The shock caused the game market to evaporate nearly 2 billion USD

Traders in CS 2 lost hundreds of thousands of dollars overnight. Photo: TheGamer .

The Counter-Strike skin market saw a dramatic crash overnight, falling from a record $6 billion market cap to $4.1 billion .

This plunge came after Valve released an update on October 23, officially introducing the ability to Trade Up for knives and gloves - the two most expensive items in the game.

Previously, gamers only had two ways to own knives or gloves: Buy directly on the trading floor or open from the weapon case. The rate of receiving knives or gloves from the weapon case is extremely low, only 1/385.

To open each chest, players must purchase a key for around $1.99 . Due to the difficult and expensive process of obtaining them, the value of knives and gloves is always very high, making these rare items account for a large portion of the total skin market capitalization.

Knives and gloves are the two most valuable items in CS 2, worth up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. Photo: YouTube.

Trade Up in CS 2 is a mechanism that allows gamers to "upgrade" items, exchanging several lower-level skins for a single skin of higher level and rarity. Specifically, players will collect 10 weapon skins of the same level (e.g. green) to Trade Up, in exchange for 1 skin of higher level (blue skin).

With the latest update, Valve has allowed players to use 5 extremely rare weapon skins (Covert/red) to exchange for a single highest quality item (yellow skin) like a knife or glove. This is the reason why the prices of these 2 items have dropped dramatically, because now there is an easier and more direct way to get them without opening a loot box.

According to information from CSGOSkins , within just 24 hours, this change has caused the value of some knife items to decrease by up to 43%, while Covert skins have increased by up to 67%.

This event is a worrying sign for the in-game trader community, as many have seen the value of their virtual inventory evaporate by thousands of dollars overnight.

Players can now trade regular skins for knives and gloves, causing the value of these two items to drop sharply. Photo: YouTube.

According to FloatDB analysis, there are currently 20 million Covert skins in circulation (not counting knives and gloves). This number would increase to 29 million if all lower level skins are all Trade Up. In the unlikely scenario where all of these Covert skins are traded for knives and gloves, the supply of these two items would double from 5.5 to 11 million.

With these data, many traders expected the market capitalization to stabilize and recover some of the value lost after the initial panic. In fact, at the time of writing, the market capitalization has increased slightly to $4.3 billion .

For nearly a decade, the gaming community has been petitioning Valve to overhaul the Counter-Strike skin market, arguing that prices have become too expensive and out of reach for the average player.

The clearest evidence is that skin lines such as "Souvenir AWP Dragon Lore" were once traded for more than 500,000 USD , or the case of the skin "AK-47 Blue Gem Factory New" was sold for a record price of more than 1 million USD .

Most recently, a Vietnamese gamer opened a weapon chest and received the extremely rare skin "Talon Knife Case Hardened Blue Gem". According to initial estimates, the value of this item could be up to more than 200,000 USD (equivalent to 5 billion VND ).

Source: https://znews.vn/cu-soc-doi-voi-cong-dong-counter-strike-2-post1596425.html