Counter-Strike may be a quarter of a century old, but it remains one of Valve's biggest money-spinners on Steam.
Counter-Strike 2 – the latest iteration of the free-to-play team-based shooter – makes its money from chests, which cost around $2.50 to open. Incredibly, some of the skins found inside said chests can fetch over a million dollars online – so it's little wonder that, on average, players pay real-world money to open around 70,000,000 chests every month.
That's over $175,000,000 of revenue coming in every 30 days – so you'd expect the person who created the game to be utterly minted, right? Wrong.
Speaking to EDGE magazine, Counter-Strike creator Minh Le reveals that he effectively gave up what would become a billion-dollar money-making machine when he joined Valve back in 2000. In fact, when it came to selling up, Le readily admits he had no idea why Valve thought the game, which began life as a Half-Life mod, was worth anything:
"Counter-Strike was a free mod. I remember talking to [Jess] Cliffe (a modder who joined the project soon after launch) and asking, 'How are they even going to make money off this?' To us, they could have offered us any amount of money and we would have taken it. We didn't understand the value. We didn't negotiate. We just said, 'OK, this is a great deal'. We just wanted to work with Valve."
Le also reveals that he was happy to take any amount of cash at the time, as his own situation was somewhat precarious:
"I was worried about my financial situation. The money from Valve let me solve a lot of my problems. I ended up using some of it to help my parents pay off their mortgage, too. I kind of looked at it like winning the lottery. I didn't think about negotiating. I didn't want to scare off Valve. They had the upper hand and we were just a bunch of modders."
Le has never revealed what Valve paid him for Counter-Strike, but admits that it wasn't enough cash to retire there and then. In fact, as part of the arrangement, he became a Valve employee, which was something he could only have dreamed about prior to Counter-Strike being made.
In 2006, Le left Valve and has since worked on the likes of Rust and Black Desert Online. He's now working on a new tactical FPS of his own creation, Alpha Response, at Ultimo Ratio Games.
While he's continuing to chart his own path in game development, Le admits there are things he wishes had gone differently. "I do have some regrets," he tells EDGE. "A lot of the people who I still keep in touch with at Valve, I kind of notice that they're really well off financially."