Abandoned CS:GO Items

The first thing we would like to remember is the first 3 sticker capsules⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾⁽³⁾, which were released at the dawn of the game. They could be obtained as the drops after the game, but you had to buy a key to open the capsule. These keys were 3 times cheaper than their analogs for cases, but even so, these capsules didn’t have much popularity. For this reason, in July 2014, they became unobtainable as in-game drops. This has led to a gradual increase in the prices of the capsules themselves and the stickers they contain. For example, Crown (Foil) from the Sticker Capsule 2 currently costs around $800 on Skinport. On release, however, it was about 150 times cheaper, around $5.

At the ESL One Cologne Major in 2015, capsules with player autographs were added to the game. Each team was assigned a separate capsule containing stickers of only 5 players. This concept lasted only 3 years, after which Valve abandoned it in favor of capsules with autographs of players from all teams at once. Valve dropping off this concept could be justified by its lack of popularity.

The 2017 Major in Atlanta brought us some brand new team graffitis that you could use only 50 times before they disappeared forever. This idea lasted for only 4⁽¹⁾⁾⁽²⁾⁽³⁾⁽⁴⁾ majors (about 2 years), and already in the major in Katowice in 2019, Valve began to provide unlimited access to the team graffities throughout the tournament to those who bought a viewer pass. The reason for such changes was the unwillingness of players to rebuy their favorite team’s graffiti pack after a couple of competitive games again and again.

Another interesting change was the abandonment of eSports cases in 2014⁽¹⁾⁽²⁾⁽³⁾(First appeared in the year 2013). Valve had promised that part of the funds spent by the players on the keys for these cases will be included in the prize pool of Major tournaments, which were held twice or thrice annually during that phase. According to rough estimates, the players spent about $10 million only on the keys to these cases, while the prize pool for the majors was fixed at $250,000 at that time. If all the previous ideas were abandoned due to their unpopularity in the community, then the problem here was precisely the excessive popularity of eSports cases. Valve simply couldn’t give so much proceeds to the tournament prize pool, leading these cases to part ways with Counter Strike forever.

We would also like to mention the Gift Packages that left the game with the advent of the Panorama UI. These were sold in the main menu for the new year holidays. The idea was that when you activate these packages, you give the players on the server 1 randomly selected skin from specific collections, which might sound interesting. But in reality, these packages almost never paid off, which led to their extreme unpopularity, and subsequently the removal from the game.