Skins from games are almost a currency.
In 2023, Valve made $ 54 million a month in CS:GO on crates of new gear skins alone. This is a significant part of the annual revenue from CS:GO based on the secondary market for skins and stickers. The game itself is completely free.
The nondescript free AK-47 in Counter-Strike differs from the expensive AK-47 only in appearance. But very much. And for the opportunity to look "not like everyone else", people are willing to pay a lot of money. In fact, this was understood by a person who immediately after working at Valve became the Greek finance minister.
In 2023, Valve earned $ 54 million a month in CS:GO just from crates of new gear skins. A source
I will talk about in-game deals using the example of Counter-Strike, although there are a great many games that use skins, and each one has its own collectors, resellers and scammers. But, perhaps, in CS:GO skins are the most famous, and deals are the most expensive and sensational.
People come to trading skins in different ways. Among traders, there are both successful businessmen and ordinary schoolchildren. Someone starts with buying a knife for a thousand dollars, and someone-with selling a case that fell out after the game for two dollars.
For example, a player with the nickname Luksusbums inherited a hotel and casino, and he founded an online casino and a private equity fund. It all started with the fact that he was intrigued by colorful rifles and submachine guns, and he bought them through groups in social networks at prices much higher than market prices. And then I figured out the process and started trading.
The Kyro trader has been building his own business in every online game he has played since childhood.
He made his start-up capital by buying and selling Pokemon. When he was fourteen, he bought his first knife in CS:GO and on the first exchange got caught by scammers. But he didn't stop. Now he is nineteen, and the cost of skins in his account is 265 thousand dollars.
For Astroooo trading in CS:GO is a real full-time job, where he earns about five to six thousand dollars a week.
And there are a lot of such stories.
This game has a long history and many fans. It was first published in 2000 and almost immediately became one of the main disciplines in esports (for a moment: professional players even have their own trade union).
Stockholm Arena on the day of the competition
This game is quite simple and looks like a match divided into several rounds between two teams: conditional "enemies"and" special forces". That is, the gameplay is as clear as possible. It is free, not very demanding on hardware, and consistently leads the world in online usage.
Well, skins, on the one hand, warm up interest in it, and on the other-due to the popularity of the game, they are a value in themselves.
By and large, they are needed only to distinguish their owner from the crowd and increase his emergency response.
We owe their appearance in the game to these two gentlemen — Valve founder and CEO Gabe Newell and economist Yanis Varoufakis.
This is Gabe Newell…
... and this is Yanis Varoufakis. The one that after Valve managed to work as the Greek finance minister
The first thing Varoufakis suggested was to integrate the ability to purchase not only games, patches and updates, but also skins that distinguish players from each other. And also — the ability to trade among themselves. The innovation made a splash: provided that the company takes 15 % of each transaction, it earned the first six million dollars in just a year.
By the way, these were not yet CS:GO skins, but caps for characters from another game — Team Fortress 2. At first, they were made by the company's designers, and then everyone got this opportunity: the platform has a special tool that allows them to be creative. Steam selects the best of the best and takes them to the game, and their authors receive a good reward from Valve and a small percentage of the sale of each image.
Toadstool Hat from Team Fortress 2
In Counter Strike, skins appeared for the first time in August 2013.
Everything would be fine, but the rights to the skins belong not to the players, but to Valve. And, if at some point your account is blocked or the game itself ceases to exist, then the entire collection will disappear into the abyss, no matter how much it costs.
However, it is not so easy to get a ban, so many people safely transfer part of their assets to skins for hedging, that is, reducing risks by performing operations for the same amounts, but in different markets. For example, when China sharply suppressed cryptocurrency and the value of bitcoin plummeted, in CS:However, there was an almost perfect correlation.
The second argument for investing in CS: GO skins: they can "take off" much higher than the same shares.
The number of skins on the market is strictly limited by Valve, and the number of players on the platform is not limited to anything and is constantly growing.
In many ways, the market is "held" by collectors who are willing to pay a lot of money for rare skins. Skins, in turn, slowly settle in collections, the number of them on the market decreases, which means that prices are rising.
