The Counter-Strike 2 skin marketplace has thousands of listings for thousands of dollars, and Valve has tanked the market with a small update designed to make skins easier to get.
The small update that just dropped allows players to trade regular Covert skins for a rare cosmetic for their knives and gloves, and it torched a secondary marketplace. This may not sound like a huge deal, but Counter-Strike 2Â has a massive online community marketplace that engages in real-money deals for thousands of dollars. So, while a newer player would be elated to find out they can get rarer skins easier and earlier (and with less luck involved), Counter-Strike 2 skins are tradable on the Steam secondary market, and knife or glove skins have historically sold for big money.
The reason these cosmetic skins sell for such a premium is the method of obtaining each item. Counter-Strike 2 dispenses its cosmetics through “weapon cases,” which are essentially loot boxes with chances to unlock a rarer item. These cases are purchased with real money. Openings are not guaranteed to yield valuable results, and most often, players receive items that hold little worth on the secondary market.
Each item is colour-coded, with grey and blue considered relatively common, while the most valuable items are classified as red and gold. Previously, players could trade 10 skins of one colour to upgrade to the next rarity tier, but this rule did not apply to highly sought-after gold skins until this update launched.
Because players couldn’t trade red skins in bundles for gold skins, gold was regarded as a premium item, and the highest sought gloves and knife items fall into the gold classification. Valve’s controversial update launched this week, changed these long-standing rules, allowing players to trade red skins for gold skins, effectively taking a hacksaw to the Counter-Strike 2 marketplace. Before this update, fans would have to spend real money to try their hand at the claw machine-like weapon case distribution to get a cool cosmetic, and now, fans can just trade up to the highest rarity.
Because of everything that happened due to the “small update,” according to CS2 market analytics website Price Empire (found by Eurogamer), the entire market cap for trending skins in-game has fallen by a massive 42 percent in the last 24 hours. The update from Valve, designed to make skins easier to obtain for Counter-Strike 2 players, wiped over $2 billion off the market within a week.
While it is now easier to get high-grade skins in Counter-Strike 2, fans who have invested in the marketplace for skins like the M4A1 Hot Rod have lost big (approximately $2000 off the average listed price). As of this posting, Valve has yet to issue a formal statement regarding the Counter-Strike 2 market crash.
