This label of "rug pull" needs to be pushed back against, I think. You saw similar rhetoric out of MTG collectors a while back when some notable cards were devalued. These were not created or sold...
This label of "rug pull" needs to be pushed back against, I think. You saw similar rhetoric out of MTG collectors a while back when some notable cards were devalued.
These were not created or sold as investment assets. Valve had no agreement with anyone that these would be run as financial assets. They have no obligation to ensure they remain a "store of value", especially when the speculation actively worsens the game that makes them their money.
People who lost their arses on this have every right to be upset, I have sympathy, but to be angry at valve? Nah. They didn't put that rug under you.
I mean, they created and control the market. The only reason these skins can fetch such high prices is that it's easy to sell them for real money. Valve could put a stop to it by making skins...
I mean, they created and control the market. The only reason these skins can fetch such high prices is that it's easy to sell them for real money. Valve could put a stop to it by making skins untradable, but everything they do implies they don't mind the billion in profit generated by them. In fact, they recently introduced a replacement for cases in the form of a "terminal". It more directly allows players to buy skins, with Valve dynamically pricing skins based on past sales, of which some had initial asking prices in the high hundreds. Even this newest update is just them trying to get ahead of regulators, since the market manipulation got kind of out of control.
If you're out of the loop on this one, you might be surprised to learn it's because said items are used as currency in gray market gambling sites. Wikipedia actually has a surprisingly...
If you're out of the loop on this one, you might be surprised to learn it's because said items are used as currency in gray market gambling sites. Wikipedia actually has a surprisingly comprehensive overview.
I've seen speculation that Valve made this move to get ahead of potential legal/regulatory actions regarding lootboxes and skin gambling.
Its weird because their approach for Dota was quite sane and a nice "inbetween" on collecting vs gambling. A box has 5 items, you WILL get a unique item for the first 5 you open, so it will only...
I've seen speculation that Valve made this move to get ahead of potential legal/regulatory actions regarding lootboxes and skin gambling.
Its weird because their approach for Dota was quite sane and a nice "inbetween" on collecting vs gambling.
A box has 5 items, you WILL get a unique item for the first 5 you open, so it will only every cost 5 boxes max to get every item EXCEPT the rare items which are still "good luck terrible odds lol". However the "1 of 5 every time" loop repeats as you chase the rares and you start stocking up extras of those commons which you can then give out.
It keep/kept the common prices low and even some of the rare stuff wasn't that expensive, or if it was, was tied to certainty. Things like get to X level in a battle pass which had a ceiling of Y (I think the Wisp Portal skin worked out to $200, but you also get a bunch of stuff along the way and could climb the levels without paying so it's not exactly 1 to 1).
My understanding of the CS market is it's the wild fucking west, and of course they had 3rd party markets that gambled the HELL out of this shit in totally illegal ways (all sorts of rigging). How valve didn't instantly say "nope fuck that" and take massive steps to shut that shit down still blows my mind. I don't expect billion dollar companies to be ethical, but valve at least seems to try, and this was nasty levels of fucked up and basically still continued?
If you have a virtual hat worth a penny, and there's a trillion of them out there, you have a "market cap" of 10 billion. Many of these virtual hats are valued at much higher than a penny.
If you have a virtual hat worth a penny, and there's a trillion of them out there, you have a "market cap" of 10 billion. Many of these virtual hats are valued at much higher than a penny.
Cryptocurrency but Valves database instead of a blockchain. Because it’s liquid and fungible, skins can be used as a currency for things like gambling.
Cryptocurrency but Valves database instead of a blockchain.
Because it’s liquid and fungible, skins can be used as a currency for things like gambling.
Actually they aren't all fungible. Many skins have random patterns, so two knives of the same type may have dramatically different values depending on how desirable the pattern is.
Actually they aren't all fungible. Many skins have random patterns, so two knives of the same type may have dramatically different values depending on how desirable the pattern is.
