$2 Billion USD Wiped From ‘Counter-Strike 2’ Market Due to Game Update

A video game with a cosmetic market worth billions?

Welcome to Counter-Strike. The video game franchise has been active for decades and Counter-Strike 2, the latest entry of many in the series, released just over two years ago. It was just before this launch that we did a complete deep diveinto the booming cosmetic market tied to its predecessor, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. Now, a new update to the game has set off a frenzy in the market.

Just a few days ago, the Counter-Strike team shared news of an update, one marked on Steam as a “Small Update” centered around the return of a game mode. However, the team buried the lede. A small section within the patch notes announced that trade up contracts have an expanded list of options.

For a quick tl;dr of the aforementioned feature’s points pertinent to this situation, the cosmetics are primarily obtained through cases, similar to buying packs for a trading card game. When opened, an item of a certain rarity tier is handed out. Trade up contracts have allowed for 10 items within one rarity tier to be converted into a random item of a higher tier. However, this previously was only possible to do  on all but the final rarity tier. As a result, the second highest rarity, Covert, had plenty of non-desirable cosmetics that had no value outside of being collectible.

This update has now allowed players to convert just 5 of these Covert-tier cosmetics into an Extraordinary-tier item, which is the only tier that offers knives and gloves. As a result, prices for many Covert skins have skyrocketed while Extraordinary items have plummeted in value. For example, a Glock-18 | Wasteland Rebel in Minimal Wear condition traded for about $12 USD on the Steam Market a week ago and is now selling for over $85 USD. Meanwhile, a standard Flip Knife went from selling at just under $600 USD to around $275 USD.

According to Pricempire’s data on the Counter-Strike 2 cosmetic market, the overall market cap has nosedived from just over $6 billion USD at its all-time high a week before the update to just under $4 billion USD at the time of writing. For many investors who banked on the rapid, continuous growth of these cosmetics over the years, a loss of confidence in the market has struck (see: replies to the post embedded below). However, everyday players of the game are now enjoying better price accessibility to items, leaving the community divided in opinion over the changes.