Ah Valve, you awful, giggling vultures. You terrible purveyors of mischief and misfortune. Weeks go past without you making any significant game-related announcements, and then you suddenly dropkick the entire Counter-Strike cosmetics economy into the sun.
The developers have released what they breezily call a “small update” for Counter-Strike 2 that, essentially, allows players to exchange five cosmetic items for other items that sell for a lot, lot more over the Counter-Strike player marketplace. As such, they have crashed the price of the latter items and, according to tracking app Price Empire, wiped billions of US dollars off the value of the CS2 skins market.
As passed on by Gamesradar, the update in question extends the functionality of the ‘Trade Up Contract’, which allows players to swap common “Covert” items obtained from purchaseable cases for much rarer knives or gloves, including “StatTrakTM” gear that, as the name implies, tracks certain play statistics when equipped.
The Trade Up contract now lets people exchange five StatTrakTM Covert quality items for “one StatTrakTM Knife from a collection of one of the items provided”, or five regular Covert items for “one regular Knife item or one regular Gloves item from a collection of one of the items provided”. The result is that Covert skins have shot up in price, while the price of knives and gloves has plummeted.
The numbers in question are not tiny. They are in fact quite large. One Covert skin collector says that their 609 hitherto “worthless red skins” are now worth £3,329,612 on the marketplace. One respondent comments that “my knife just dropped $1,400 in value in the span of 30 minutes”.
Reactions to all this on the Counter-Strike subreddit naturally vary quite a bit, with knife and glove collectors spitting mad, while others comment that this is great for new players who don’t have the pocket money for a $400 make-believe dagger. Over at Forbes, Mike Stubbs speculates that this is actually Valve’s way of punishing knife and glove dealers for selling the items on external marketplaces, even at the cost of sabotaging the CS player cosmetics biz (from which Valve takes a cut) in the short term. I’ll go ask the developers if they’d like to comment on all this.
