CS2 skins market craters $1.7 billion after October 22nd update throws market into chaos

Last night Valve released a seemingly innocuous update to Counter-Strike 2 allowing players to trade up Covert-grade items in exchange for Knives and Gloves. When the update first dropped, these freshly minted items were untradeable and unmarketable, however a quick patch by Valve changed this to allow these new items to flood onto the market.

The implications of this were immediate as the value of Knives, some of the most lucrative and expensive items in the game, cratered while Covert guns skyrocketed on Valve's first-party Steam Community Market and third-party marketplaces.

As a result, the overall Counter-Strike 2 skins market has been thrown into complete chaos and pandemonium, with some staggering real-life implications. According to skins economy analysis website Pricempire, the overall Market Cap of Counter-Strike 2 has fallen more than $1.7 billion in less than 24 hours of trading in the wake of Valve's update.

This loss accounts for nearly 30% of the market's total value and is possibly the single worst day of trading since the release of Counter-Strike 2. For many, especially casual fans and outsiders, the value of these "videogame items" is inconceivable however, as Bloomberg's Cecilia D'Anastasio noted in her article on the crash, many are retreating to unusual commodities like in-game items amidst instability in the volatility in the S&P 500, cryptocurrency markets, and the global economy.

Overall, with the CS2 skins bubble seemingly "popping" thanks to Valve's update, the long-term implications of this market crash remain to be seen, although many high-profile accounts have already claimed losses totaling hundreds of thousands of dollars in the wake of these changes.