There are a lot of subtleties of trading. Personal skins of esports players and skins with their autographs are expensive. You can make good money by buying souvenirs during the majors (that is, championships with a prize pool of more than 500 thousand dollars) and reselling them in a few years. It is quite profitable to buy equipment before the release of new releases and updates of the game. And the shortage of any rare coloring book on the market occurs about five years after its release, when cases with such skins stop falling out.
The price of skins is affected by rarity (and, accordingly, brightness and color), the popularity of the specific weapon for which they are made, "wear" (also known as float value), the StarTrack counter that displays players killed with it, rare textures and stickers pasted on guns.
The StarTrack tag looks like this
And so-different textures for the same knife. By the way, only one pattern is valued — No. 387 (out of 999), which gives blue color along the entire blade. The last known estimate for an all-blue knife is $ 1.2 million. And blue with spots — "cheap" worth about two thousand dollars.
And this gun does not have two identical copies at all, and each one is at least a little different
Skins can be combined into collections, where different types of weapons will have a similar design.
Moreover, the cunning Valve is usually in no hurry to release the entire collection at once, and often a couple of years can easily pass between the release of different knives or guns in the same design.
So collectors who dream of a full line of something have to be patient.
The cost of skins is falling, then climbing up, and the most important thing is to find the reason for this behavior, and then you are on the horse.
Here, for example, one rare pistol at the time of release cost $ 13, and then in a few years it rose in price as much as 612
But it also happens the other way around. For example, like this: from $ 46.86 at the start to $ 1.29 at the time of the deepest drawdown, this skin fell in price due to the fact that the rifle for which it was created lost its popularity after the next release.
They receive a commission from each purchase or sale and carefully monitor the distribution of skins that fall into cases or drops after matches, and the security of the market. For example, it restricts transactions for those who have not passed two-factor authentication and does not allow them to sell or exchange an artifact they just purchased within seven days.
And all would be fine, but with the trade in skins on Steam from the very beginning there were two problems:
However, the community learned to bypass the restrictions almost instantly. The first community of traders appeared with the first skins for Team Fortress 2 in 2011, immediately after the appearance of the skins themselves. On special forums or in a personal dialogue, people independently decided how much rare items would cost and how to exchange them bypassing the platform.
This was followed by services that helped you search for the right equipment and analyze its prices, bots that did the same, but in automatic mode, and the first marketplaces, that is, trading platforms that guaranteed safe trading. They worked much like Wildberries with Ozon: the seller handed over his skin to the site's bot and waited for the buyer, and after confirming the purchase, received money to his card or account. So skintrading has become a good and stable source of income.
Then the skins were included in gambling. There were roulette tables and casinos that used skins as a stratum currency: on the one hand, they were not taxed, and on the other hand, they were not subject to legislation. It was awfully convenient! In addition, it was possible to get a win without unnecessary checks and identity verification. Skins were sold on special platforms, and the proceeds were spent either on other skins or on bets.
But they quickly got out of gambling (at least officially: illegal bookmakers continue to work), because Valve did not like that it indirectly helps minors to play in online casinos. This includes using your parents ' money. With the help of lawyers, Valve asked everyone around them to no longer engage in commercial activities with skins and closed several sites that used them as bets.
But the sites that sell skins haven't gone away. They use Steam functions, but they don't depend on Valve in any way.
Published in January 2023, the Steam report for last year states that at the fall 2022 sale, just under one and a half million users bought something on the platform for the first time (and this is 27% more than in 2021). But there were also people who came for repeated purchases!
And in general, throughout the year, Steam registered an average of 83 thousand new customers per day. And in total, in 2023, Valve earned $ 980 million from cases.
The market capital of this segment is estimated at approximately $ 4.5 billion. That is, if compared with cryptocurrencies, then skins could well be located on the 14th-15th places in the world ranking.
People around the world spent $ 19.3 million on skins and loot boxes in 2023.
In 2017, after the official launch of CS localization:THEN China entered the market with billions of dollars. Records for the cost of transactions are broken by players from the Middle Kingdom. In 2021, the purchase of two skins cost $ 770 thousand, while the most expensive purchase in 2023 was somewhat more modest: only $ 500 thousand.