Yeah, this is a pretty big, unregulated industry that a lot of people use for gambling. Also the price of skins until this point have steadily gone up, to the tune of some skins being worth a million.
Yeah, this is a pretty big, unregulated industry that a lot of people use for gambling. Also the price of skins until this point have steadily gone up, to the tune of some skins being worth a million.
Unlike games where you can only buy cosmetic items to outfit your character, which is by far the norm, Valve dabbles in various grey market activity. Weapon skins are tradeable to any Steam user,...
Unlike games where you can only buy cosmetic items to outfit your character, which is by far the norm, Valve dabbles in various grey market activity. Weapon skins are tradeable to any Steam user, and last I was aware (I've since switched to PlayStation) you could even put them on a marketplace and get Steam wallet credit for whatever people were willing to pay.
CS2 is probably my most-played game (though I play it very differently than most). I've never been too interested in the skin market side of it until now. Over the past couple of days, I've been...
Exemplary
CS2 is probably my most-played game (though I play it very differently than most). I've never been too interested in the skin market side of it until now. Over the past couple of days, I've been following almost nothing but this drama, because it's fascinating to watch how people behave during what they perceive as a crisis.
I only own one skin myself, which I bought for around $600 and is now worth roughly $150. Since I never saw it as an investment, its practical value became $0 the moment I bought it, so I didn't really care about the recent news. But a lot of people clearly do. The forums are full of delusional posts about how it's time to "buy the dip", that the market will recover, trust will return, and it's all just a matter of time.
To me, it's obvious why Valve is doing this. Even if you only play CS2 for the gameplay, you can't help but become somewhat aware of the skins. In the past few months, we've seen absurd price spikes on cheap, irrelevant items. For example, a sticker, which can only be applied once and never removed, went from $0.30 to $250 for no reason whatsoever. The same thing happened with several previously worthless skins. I think Valve took notice. There were clearly some shenanigans going on.
Given Valve's recent steps toward making cases obsolete with the introduction of Terminals1 and increased scrutiny from EU countries like Belgium and France (which has already led to in game changes), regulation seems inevitable. Valve isn't a litigious company, at least as far as I know. They know how to avoid regulation. And with growing media attention on CS-related gambling sites and the monetization model, which adds some value to Valve but not the majority of it, this shift was bound to happen.
Valve's direction seems clear: gradually remove cases from the market, introduce Terminals instead, and make the process more transparent. If you're lucky enough to get five covert (red) items from the Terminals, you're guaranteed a knife or a glove. Previously, your chances of getting either were about 1 in 1,000 and even then, the condition (or wear, which is another level of randomness) you can get them in meant that a "good" one was still unlikely. With the new system, third-party websites become much less relevant, Valve regains control of the market, and overall prices drop so that more people can participate.
An Emerald Butterfly Knife used to sell for $30,000, with Valve earning nothing from that "value". Now, if Valve reclaims control of the market, that same knife might cost $1,000 but Valve would earn their 10% (or whatever the cut is) from each transaction completed under their own Steam Market. It's better for them financially and legally. Buying items based on chance becomes buying items based on choice. A week ago, Valve was in a lose-lose situation, now they're slowly turning it into a win-win. Some people who treated skins as investments will be furious, but maybe that's an expensive lesson they needed to learn.
The situation in China is more complicated. The Chinese market represents the largest share of CS2 skins, but there, skins can act as a kind of tangible currency2. Because of arbitrary limits on how much foreign currency Chinese citizens can hold, this system apparently became a way around those laws. There's currently a huge disparity between skin prices in China and the rest of the world because of it. Speculation is rampant about what happens once the new items hit the global market but honestly, it might not matter. Valve's intention to kill this system is clear, even if delusional people still think it's time to "buy the dip" and make money again once things settle.
My only personal and selfish worry out of all of this is how this will affect the esports scene, which I enjoy following. Most of the scene is fueled by these third-party skin websites and if Valve forces them to downsize or ran them out of business with their current and future decisions, I'm not sure what will take their place.
