Counter-Strike 2 Item Database

You can find the Counter-Strike 2 Item Database on csitems.app. Both the data gathering, extracting, and the full-stack website was done by me. You can find some more information about Counter-Strike items and idea behind the Item Database below.

Counter-Strike Items

Counter-Strike first introduced weapon skins, lootboxes, and various other items back in 2013, when the game was still in its older version: Counter-Strike Global Offensive. Valve, the company behind CS, was not the first, but definitely one of the first ones to introduce such cosmetic items. Cosmetic because these items do not alter the players’ abilities or the weapon’s properties - they are only to make the guns visually more appealing. Despite this, a large playerbase and some very rare items have driven the prices sky-high. Some of the most expensive and rare items are worth millions of dollars.

In the meantime, a whole ecosystem has evolved around those items. Trading sites, secondary markets, and most profitable of them: gambling sites. Even though they are not endorsed by Valve, they are allowed to coexist. As each lootbox opened earns Valve around $2.50, and any item traded on the official market incurs 15% fees - per trade (!) - they are of course a highly profitable income source. According to Wikipedia, Valve earned 1 Billion USD in 2023 alone¹. An in-depth and critical analysis of the gambling issue was done by YouTube creator Coffeezilla in this video, which I can highly recommend. He argues that most of the competitive scene, at least the minor leagues, are only feasible because of skin gambling websites. But that is not the main topic of this article.

Gaining the Upper Hand

In the 12 years since these items were introduced, the total number of items grew to around 24 thousand. There are multiple versions of skins, with different wear-levels, patterns, and many combinations. As if it wasn’t already difficult enough to make sense of all these items, the official item browser by Valve is not very user friendly at all (one would think they have enough money to make a good one at least). This led me to the following project. Crawl all the Counter-Strike items, and make a browser for them. The current website is the first version, as is this blog post. I will expand more on it soon - stay tuned.