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Valve is allowing CS2 players more freedom to apply stickers to their weapons
Some stickers are more popular than others
The aftermarket prices for the most popular stickers have skyrocketed
Earlier this week, Valve’s Counter-Strike 2 received a major update. Along with new maps, game modes, and bugfixes, there was also a simple tweak to weapon customization. Players now have more freedom to individually place stickers on weapons. As you might expect from gamers, swears, slurs, and racial epithets are popular choices. In fact, there’s been a noticeable uptick in aftermarket prices for some of the most popular letter combinations.
Now, if you’ve played any multiplayer game in the last 20 years, and either used the in-game chat or seen player-created content, you’ll know that gamers are a pretty rowdy bunch. Well, “rowdy” meaning racist, misogynist, homophobic, transphobic; basically not fans of most minorities.
And many of them have a lot of fun expressing those opinions. While we’ve come a long way from the wild west of early 2000s gaming, there’s still a lot of it floating around. CS2 is one of the biggest live-service games operating right now, and there’s plenty of bad apples clocking in and running up the slur count every night.
Very early yesterday morning, Valve pushed a new update for CS2. There are some new maps, Arms Race is returning, networking and gameplay fixes, and a minor cosmetic update. Players can now freely apply their owned stickers wherever they’d like on a gun, and layer them over each other. Previously, you could only add them to predetermined spots.
Ideally, this change lets players be more creative, and can be used in conjunction with weapon skins to create new designs.
Instead people are mainly using it to write slurs.
Can you guess what we censored?
Seriously Valve, this should be pretty obvious. If you played Call of Duty in the 2010s, you’d realize why they removed the emblem editor after putting so much time into making it. This pretty much always happens if you give players a keyboard and allow them to show other people their creations.
The recent update has actually had a measurable impact on the aftermarket for CS2 stickers. If you didn’t know, Valve’s games typically offer a robust in-game trading system, and players can swap cosmetic items like gun skins and stickers. Valve even hosts its own marketplace where players can sell in-game items for real world currency.
Following this update, we’ve seen a spike in prices for some stickers. Mostly ones that use letters. The most popular by far is the “Good Game” sticker that helpfully forms the letters “GG”, critical for some gamers’ favorite slurs.
This sticker has actually tripled in price since the update, rising from an average sale of $10 to $30 in just a few hours.
Penises and swastikas built from multiple stickers are also popular, while “F” and “K” shapes are all trading at a premium. This is Valve’s first major content update for CS2, and it seems like they’re really trying to appease the fans.
Anyways, we’re just writing about this because we think it’s interesting. We’re not endorsing the crafters or the people selling the stickers, nor are we encouraging you to dump your life savings into becoming an online arms dealer for slurs.
It’s just worth pointing out how innocuous changes can have big knock-on effects, especially in a game as massive as CS2. While Valve probably should have anticipated the new wave of toxicity they were about to release, they had no idea how the new update would affect sticker prices.
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