1: You need a $2.50 key to open cases. If you don't already have many, cases themselves cost a dollar or two. With a Terminal, which you can pay for or occasionally get for free, you open it without a key. It gives you five random skins in varying qualities, and you choose whether to buy them or not.
2: You can technically convert skins to fiat money, but not directly.
I learned about this while browsing Reddit for updates. Some basics: knives and gloves previously were ONLY available from lootboxes because they're exclusively in the Covert quality tier. You...
I learned about this while browsing Reddit for updates. Some basics: knives and gloves previously were ONLY available from lootboxes because they're exclusively in the Covert quality tier. You could trade up guns to get higher quality ones, but you had to get knife and gloves through lootboxes or trading. So now you can trade five Covert skins of any kind to get a knife or gloves. This isn't just making knife and glove prices plummet, it's also raising the prices of Covert guns so people can trade those in. So there's chaos on all fronts.
The way prices ballooned is absurd to me since as far as I can tell the skins are 100% cosmetic so it's just pixels, but given their exclusivity, I can see how the economy built around them. It's ridiculous how expensive they got, to the point of people treating it as actual investments, but... Yeah, I can see how the skins would have actual value.
Of particular note: the Chinese market is apparently particularly big in "investing" in video game items and CS skins. Which brings me to this sad item: there are reports that a Chinese student sadly committed suicide after this update. A quick internet search didn't bring up any articles on it (I'd assume any articles would be in Chinese), but this mentions there are reports of multiple unconfirmed deaths in China. Hard to say how true it is (even the article/post/whatever that is notes the reports are unconfirmed), but sadly I would not be surprised. Investments gone wrong have many such tragic stories. It's just sad that the same sort of loss is happening over virtual items.
Speculating that part of the reason for this update has to do with the third party market manipulation by Chinese groups. It was talked about for a while in the community that Chinese "traders"...
Speculating that part of the reason for this update has to do with the third party market manipulation by Chinese groups. It was talked about for a while in the community that Chinese "traders" would pick cases/skins to pump and dump. I just heard a story a few weeks ago from a friend where he woke up and some cases he had that were worth around $5 became worth around $300 (numbers are hazy) and he quickly sold before the dump. This was not healthy and crashing the market sooner is better than letting it continue to build. People started believing skins were a real store of value.
I don't love the use of "rug pull" in the headline but I can't think of anything better. In the last day or so, CS2 skins have lost a lot of value. I think it's kinda hilarious that people are...
I don't love the use of "rug pull" in the headline but I can't think of anything better. In the last day or so, CS2 skins have lost a lot of value. I think it's kinda hilarious that people are complaining about it, but I don't have too much else to say about it.
(also don't love using Dexerto as a source either)
Yeah it's dumb but that's how they perceive it. It's an arbitrary asset priced based on its availability with no guarantee that Valve doesn't just say "meh fuck it, you all get one" tomorrow. The...
Yeah it's dumb but that's how they perceive it. It's an arbitrary asset priced based on its availability with no guarantee that Valve doesn't just say "meh fuck it, you all get one" tomorrow. The fact it EVER got so high is a damming look for valve to begin with.
I mean... There's a lot more regulation involved with actual currency than video game assets and game marketplaces. So people actually treating skins as investments really feels insane. Actually...
I mean... There's a lot more regulation involved with actual currency than video game assets and game marketplaces. So people actually treating skins as investments really feels insane.
Actually this kinda reminds me of the beanie babies craze and how a lot of people treated them with the same seriousness as investing in stocks. And I'd argue beanie babies are a little more sustainable since they're, you know, physical objects that you physically own... Skins depend on you never getting banned and the game never shutting down.
If the fed decided "meh, fuck it" and deliberately halved the value of the US dollar for no gain whatsoever, their heads would be on spikes by the end of the day.
If the fed decided "meh, fuck it" and deliberately halved the value of the US dollar for no gain whatsoever, their heads would be on spikes by the end of the day.
