I've yet to meet a single person in-game who will admit to buying their fancy knife or gun skin, like the hundreds or thousands of dollars they'd have to spend to unbox a super rare rifle/pistol/knife combo is just fine but saying "yeah i bought them for much less" is just plain wrong.
I've bought a stattrak AWP Boom, a stattrak Kraken, a bunch of 5-10$ skins and a bunch of 10c-$2 stattraks, seems like much less of a scam to just buy the thing i want than paying 2fiddy per key for skins worth 10c.
also, anyone gonna buy the music packs? i turned off the music day one, no way im gonna pay to replace it with some bands ive never heard of.
I don't have a single skin in CS:GO. The moment I get a drop, I put it on the marketplace, because that's money I can buy other games with. Guns with skins don't shoot any better (even though that might come the way Valve is destroying the game), and more games is a better attribution of resources than skins...
Also, from a mathematical/statistical standpoint, gambling is a waste of time and resources. If the outcome is predictable, the gain is worth less than the time spent, and if the gain is worth it, that means the wager is against all odds, and therefore in the universe of wagers, it is mathematically imperative that the player of such bets, loses money...
I have one or two skins that are worth probably about 15 cents each that I think are cool. The chance of me getting a good skin from the cases is pretty low, though, and keys are two, three dollars (I think? It's been a little while) and thus entirely not worth it even if you get a case where your chances are 20%. Better to sell it and get money from the people who do for some reason think it's worth it to gamble.
Back at the time of the competition, I was playing casual and overheard a couple of guys saying that the comp sticker capsules would jump from $.25 to $3 in six months. So far it's tripled in about two months, but it's been like that since Valve took the capsules off the market, so Iduno. At least I've still made net profit either way.
indie games are cheep. $3 or so on steam when sales come round. So if you never buy anything and sell any items you receive you should be able to afford a game a in a month or, more likely, in two months depending on how often you play.
you're not really making much money. a day's work at a minimum wage job will give you more money than a year of CS:GO playing.
I've only opened one case in CS:GO. And I didn't even pay for the key, a friend traded it for a huntsman case. I'm probably going to do as Zolton does and just put them up on the market.