For example, in the Netherlands, you can't sell skins at all. The fact is that according to the laws in force in the country, game items cannot be transferred to other people, so Valve had to ban the sale and exchange in CS games.:GO and Dota2. They, of course, strongly emphasize that they do not agree with this decision, and continue to negotiate with the government, but so far nothing has come of it.
In Russia, this is still a "gray" market, but the state is already looking at it and thinking about how to properly regulate it.
One of the most common types of fraud, which many newcomers have fallen for, is sharding, that is, deliberately underestimating the cost of skins during the exchange.
But these are small things, because sometimes in the CS world:BUT there are also very high-profile crimes.
For example, in June 2022, a fraudster hacked into the account of an HFB collector and stole skins worth about two million dollars from him. Some of them he even managed to immediately resell on third-party resources. As a result, Valve managed to cancel all transactions with the HFB account, and those who managed to buy stolen weapons were reimbursed for their cost by the trading platform itself.
In April 2022, the account of Czech esports player Martin Slama was hacked right during the match in which he participated, and the skins were" stolen " for about thirteen and a half thousand dollars.
But perhaps the most unpleasant incident occurred in February 2023, when it was discovered that the stolen skins are traded directly by Steam technical support employees. The guys found inactive accounts with expensive inventory, "restored" access to them on their own behalf, and then took and resold everything of value that was there.
But it also happens differently. For example, in June 2023, TDM_Heyzeus, a skin collector, helped a former CS player:GO sell expensive stickers from the tournament "Katowice-2014" for an astronomical sum of 446 thousand dollars. The account owner has long abandoned the game and did not even suspect that he could make a fortune on stickers.
So, if one of your friends is cutting in the "Counter" for days, then, perhaps, soon he will be able to make a big fortune.
And if you yourself have an abandoned account somewhere, then this article is a reason to look into it in search of rare artifacts.
In 2023, Valve made $ 54 million a month in CS:GO on crates of new gear skins alone. This is a significant part of the annual revenue from CS:GO based on the secondary market for skins and stickers. The game itself is completely free.
The nondescript free AK-47 in Counter-Strike differs from the expensive AK-47 only in appearance. But very much. And for the opportunity to look "not like everyone else", people are willing to pay a lot of money. In fact, this was understood by a person who immediately after working at Valve became the Greek finance minister.
In 2023, Valve earned $ 54 million a month in CS:GO just from crates of new gear skins. A source
I will talk about in-game deals using the example of Counter-Strike, although there are a great many games that use skins, and each one has its own collectors, resellers and scammers. But, perhaps, in CS:GO skins are the most famous, and deals are the most expensive and sensational.
People come to trading skins in different ways. Among traders, there are both successful businessmen and ordinary schoolchildren. Someone starts with buying a knife for a thousand dollars, and someone-with selling a case that fell out after the game for two dollars.
For example, a player with the nickname Luksusbums inherited a hotel and casino, and he founded an online casino and a private equity fund. It all started with the fact that he was intrigued by colorful rifles and submachine guns, and he bought them through groups in social networks at prices much higher than market prices. And then I figured out the process and started trading.
The Kyro trader has been building his own business in every online game he has played since childhood.
He made his start-up capital by buying and selling Pokemon. When he was fourteen, he bought his first knife in CS:GO and on the first exchange got caught by scammers. But he didn't stop. Now he is nineteen, and the cost of skins in his account is 265 thousand dollars.
For Astroooo trading in CS:GO is a real full-time job, where he earns about five to six thousand dollars a week.
And there are a lot of such stories.
Why Counter-Strike?
This game has a long history and many fans. It was first published in 2000 and almost immediately became one of the main disciplines in esports (for a moment: professional players even have their own trade union).
Stockholm Arena on the day of the competition
This game is quite simple and looks like a match divided into several rounds between two teams: conditional "enemies"and" special forces". That is, the gameplay is as clear as possible. It is free, not very demanding on hardware, and consistently leads the world in online usage.
Well, skins, on the one hand, warm up interest in it, and on the other-due to the popularity of the game, they are a value in themselves.
Skins are basically just in-game cosmetics
By and large, they are needed only to distinguish their owner from the crowd and increase his emergency response.