Yea, if the market for CS skins vanishes tomorrow, the only people that suffer are those who made incredibly poor decisions. And they'll still be able to eat.
Yea, if the market for CS skins vanishes tomorrow, the only people that suffer are those who made incredibly poor decisions. And they'll still be able to eat.
If you're going to self-harm because devs pushed out a QoL update to let people get some skins easier, you really need to sit back and think about your life choices. Hey kids! Did you know in the...
“You guys know that people are probably going to harm themselves cause of this, yet you pushed it out without hesitation, crazy.”
If you're going to self-harm because devs pushed out a QoL update to let people get some skins easier, you really need to sit back and think about your life choices.
Hey kids! Did you know in the before times, you didn't need to pay hard cash to customize your character in games?
You could just make or download whatever skin you wanted. You could change the rules of the game however you wanted. All you had to do was run a private server and install modding tools. Which companies provided for free.
That’s pretty crazy. I have myself also sold tons of of the CS boxes back in the day for a couple of cents each. And once I noticed it was going to keep increasing in price I also bought a few...
That’s pretty crazy. I have myself also sold tons of of the CS boxes back in the day for a couple of cents each. And once I noticed it was going to keep increasing in price I also bought a few boxes (put 20 euros in boxes) and bought a couple of skins that I liked for like 40 bucks. That account is still worth about 600 euro at the moment as far as I know. Pretty crazy all in all
This label of "rug pull" needs to be pushed back against, I think. You saw similar rhetoric out of MTG collectors a while back when some notable cards were devalued.
These were not created or sold as investment assets. Valve had no agreement with anyone that these would be run as financial assets. They have no obligation to ensure they remain a "store of value", especially when the speculation actively worsens the game that makes them their money.
People who lost their arses on this have every right to be upset, I have sympathy, but to be angry at valve? Nah. They didn't put that rug under you.
I mean, they created and control the market. The only reason these skins can fetch such high prices is that it's easy to sell them for real money. Valve could put a stop to it by making skins untradable, but everything they do implies they don't mind the billion in profit generated by them. In fact, they recently introduced a replacement for cases in the form of a "terminal". It more directly allows players to buy skins, with Valve dynamically pricing skins based on past sales, of which some had initial asking prices in the high hundreds. Even this newest update is just them trying to get ahead of regulators, since the market manipulation got kind of out of control.
The items for sale in a video game collectively have a “market cap” in the billions? What’s going on here?
If you're out of the loop on this one, you might be surprised to learn it's because said items are used as currency in gray market gambling sites. Wikipedia actually has a surprisingly comprehensive overview.
I've seen speculation that Valve made this move to get ahead of potential legal/regulatory actions regarding lootboxes and skin gambling.
Its weird because their approach for Dota was quite sane and a nice "inbetween" on collecting vs gambling.
A box has 5 items, you WILL get a unique item for the first 5 you open, so it will only every cost 5 boxes max to get every item EXCEPT the rare items which are still "good luck terrible odds lol". However the "1 of 5 every time" loop repeats as you chase the rares and you start stocking up extras of those commons which you can then give out.
It keep/kept the common prices low and even some of the rare stuff wasn't that expensive, or if it was, was tied to certainty. Things like get to X level in a battle pass which had a ceiling of Y (I think the Wisp Portal skin worked out to $200, but you also get a bunch of stuff along the way and could climb the levels without paying so it's not exactly 1 to 1).
My understanding of the CS market is it's the wild fucking west, and of course they had 3rd party markets that gambled the HELL out of this shit in totally illegal ways (all sorts of rigging). How valve didn't instantly say "nope fuck that" and take massive steps to shut that shit down still blows my mind. I don't expect billion dollar companies to be ethical, but valve at least seems to try, and this was nasty levels of fucked up and basically still continued?
If you have a virtual hat worth a penny, and there's a trillion of them out there, you have a "market cap" of 10 billion. Many of these virtual hats are valued at much higher than a penny.
Cryptocurrency but Valves database instead of a blockchain.
