Valve’s Latest Counter-Strike Update Rocked The Game’s Cosmetics Market

The Counter-Strike 2 community is having a bit of a day, and not in a good way. Well, that’s not entirely true. Some people are doing better than others. It depends on their perspective. But, those folks who have been heavy into trading on the marketplace aren’t happy today.

Apparently, Valve elected to push an update to the free-to-play shooter on Wednesday making changes that allows players to trade Covert (Red) for Knives and Gloves that until this point had only been available as rather pricey purchases. One example given on Polygon is a Dopple Ruby Buterfly Knife that ran about $20,000 on third-party sites.

Up until this point, Knives and Gloves were two items that players could not bulk trade lower-quality stuff for, keeping those prices high. With this change implemented, those prices are now dropping and some people are panic selling. Polygon noted a 25% drop in the market value. (That’s $1.75 billion.) However, one streamer, Ohnepixel, cited a 50% drop on his stream, according to a clip shared on Reddit.

For those unfamiliar with this market, like myself, the items in question are not things made by players, but rather items received via Cases – the game’s version of lootboxes, which require Keys bought with real money to open. Once the items are acquired they can be traded among players, and that’s where the Steam Community Market comes in. Although, not all items make it onto this market, and are instead sold via third-party markets instead. Some items are rarer than others and therefore sell for quite a bit of money.

According to posts being made by players, some have been using this system as a way to invest. So, the market drop means they’re actually losing money too. There have even been some rumblings on social media about some individuals now being at risk of harming themselves (or having harmed themselves) as a result of this change. 

On the other hand, while quite a few players are upset by this change, others are pretty excited about it. It seems that those without thousands of dollars to spend on a virtual knife are happy that the prices are dropping and that perhaps they’ll be able to afford one of these rarer items. That said, I’m not sure the prices have dropped quite that far yet.