of it or made it slower. They did introduce a bug where you randomly stop when sliding IIRC. They've "fixed" this bug multiple times now, but it never actually fixed it. It could be actually fixed now for all I know, but I remember hearing that surf in CS2 is practically dead because it's bugged.