I always delete those "gift" boxes as soon as I get them. I love how they were bullsh1tting in the beginning of CSGO like "skinning and various other mods/hacks have been disabled for safety reasons".
I'll never undestand this kind of stuff. I do play CS GO and TF2 from time to time but i would never, NEVER, pay money for weapon skins or cosmetic items. To make things even worse, Valve created its own gamble system and people fall into that trap. When i receive those crates and guns they go straight to the steam market. Only kept the ones that are worthless. On TF2, i just craft metal with duplicates and eventually (after tons of drops) i end up crafting an item.
I played a LOT of hl1/cstrike/tfc and hl2/css. I did not understand anything in that video. I also find those people gloating over textures a little weird...
Nowadays you have to pay for skins. With CSS you can still go to csbanana and get your skins for free. I think mostly it's 12 year olds paying with their mom's credit cards.
It is a sad state the games are in. I'm a huge CS:GO player and about 12 months ago I fell into the trap of micro transactions and skins. I started trading and although it was profitable (I turned about £10 into £300 in 3 months) I started spending way too much time worrying about how my guns and knives looked more than playing the game....at 30 years old it didn't feel right. In the end I cashed out, bought a full set of skins that I liked and a handful of games I could never normally afford and promised myself never to spend another penny on it again. The addiction is not easy to break for others though and it's gone beyond the skins and their appearance, people now trade on float value ( an artificial numerical representation of how visually perfect it is). A normally cheap £0.04 skin can be worth a fortune if its float is ludicrously low but to the naked eye you would not be able to tell the difference between it and another 'factory new skin. The only thing I could try argue in their favour is the placebo feel good factor. My car can get to 0-60 slower than most but I feel much better about driving it quickly because of the way it looks and the way it makes me feel. When I had some decent set of skins I felt I played better even though they have no physical impact on the game. It's nice feeling if it's not sheer vanity, boasting and totally out of control.