The End of a Big Streaming Trend

It’s fair to say that all aspects of esports are at an all time high, despite the past year and the difficulties for some with offline events, online gaming has certainly provided many with a new approach to entertainment and a great escape through gaming itself. At the top end of esports too, there has been a changing of the guard – one of the biggest titles in CS:GO had found new competition with Riot Games Valorant, and as a huge number of both professional players and fans have made the change, the game certainly looks to be shaping up to take lead the way for competitive FPS throughout 2021 – but also looks to bring the end of one of the big streaming trends over the past decade too, as the CS:GO case opening fad had been slowly fading.

Throughout the history of Twitch there have always been a huge number of casino streamers and those that like to gamble as it remains to be a part of the streaming platform that has little attention paid for new rules or measures and would certainly be a spot that case openings would otherwise fall under but had remained under the Counter-Strike banner. Part of the reason this area of streaming is fading a little is simply because the bigger names that would otherwise be opening the cases have since moved, as it was largely the bigger streaming personalities that would be the big esports streams doing so and with them moving to a new game there are less options to do these openings.

Another factor has simply been within changes to the mechanics of the case openings themselves – they had previously been profitable for some with markets available for turning the skins into real cash or as part of the bigger sponsorship deals, but over the years efforts have been made to make it harder for trading in a wider way to happen or to limit the size of the skin market as a whole. Whilst there are those who would still open a large number to expand their own collection or as part of a sponsorship deal, doing so for the possibility to make a little extra had certainly become less of a choice.

For now, there’s no other market quite so similar as many titles now rely on battle passes or pre-determined shops as the way to deliver new cosmetics to players, largely in a response to the huge backlash to cases for the most part, and it’s unlikely that there will be a return to a similar high that was experienced throughout 2013-2016 with the openings that were experienced, it seems one big streaming trend has finally come to an end, and for many a question on whether or not loot boxes will stick around for a long period of time in gaming or be replaced by something new – with future changes certainly coming to loot boxes too, it’s certainly looking to be the end of an era.