Counter-Strike: Global Offensive needs to be free to play

CSGO is the best first-person shooter I've ever played, but at this point, it should go to free to play. It makes a lot of sense, think about it.  Valve has made a lot of free to plays, such as Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2.

Let's be real; I think Valve really doesn't need your $15, even if you paid that much. CSGO, as of 8/8/2015, is the second most popular game on Steam, with 455,926 players. Now that's an achievement by itself, but the number one spot is Dota 2, a free to play with a low barrier to entry (hardware-wise). CSGO is the first-person shooter version of this, but it still carries that $15 price tag, which isn’t that much but still enough to turn off a certain amount of people. My friends who are console centric and play Halo and Call of Duty until their eyes fall out won't give Counter-Strike a chance because of its price. They say that if it were free, they would try the PC's golden baby. This group of console/shooter people would be huge for Counter-Strike, especially since it can run on practically anything. The last Call of Duty sold 19 million, which is 22% more than CSGO, and I don’t think there is much crossover.

This wasn’t good enough just to talk about the history of Valve but the money being made on the market place. I asked five of my closest Steam friends to get a decent estimate of how much money people are spending on the CSGO micro transactions. As you can see from the graph, it's pretty darn close, but you do have your people who spend hundreds of dollars.

So should CSGO be free to play or stick to its pointless price tag? Do you already own CSGO or are you turned off by the price?