Because it’s liquid and fungible, skins can be used as a currency for things like gambling.
Actually they aren't all fungible. Many skins have random patterns, so two knives of the same type may have dramatically different values depending on how desirable the pattern is.
Yeah, this is a pretty big, unregulated industry that a lot of people use for gambling. Also the price of skins until this point have steadily gone up, to the tune of some skins being worth a million.
Unlike games where you can only buy cosmetic items to outfit your character, which is by far the norm, Valve dabbles in various grey market activity. Weapon skins are tradeable to any Steam user, and last I was aware (I've since switched to PlayStation) you could even put them on a marketplace and get Steam wallet credit for whatever people were willing to pay.
So, anyway, people have straight up casinos where they escrow the cosmetics and gamble on items worth thousands of dollars. I've seen articles, with interviews, about teens becoming compulsive gamblers over it.
Also, money laundering.
CS2 is probably my most-played game (though I play it very differently than most). I've never been too interested in the skin market side of it until now. Over the past couple of days, I've been following almost nothing but this drama, because it's fascinating to watch how people behave during what they perceive as a crisis.
I only own one skin myself, which I bought for around $600 and is now worth roughly $150. Since I never saw it as an investment, its practical value became $0 the moment I bought it, so I didn't really care about the recent news. But a lot of people clearly do. The forums are full of delusional posts about how it's time to "buy the dip", that the market will recover, trust will return, and it's all just a matter of time.
To me, it's obvious why Valve is doing this. Even if you only play CS2 for the gameplay, you can't help but become somewhat aware of the skins. In the past few months, we've seen absurd price spikes on cheap, irrelevant items. For example, a sticker, which can only be applied once and never removed, went from $0.30 to $250 for no reason whatsoever. The same thing happened with several previously worthless skins. I think Valve took notice. There were clearly some shenanigans going on.
Given Valve's recent steps toward making cases obsolete with the introduction of Terminals1 and increased scrutiny from EU countries like Belgium and France (which has already led to in game changes), regulation seems inevitable. Valve isn't a litigious company, at least as far as I know. They know how to avoid regulation. And with growing media attention on CS-related gambling sites and the monetization model, which adds some value to Valve but not the majority of it, this shift was bound to happen.
Valve's direction seems clear: gradually remove cases from the market, introduce Terminals instead, and make the process more transparent. If you're lucky enough to get five covert (red) items from the Terminals, you're guaranteed a knife or a glove. Previously, your chances of getting either were about 1 in 1,000 and even then, the condition (or wear, which is another level of randomness) you can get them in meant that a "good" one was still unlikely. With the new system, third-party websites become much less relevant, Valve regains control of the market, and overall prices drop so that more people can participate.
An Emerald Butterfly Knife used to sell for $30,000, with Valve earning nothing from that "value". Now, if Valve reclaims control of the market, that same knife might cost $1,000 but Valve would earn their 10% (or whatever the cut is) from each transaction completed under their own Steam Market. It's better for them financially and legally. Buying items based on chance becomes buying items based on choice. A week ago, Valve was in a lose-lose situation, now they're slowly turning it into a win-win. Some people who treated skins as investments will be furious, but maybe that's an expensive lesson they needed to learn.
The situation in China is more complicated. The Chinese market represents the largest share of CS2 skins, but there, skins can act as a kind of tangible currency2. Because of arbitrary limits on how much foreign currency Chinese citizens can hold, this system apparently became a way around those laws. There's currently a huge disparity between skin prices in China and the rest of the world because of it. Speculation is rampant about what happens once the new items hit the global market but honestly, it might not matter. Valve's intention to kill this system is clear, even if delusional people still think it's time to "buy the dip" and make money again once things settle.
My only personal and selfish worry out of all of this is how this will affect the esports scene, which I enjoy following. Most of the scene is fueled by these third-party skin websites and if Valve forces them to downsize or ran them out of business with their current and future decisions, I'm not sure what will take their place.
