On average, opening the Recoil Case returns about $1.51 against a cost of $2.83 (case plus key), an expected ROI of -47%. Like almost every CS2 case it carries a house edge, so over many opens you lose money. The appeal is the small chance at a high-value Covert or rare special item.
The rare special (gold) tier that contains knives or gloves drops at roughly 0.26% per open, about 1 in 400. Covert (red) skins drop at 0.64%, Classified (pink) at 3.2%, Restricted (purple) at 15.98% and Mil-Spec (blue) at 79.92%.
We take the real drop odds for each rarity tier, price every skin in that tier at the cheapest live listing across the 26 marketplaces we track, and sum the probability-weighted values. That total is the expected value of a single open.