While we're on the subject of CS:GO, something that's been kind of on my mind lately was how they incorporated their F2P scheme into it a little under a year ago now. I'm fine with it as it's made me a profit in Steam funny money so it's worked in my favour, but I was always under the impression that it wasn't something that they always had in mind for the game but then added it after the fact.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ogcBfHjzsIU
It wasn't until I saw that video of pre-release footage from 2011 that my suspicions were raised. At 6:26 you can see a player on the Terrorist side bring out their knife, and shortly after you can see the Counter-Terrorist's knife in their view.
These differ pretty radically from the default knives of the released game.
Knives are the high-ticket items in CS:GO's fashion game, akin to the unusuals of TF2 or the... rare couriers of Dota 2? I don't know anything about Dota. Anyways, knives are some of the big bucks items you can get from their gambling system and here are a couple of the ones you can find:
Pretty familiar huh? Now I don't know if the images get it across properly, but the default knives are just extremely dinky looking. The Terrorist one especially looks like it's a cheap plastic prop that couldn't so much as cut a loaf of bread. I can't help but feel that this was their idea all along and that they changed the standard ones to look as chintzy as possible to prey on people's desire for something, well, cooler.
Which would be fine I guess if CS:GO was a F2P game, but it's still a paid product. One that they coincidentally tend to put on sale after waves of VAC bans. So you have these items going for more than 4 times the base price of the game itself on the market, and the game itself doesn't have a standard item store like TF2 or Dota, you can only directly buy keys to gamble with cases and name tags.
They're just cosmetics so in the end it doesn't really matter a whole bunch and can be completely ignored, but I can't help but feel rubbed the wrong way just a bit.