It’s no secret that Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) has a lucrative digital cosmetics or skin-trading market. In fact, the market cap for all the skins being held by players in CS2 alone was collectively valued at $6 billion. Well, “was” being the operative word here because Valve, CS2‘s developer and publisher, recently released an update that devalued some of the rarest skins in the game. This move erased almost $2 billion in collective value, crashing the rare skin market.
Now, the market cap for cosmetics dropped from $5.9 billion to $4.2 billion, or by as much as $1.7 billion. Such a huge change was effected during the October 23 patch for CS2, which states the following for skins:
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
For those who don’t play CS2, that essentially means you can now exchange five less rare cosmetics for a rarer cosmetic, usually knives or gloves. Previously, these elusive knife and glove skins could only be obtained as rare drops from a lootbox reward roulette. As a rough example, players can now use $5 worth of skins to draw rarer skins that were previously worth thousands of dollars in a third-party market.
For reference, some of the rare CS2 skins could previously be sold to other players for up to $13,000 (usually through a third-party site). Many of these skins have lost more or less 80 percent of their value due to the Trade Up Contract and panic selling. Hence, the players who were hoarding the rarest skins, letting them marinate in speculative value (to eventually sell like crypto or NFT), have lost much of that non-liquid value in dollars.
The backlash from skin traders was brutal
For years, CS2 skin traders have reveled in this kind of market; CS2, after all, is the most popular game on Steam. With all the hoarded digital value now getting, well, devalued, many CS2 skin traders are voicing out their frustrations (and lamentations) online. A furious CS2 player swore that it’s just Valve wanting to frustrate its playerbase.
“What the hell are you guys smoking over there? Can we get the original guy that made decisions on the game economy back because clearly he’s gone. Want knives and gloves to go down? Sure ok, but now reds are skyrocketing & just screws over a large portion of your player base,” rants the X user. “I invested my 401k into this game, now my skins are worthless. Where can I file my lawsuit,” fumes (or jokes) another player.
One of them, however, is worried that some players might lash out or worse after this incident, “You guys know that people are probably going to harm themselves cause of this, yet you pushed it out without hesitation, crazy.” That’s because some players have actually invested real money into the skins, likely in hopes of flipping or reselling them for higher value. Now that money is gone, just like investing in NFT or a pump-and-dump crypto. I’m not sure if you can blame Valve for that.
