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GamingCounter-Strike 2 Skins Market Crashes in $2bn Market Cap Drop After October 23 update
The skin community and the market they rely on is one of the backbones of Counter-Strike 2, but they have been rocked in an update on October 23, which could change the game forever.
The update, which also introduces Retakes as an official gamemode and adds new tradeup functionality, has already had a massive effect on the market.
CS Market Crashes After New Update
Although the release for the new update was focused on the new Retakes mode, it’s what was seen in the official patch notes that has really caught the eye:
- Extended functionality of the “Trade Up Contract” to allow exchanging 5 items of Covert quality as follows:
- 5 StatTrak™ Covert items can be exchanged for one StatTrak™ Knife from a collection of one of the items provided
- 5 regular Covert items can be exchanged for one regular Knife item or one regular Gloves item from a collection of one of the items provided
In layman’s terms, this means that CS2 players can now trade five red rarity skins for a gold rarity skin, with the outcome of what you get in that trade being dependent on which five skins they offer in it.
It’s something that has never been able to be done before, and it has already massively changed the Counter-Strike skins market. Within minutes of the update releasing, the price of red skins had skyrocketed, while gold skins had lost a lot of value.
Players are already posting videos of them trading up some of the cheaper red skins that remain in the game and receiving knives that cost thousands in return.
However, whilst this does sound good for some people, the market crash has disappointed many within Counter-Strike’s lively trading community.
Most people in this community consider their inventories to be investments, but one update has caused the value of those investments to decrease massively. Former NA star Austin “Cooper” Abadir even suggested that the CS market had lost a billion dollars in value within five hours of the update’s release, with that number doubling to almost $2 billion at the time of writing according to Pricempire.
With the new knives and gloves, which cannot be traded for another week, it’s likely that the market crash hasn’t reached its peak yet.
Skins could continue to decrease in value and might never recover, especially as people speculate that the update results from Valve looking to move away from lootboxes to comply with new regulations.
