CSGO players are reporting that their skins have soared in value after the reveal of Counter Strike 2 earlier this week.
CSGO developer Valve officially announced Counter Strike 2 this week after a series of leaks and teases. Counter Strike 2 is a revamp of the original game, porting the title over to its new Source 2 engine, with a series of graphical improvements and gameplay adjustments. It’s set to launch as a free update to CSGO in Summer 2023, however, there’s an ongoing limited test until the game launches officially. Not only will your progress carry over, but so also will all of the skins and items, which has sent the second-hand skins market into a frenzy.
Just under a year after the game's original launch, Valve introduced the Arms Deal update which added weapon cosmetics into the game, which were available through loot boxes, which players could purchase keys to open. This update formed a virtual economy for CSGO where players could sell these skins on the Steam marketplace for frankly ludicrous amounts.
After Counter Strike 2’s reveal, players on reddit are starting to notice the value of their skins are skyrocketing. One commenter in the thread claimed “my knife is almost €1000 now. Was €170 when I unboxed it”. While another lucky user exclaimed “I bought £30 worth of cases a while back, I now have £265 worth of cases”.
Other players aren’t so lucky, like one who said “My regret for selling my FN M4 Knight is eternal cause I sold it for 300+ and it's now worth like 3k and up”. Then there's ZeldaMaster32 with the perfect summation of the whole marketplace by saying “NFT bros wish they had this”.
Movin’ on AWP
Look, people can spend their money on whatever they want, but the idea of dropping literal thousands on a knife skin in an FPS is wild to me. Even outside of that, what dictates the value of these in-game items? The current gaming landscape has proven enough times that game preservation is severely lacking, so what happens to those thousands spent if Counter Strike 2 one day closes down? What if someone had spent a grand on an item in a game like Rumbleverse, which closed down in less than a year?
Either way, if you’ve played CSGO in the past it may be worth checking out your steam library to see if you’ve got a skin worth loads of money on there. But you may want to re-invest it in something more worthwhile, like a Steam Deck eh.
