In CS:GO, weapon skins are split into two categories:
WEAPON CASES and COLLECTIONS.
The collections are all Valve made skins.
I’ll only briefly cover them in this video,
but there’s a collection for almost every map.
That even includes a lot of the fake armsrace ones that nobody plays!
There are also a couple of exclusive collections that were released as part of the operations,
like the GODS AND MONSTERS collection.
The rarity grades of these weapons are typically lower than with the weapon cases.
The older collections often only range from ‘Consumer Grade’ up to ‘Restricted’,
but newer maps and collections do go all the way to ‘Covert’,
with the Dragon Lore being one such example.
Normally these skins are just dropped for completing missions and whatnot.
However, spectating large CS:GO tournaments will drop souvenirs,
which act a bit like cases but can be opened right away without needing a key.
These will only contain the weapon skins in the
map collection that was being played at the time.
Now onto the Weapon Cases.
There are currently 21 weapon cases that combined contain a total of 305 different weapon skins.
These cases can only be unlocked with a key that you have to pay for
and the weapons inside start at military grade and go all the way up to covert.
Of these 305 weapon skins here are 119 military spec, 88 restricted,
61 classified and 37 covert graded skins.
Obviously, you hope to get covert grade,
though there are occasions where lower grades can be more valuable.
Most of the Weapon Case skins are made by the community,
but 88 of them were made by Valve.
They did ALL of the skins for these 6 skin collections.
I guess they get all of the money from the 3 vanilla ‘Weapon Cases’,
and share the money from the esports cases with the gaming scene.
They also did 2 skins for the Revolver collection,
since that was when the weapon was first released and there were no community ones to pick from.
To date, the R8 only has 5 custom skins; 2 originally made by Valve,
2 also made by Valve but included in the Dust2 and Bank map collections,
and only 1 by the community.
For every weapon skin included in the collections, it earns the developer around $40,000.
Which is nice.
I mean, this is all based on estimates but if the math is true it means that
Valve has paid over $8,000,000 out to community members so far,
just from weapon skins.
And a lot of them have managed to get more than one accepted!
The most successful has been Coridium,
with 14 submissions accepted into these collections alone.
Tying for 2nd place with 9 accepted submissions each are Algis and NextgenZ.
You can see from here how it trails off after that.
I was surprised by how few accepted submissions the top people had,
I swore I saw their names time and time again when documenting this.
Turns out that 46 people have only had one submission accepted and 45 have 2 or more.
BUT!
It’s never that simple.
There are always outliers and exceptions to mess up my attempts at documenting this,
and skins are no exception.
For example, many skins have more than one maker.
And occasionally it looks like an account like FACEIT will claim a user’s skin.
Possibly for brand promotion.
I’m not saying this is a bad thing, I’m sure it’s all agreed on by the skin makers.
But I’ve chosen to list the skins by whoever has it in their workshop
and I’m sure some people will say that this is wrong.
Faceit’s Trigon P90 skin was originally made by Coridium,
but I’ve chosen to allocate it to Faceit rather than Coridium,
the game’s most popular skin maker.
Another complicated example is the only community made Revolver skin.
It has 2 creators, one being G99 Factory,
who has at least 4 other accepted skins under his name already…
…and RR3, who doesn’t have any.
Since this skin was submitted to RR3’s workshop I’ve labelled it under his name.
But just be aware that the people on this list may have been
involved in more weapon skins than I’ve credited them for.
And even Valve’s number can be contested.
I say they’ve made 88.
But there’s a weapon skin that doesn’t show up in the community section:
that’s the Aug by Syd Mead,
who’s kind of a big deal having worked on films such as Blade Runner and Tron.
I guess he was contacted by Valve directly and bypassed the workshop entirely.
I’ve given him his own category,
even though sadly he doesn’t appear to own his own steam account.
And then there are contraband items, like the Howl and Griffin.
The Howl was originally part of the Huntsman case
but after its artwork was found to be stolen it was remade by Valve,
so I guess this technically counts as a Valve submission as well.
However, it simply hasn’t been counted at all in my list.
So really, there are 306 weapon skins.
The M4A4 Griffin is another stolen submission.
The original submitter has been removed and
in my collection it’s just put down in its own category as ‘Removed – Contraband!!!’,
but once again you could argue this is now one of Valve’s skins as well or whatever.
I’ve been constructing this list for a while and was worried
that some of the artists would change their names or whatever.
But I’m very happy to say that none of them have.
Clearly, they’re proud of what their name is associated with.
Even if it isn’t always easy to type.
So, thanks for that, weapon artists.
And there’s one last anomaly,
and that’s the MP9 Impire by the Danidem.
Or is it… the MP7?
Because everywhere other than on the workshop it’s the MP7
yet on the workshop it says that his MP9 was accepted.
They both use a similar theme.
If I find out why then I’ll explain in this video’s description.
Honestly, skins aren’t my strong point,
I’ve done my research for this video but there may be tiny TINY problems.
Or something big, I don’t know.
But I hope it’s been interesting and if you’ve liked it then let me know so I can
make more.
And obviously, subscribe to me.
And give me any Dragonlores you happen to have lying around.
Awwwhh…