We owe their appearance in the game to these two gentlemen — Valve founder and CEO Gabe Newell and economist Yanis Varoufakis.
This is Gabe Newell…
... and this is Yanis Varoufakis. The one that after Valve managed to work as the Greek finance minister
The first thing Varoufakis suggested was to integrate the ability to purchase not only games, patches and updates, but also skins that distinguish players from each other. And also — the ability to trade among themselves. The innovation made a splash: provided that the company takes 15 % of each transaction, it earned the first six million dollars in just a year.
By the way, these were not yet CS:GO skins, but caps for characters from another game — Team Fortress 2. At first, they were made by the company's designers, and then everyone got this opportunity: the platform has a special tool that allows them to be creative. Steam selects the best of the best and takes them to the game, and their authors receive a good reward from Valve and a small percentage of the sale of each image.
Toadstool Hat from Team Fortress 2
In Counter Strike, skins appeared for the first time in August 2013.
It is a rare case of combining a gaming hobby and financial benefits, but there are risks
Everything would be fine, but the rights to the skins belong not to the players, but to Valve. And, if at some point your account is blocked or the game itself ceases to exist, then the entire collection will disappear into the abyss, no matter how much it costs.
However, it is not so easy to get a ban, so many people safely transfer part of their assets to skins for hedging, that is, reducing risks by performing operations for the same amounts, but in different markets. For example, when China sharply suppressed cryptocurrency and the value of bitcoin plummeted, in CS:However, there was an almost perfect correlation.
The second argument for investing in CS: GO skins: they can "take off" much higher than the same shares.
The number of skins on the market is strictly limited by Valve, and the number of players on the platform is not limited to anything and is constantly growing.
In many ways, the market is "held" by collectors who are willing to pay a lot of money for rare skins. Skins, in turn, slowly settle in collections, the number of them on the market decreases, which means that prices are rising.
There are a lot of subtleties of trading. Personal skins of esports players and skins with their autographs are expensive. You can make good money by buying souvenirs during the majors (that is, championships with a prize pool of more than 500 thousand dollars) and reselling them in a few years. It is quite profitable to buy equipment before the release of new releases and updates of the game. And the shortage of any rare coloring book on the market occurs about five years after its release, when cases with such skins stop falling out.
The price of skins is affected by rarity (and, accordingly, brightness and color), the popularity of the specific weapon for which they are made, "wear" (also known as float value), the StarTrack counter that displays players killed with it, rare textures and stickers pasted on guns.
The StarTrack tag looks like this
And so-different textures for the same knife. By the way, only one pattern is valued — No. 387 (out of 999), which gives blue color along the entire blade. The last known estimate for an all-blue knife is $ 1.2 million. And blue with spots — "cheap" worth about two thousand dollars.
And this gun does not have two identical copies at all, and each one is at least a little different
Skins can be combined into collections, where different types of weapons will have a similar design.
Moreover, the cunning Valve is usually in no hurry to release the entire collection at once, and often a couple of years can easily pass between the release of different knives or guns in the same design.
So collectors who dream of a full line of something have to be patient.
Most of all, Steam resembles the stock market
The cost of skins is falling, then climbing up, and the most important thing is to find the reason for this behavior, and then you are on the horse.
Here, for example, one rare pistol at the time of release cost $ 13, and then in a few years it rose in price as much as 612
But it also happens the other way around. For example, like this: from $ 46.86 at the start to $ 1.29 at the time of the deepest drawdown, this skin fell in price due to the fact that the rifle for which it was created lost its popularity after the next release.
Regulates the skin market directly by Valve
They receive a commission from each purchase or sale and carefully monitor the distribution of skins that fall into cases or drops after matches, and the security of the market. For example, it restricts transactions for those who have not passed two-factor authentication and does not allow them to sell or exchange an artifact they just purchased within seven days.
And all would be fine, but with the trade in skins on Steam from the very beginning there were two problems:
- The platform itself does not allow you to withdraw money to your account or card.You can only spend it on other skins or games from Valve.
- Steam limited the cost of absolutely any skins to a modest amount of $400, and the number of items that were priced much higher on the market was constantly growing.
