The World's Biggest Video Game Skin Market Crashed. Why?

A single update erased hundreds of millions in value for CS2 skin traders

News

By RC Staff

24 October 2025

Key Points

The October 22 update for CS2 allowed gamers to craft knives and gloves
Prior to now, these items could only be obtained from lootboxes
Skin traders made thousands flipping them, now those items have crashed in value

We’re gonna take a quick break from covering tangible items to take a look at something pretty interesting. Late last night, Counter-Strike 2 received a minor update. Some bug fixes, some map tweaks, and… And oh yeah, a complete upending of the market that’s been established for over a decade. Individual traders have lost thousands in just a few hours, with independent analysts estimating the damage to the market at over a billion dollars. Let’s talk about it.

CS2 October 22 Patch Notes

First, we need to give a little context. Not everyone is a gamer! Counter-Strike 2 is one of the world’s most popular competitive shooters, and has been played and developed in some form or another for over 25 years.

Like most AAA shooters, there’s a lucrative market for in-game cosmetics. Gamers like to one-up each other with the slickest skins for their guns and knives, and Valve has turned dectuple digit profits from selling them.

Additionally, players can trade and sell skins to other players. Because of the rarity of certain items and the massive, global playerbase, it’s not at all rare to see particular skins selling for several thousand dollars at a time.

The most valuable items have historically been knives and gloves. These can only be obtained by pulling them from an in-game lootbox, and the rarest skins have pull rates at just fractions of a percent.

In-game skins have an assigned rarity, and Valve allows players to “Trade Up” multiple skins of a lower rarity to a single skin of a higher rarity. By patiently grinding lower tier skins to higher tier skins, gamers could end up with a library of “Covert” quality skins (the highest level) without spending a dime.

But this only applied to gun skins. Knives and gloves have become the premium cosmetics specifically because they are only obtainable through lootboxes.

Until now. Last night’s CS2 update completely changed the way “Trade Up” contracts worked, allowing players to trade five Covert skins for a single knife or a single glove.

Valve’s patch notes from last night dedicate just two lines –– less than fifty words to the change, but its effect was monumental.

Skin trading has been around since 2013, and gamers have built actual careers flipping and investing in skins for profit. A majority of those high-profile transactions have been centered around knives and gloves specifically for their rarity and difficulty to obtain. This change upends all of that.

The CS2 Skin Market Today

Within minutes of the patch notes being published, gamers and skin traders felt the immediate effects. Knife prices crashed instantly as players began trading in their covert skins, making one of Counter-Strike’s rarest items instantly obtainable for anyone that’s invested enough hours.

You can check for yourself through Steam’s marketplace or third-party aggregators like CSGOskins, but many of the most popular knives and gloves have seen drawdowns of thirty to forty percent. Karambits (usually the most valuable knives on the market) have fallen in price from $3,000 to $1,000 following the update

CS2 Knife Skin Prices October Update — Price data courtesy of CSGOSkins.gg

Obviously, the market is in a state of shock right now, with skin traders scrambling to protect their investments amid rampant speculation. The numbers are completely scattered so it’s hard to draw any firm conclusions. Really the only thing we can say for certain is that things are a mess right now.

Where do CS2 Skin Traders Go Now?

It might be doom and gloom for many, but fear and greed go hand in hand. CS2’s blue chip investments are down, but that’s spawned an entirely new market across the board.

The most obvious are the Covert gun skins. Previously, these were trading for around $10 at a time, but the update has surged incredible interest in them, boosting prices to upwards of $100 at a time.

Our conclusion is pretty standard investment advice: don’t put all your eggs in one basket, especially when your basket (and your eggs) are entirely virtual and entirely controlled by a single company.

Traders that put all their money into knives and gloves and assumed they’d remain as unobtainable as they’ve been historically are up S. creek, but the update has thoroughly shaken up the market and seen significant gains for folks sitting on unconventional investments.

If you’re a CS2 skin trader looking for advice, we’d tell you to look outside the obvious. We’ve written about CS2 sticker prices spiking in value before, and it’s looking like that might be the case again. Stickers might have the potential to become the rarest CS2 item following this update, and certain designs have already started rising in value.

And while most traders were focused on knives, many others preferred to trade in particular “Holy Grail” weapon skins. Take a look at the “Howl” and “Dragon Lore” designs for the M4A4 and AWP specifically to see how things are holding up.

We could (and others have) published paragraphs about the value of particular skins. This shakeup came out of left field from Valve, but that’s the price some will pay when they invest thousands in a market held in the hands of a privately traded company. Who’s to say what they’ll bulldoze next?

The reception to this update has been mixed. Obviously, skin traders have been the loudest and most butthurt. When you lose several thousand dollars on a few lines of code you’d be pretty pressed, but many gamers have voiced support for the change. If you take everything at face value, you could see this update as a general course correction from Valve.

Old skins, especially knives, have held ridiculous price premiums for years. This is outside the general sales trajectory we’ve seen for pretty much every other popular shooter, and last week’s update refocuses attention from older releases to upcoming designs.

Do we care? Not particularly, but we sympathize with those that have lost money from the update. It’s a good reminder that big companies don’t really give a shit if they nuke your livelihood with a few lines in their patch notes.