There are few games where skins are more important than Counter-Strike, as the legendary first-person shooter has a cosmetic market dictated almost entirely by the player base, with some items valued in the millions of dollars.
Where most games sell weapon skins and other cosmetics at a fixed price that the developer solely profits from, Counter-Strike has historically done things very differently by giving players the power.
People still need to source skins from developer Valve directly through loot box-like weapons cases that have a random chance to drop a skin from a predetermined selection, but once they have a skin they're free to sell it for as much as they like — provided another player is willing to pay the price.
This has caused many of the most in-demand skins to go for hundreds, thousands, and even millions of real life dollars, with knives in particular being among the most expensive due to their increased rarity.
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However, a recent unexpected change from Valve has given players a new way to obtain knives that was incredibly cheap for a brief period of time, and it has caused $1,000,000,000 to be wiped from the market overnight.
Detailed in the October 23, 2023 patch notes, a change to the 'Contracts' system adds "extended functionality of the 'Trade Up Contract' to allow exchanging 5 items of Covert quality" for a knife or pair of gloves — two of the rarest item types.
While Covert quality items can often be expensive if they're tied to a popular weapon in-game, there were also many items that were valued at little more than a couple of dollars, meaning that for less than $10 you could get an item that was in most cases at least around $100.
Understandably, many rushed to do this new Trade Up Contract as soon as it went live, causing both all Covert items to soar in price and many knives to tank, with some of the most popular dropping by around 50% in a matter of hours.
Funnily enough, none of the new knives or gloves obtained through these Trade Up Contracts will be able to be sold for another two weeks as they are officially trade-locked by Valve, but the market has responded accordingly to the panic, and the damage has well and truly been done.
A post on X from former Counter-Strike pro player Austin "Cooper" Abadir shows that the CS2 Marketcap dropped around $1 billion in just five hours after the change, and many who were holding onto expensive inventories have no doubt felt the change.
While many have slammed Valve for effectively making them lose hundreds if not thousands of dollars, popular creator fl0m has argued that it's a good change for the majority of people "couldn't buy [skins] without 'investing' an insane amount of money to get a 'nice' skin."
He argued that "people pretending like the market wasn't becoming just a s***hole of people manipulating it for their own gain are either in denial cause it benefitted them or are the ones who created this to begin with," adding that "a normal human shouldn't have to spend the amount of money to just have 1 nice skin in CS."
It's unlikely that Valve will add any further comment on the current market situation or address the concerns of those left outraged and out of pocket as the developer tends to operate in silence, but it's definitely shown quite how volatile gaming's own stock market can be, and why it might not be the best idea to plunge your net worth into skins that are only as valuable as the community makes them.