However, the community learned to bypass the restrictions almost instantly. The first community of traders appeared with the first skins for Team Fortress 2 in 2011, immediately after the appearance of the skins themselves. On special forums or in a personal dialogue, people independently decided how much rare items would cost and how to exchange them bypassing the platform.
This was followed by services that helped you search for the right equipment and analyze its prices, bots that did the same, but in automatic mode, and the first marketplaces, that is, trading platforms that guaranteed safe trading. They worked much like Wildberries with Ozon: the seller handed over his skin to the site's bot and waited for the buyer, and after confirming the purchase, received money to his card or account. So skintrading has become a good and stable source of income.
Then the skins were included in gambling. There were roulette tables and casinos that used skins as a stratum currency: on the one hand, they were not taxed, and on the other hand, they were not subject to legislation. It was awfully convenient! In addition, it was possible to get a win without unnecessary checks and identity verification. Skins were sold on special platforms, and the proceeds were spent either on other skins or on bets.
But they quickly got out of gambling (at least officially: illegal bookmakers continue to work), because Valve did not like that it indirectly helps minors to play in online casinos. This includes using your parents ' money. With the help of lawyers, Valve asked everyone around them to no longer engage in commercial activities with skins and closed several sites that used them as bets.
But the sites that sell skins haven't gone away. They use Steam functions, but they don't depend on Valve in any way.
The skin market is growing every year along with the number of gamers around the world
Published in January 2023, the Steam report for last year states that at the fall 2022 sale, just under one and a half million users bought something on the platform for the first time (and this is 27% more than in 2021). But there were also people who came for repeated purchases!
And in general, throughout the year, Steam registered an average of 83 thousand new customers per day. And in total, in 2023, Valve earned $ 980 million from cases.
The market capital of this segment is estimated at approximately $ 4.5 billion. That is, if compared with cryptocurrencies, then skins could well be located on the 14th-15th places in the world ranking.
People around the world spent $ 19.3 million on skins and loot boxes in 2023.
In 2017, after the official launch of CS localization:THEN China entered the market with billions of dollars. Records for the cost of transactions are broken by players from the Middle Kingdom. In 2021, the purchase of two skins cost $ 770 thousand, while the most expensive purchase in 2023 was somewhat more modest: only $ 500 thousand.
Skin trading is treated differently in different countries
For example, in the Netherlands, you can't sell skins at all. The fact is that according to the laws in force in the country, game items cannot be transferred to other people, so Valve had to ban the sale and exchange in CS games.:GO and Dota2. They, of course, strongly emphasize that they do not agree with this decision, and continue to negotiate with the government, but so far nothing has come of it.
In Russia, this is still a "gray" market, but the state is already looking at it and thinking about how to properly regulate it.
Where big money is being made, scammers are bound to appear
One of the most common types of fraud, which many newcomers have fallen for, is sharding, that is, deliberately underestimating the cost of skins during the exchange.
But these are small things, because sometimes in the CS world:BUT there are also very high-profile crimes.
For example, in June 2022, a fraudster hacked into the account of an HFB collector and stole skins worth about two million dollars from him. Some of them he even managed to immediately resell on third-party resources. As a result, Valve managed to cancel all transactions with the HFB account, and those who managed to buy stolen weapons were reimbursed for their cost by the trading platform itself.
In April 2022, the account of Czech esports player Martin Slama was hacked right during the match in which he participated, and the skins were" stolen " for about thirteen and a half thousand dollars.
But perhaps the most unpleasant incident occurred in February 2023, when it was discovered that the stolen skins are traded directly by Steam technical support employees. The guys found inactive accounts with expensive inventory, "restored" access to them on their own behalf, and then took and resold everything of value that was there.
But it also happens differently. For example, in June 2023, TDM_Heyzeus, a skin collector, helped a former CS player:GO sell expensive stickers from the tournament "Katowice-2014" for an astronomical sum of 446 thousand dollars. The account owner has long abandoned the game and did not even suspect that he could make a fortune on stickers.
So, if one of your friends is cutting in the "Counter" for days, then, perhaps, soon he will be able to make a big fortune.
And if you yourself have an abandoned account somewhere, then this article is a reason to look into it in search of rare artifacts.
