CS2 fans welcome skin rental feature but hope ‘subscription’ model won’t take over

Skin rental is now a thing with Counter-Strike 2’s May 24 update. Available so far on the sequel’s first-ever collection, the Kilowatt Case, players can rent skins for a week for the price of the case and a $2.50 USD key, and the community seems to be cautiously welcoming to Valve’s new model.

Weapon skin cases have been at the forefront of Counter-Strike’s revenue model since 2013. However, until the Kilowatt Case update, you’d have to spend cash on keys to open cases to get your shot at a desired weapon skin—unless you’d buy a particular skin from the community market or third-party websites. Depending on the drop rate of a certain skin within a case, and then the drop rate of the case as a whole, it wasn’t a rare sight to see a highly sought-after skin trading for hundreds of dollars. Now, however, the skin rental service lets subscribers access all skins within the collection for a week at a set price.