Valve Removes $2B from Counter-Strike 2 Market 💰

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Investors all around the world are panicking after losing billions after Valve made an update to its game Counter-Strike 2.
That’s because one of Counter-Strike’s features -- and really a feature of most Valve games -- is that the cosmetic items in them can be traded on a marketplace for real-world money.
Technically the system is supposed to keep the money within Steam, which is Valve’s extremely popular marketplace.
But the most common way for players of Counter-Strike 2 is to use other marketplaces that facilitate “Trades” in exchange for crypto currencies and other money.
These trades can be for serious money too, with many items going for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.
And in rare instances some go for FAR, FAR more than that.
So how did Valve fuck all this up? With a new lootbox and an update to how many past items work.
This is going to get a little technical -- although for CS2 fans this will just scratch the surface -- so bear with me.
The cosmetic items in CS2 usually revolve around skins for the guns, knives, and player’s gloves -- the latter two generally fetch the highest prices.
So the tldr is: Knives and gloves expensive. Guns cheaper.
There’s also a rarity system and for simplicity’s sake we can mostly ignore it because all you need to know is that Valve made it so that now -- outside of a handful of exceptions -- you can trade any 5 guns from the rarest “Covert” tier for a chance at a knife or glove.
Instantly the market went nuts, with the price of knives and gloves crashing while the price of Covert guns skyrocketed.
This is especially true for Covert guns that were pretty unpopular and cheap, because it gives a massive opportunity for arbitrage since you can trade 5 relatively cheap guns for the chance at an expensive knife.
And even though knives and gloves are falling in price they’re still pretty valuable.
So if you can buy Coverts on the cheap and trade them up, you’re still up in value.
xQc possible described it best when he said:
“Now, everyone that has something has nothing and people that have nothing can have something. It’s a market flip.”
Although he’s probably wrong about the “only thing worth something now are rare guns” because it’s still a 5:1 ratio to get a knife or glove.
With some analysis claiming that if EVERY SINGLE one of these covert guns in existence was used to trade up, it would only double the supply of the rarer knives and gloves.
Theoretically there will be some kind of equilibrium as the two prices better reflect each other, but until then a ton of money has been lost in high end collections and a $2 billion loss across the board.



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Produced by: Cory Ray, Philip DeFranco
Edited by: James Girardier, Maxwell Enright, Julie Goldberg, Christian Meeks, Matthew Henry
Art Department: William Crespo
Writing/Research: Brian Espinoza, Philip DeFranco
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#CS2 #CounterStrike2 #Valve