1: You need a $2.50 key to open cases. If you don't already have many, cases themselves cost a dollar or two. With a Terminal, which you can pay for or occasionally get for free, you open it without a key. It gives you five random skins in varying qualities, and you choose whether to buy them or not.
2: You can technically convert skins to fiat money, but not directly.
I learned about this while browsing Reddit for updates. Some basics: knives and gloves previously were ONLY available from lootboxes because they're exclusively in the Covert quality tier. You could trade up guns to get higher quality ones, but you had to get knife and gloves through lootboxes or trading. So now you can trade five Covert skins of any kind to get a knife or gloves. This isn't just making knife and glove prices plummet, it's also raising the prices of Covert guns so people can trade those in. So there's chaos on all fronts.
The way prices ballooned is absurd to me since as far as I can tell the skins are 100% cosmetic so it's just pixels, but given their exclusivity, I can see how the economy built around them. It's ridiculous how expensive they got, to the point of people treating it as actual investments, but... Yeah, I can see how the skins would have actual value.
Of particular note: the Chinese market is apparently particularly big in "investing" in video game items and CS skins. Which brings me to this sad item: there are reports that a Chinese student sadly committed suicide after this update. A quick internet search didn't bring up any articles on it (I'd assume any articles would be in Chinese), but this mentions there are reports of multiple unconfirmed deaths in China. Hard to say how true it is (even the article/post/whatever that is notes the reports are unconfirmed), but sadly I would not be surprised. Investments gone wrong have many such tragic stories. It's just sad that the same sort of loss is happening over virtual items.
Speculating that part of the reason for this update has to do with the third party market manipulation by Chinese groups. It was talked about for a while in the community that Chinese "traders" would pick cases/skins to pump and dump. I just heard a story a few weeks ago from a friend where he woke up and some cases he had that were worth around $5 became worth around $300 (numbers are hazy) and he quickly sold before the dump. This was not healthy and crashing the market sooner is better than letting it continue to build. People started believing skins were a real store of value.
I don't love the use of "rug pull" in the headline but I can't think of anything better. In the last day or so, CS2 skins have lost a lot of value. I think it's kinda hilarious that people are complaining about it, but I don't have too much else to say about it.
(also don't love using Dexerto as a source either)
Yeah it's dumb but that's how they perceive it. It's an arbitrary asset priced based on its availability with no guarantee that Valve doesn't just say "meh fuck it, you all get one" tomorrow. The fact it EVER got so high is a damming look for valve to begin with.
Not that I disagree with you but this also applies to the US Dollar if you replace Valve by the fed 😅
I mean... There's a lot more regulation involved with actual currency than video game assets and game marketplaces. So people actually treating skins as investments really feels insane.
Actually this kinda reminds me of the beanie babies craze and how a lot of people treated them with the same seriousness as investing in stocks. And I'd argue beanie babies are a little more sustainable since they're, you know, physical objects that you physically own... Skins depend on you never getting banned and the game never shutting down.
Currencies aren't an asset
CSGO digital knives aren't any more of an asset than currency is.
If the fed decided "meh, fuck it" and deliberately halved the value of the US dollar for no gain whatsoever, their heads would be on spikes by the end of the day.
Yea, if the market for CS skins vanishes tomorrow, the only people that suffer are those who made incredibly poor decisions. And they'll still be able to eat.
If you're going to self-harm because devs pushed out a QoL update to let people get some skins easier, you really need to sit back and think about your life choices.
Hey kids! Did you know in the before times, you didn't need to pay hard cash to customize your character in games?
You could just make or download whatever skin you wanted. You could change the rules of the game however you wanted. All you had to do was run a private server and install modding tools. Which companies provided for free.
That’s pretty crazy. I have myself also sold tons of of the CS boxes back in the day for a couple of cents each. And once I noticed it was going to keep increasing in price I also bought a few boxes (put 20 euros in boxes) and bought a couple of skins that I liked for like 40 bucks. That account is still worth about 600 euro at the moment as far as I know. Pretty crazy all in all