If you are closely following not only the events in the world of eSports but also the world of skins, then you have probably already noticed that the cost of in-game skins has increased significantly lately. Moreover, the cost of even CSGO cases has risen. And in today’s article, we will explain to you why this happened.
Many players may call this another greedy manifestation of the owner of Valve, but this is not entirely true. In fact, there are a lot of reasons that affect such fluctuations in the CSGO cases and skins market, and below we will try to identify all of these reasons.
Valve’s fight with casino sites, bookmakers, and traders
If you have been playing CS:GO since its inception, then you probably remember the times of 2013-2015, when there were incredibly many people in the game who, in principle, did not play it, but were in it only because of the skins with which they earned a lot of money. Moreover, for the same reason, hundreds of different roulette sites were created, which massively bought and sold gaming skins.
However, Valve themselves did not like this, because they lost their percentage of profits from skin sales in the Steam store. This led them to start their own fight against similar casinos, bookmakers, traders, and other representatives of the world of skins.
This war led to the fact that all these sites began to be massively closed. Only the strongest and most popular survived. The rest were simply forced out of this business. As a result, a sharp decrease in offers affected the increase in the cost of skins. As practice has shown, on average, the price of a skin or case has increased by about 10%.
Fight against scammers
Where there is a lot of money, there will always be those who want to break the rule and get rich from it. These people were scammers who stole Steam accounts and smelted CS:GO skins and cases from them. Needless to say, even pro players or streamers came across the tricks of scammers.
As a result, Valve introduced a system that blocks the ability to transfer skins to other people for a whole week. And this system works to this day. Against cheaters – it worked, but it further crowded out third-party skinning resources. In simple and understandable terms, this was the biggest nail in the coffin of traders and casino sites.
And all because this time the demand also fell, because in order to get or sell the skin, players had to wait a whole week. As a result, the number of exchanges decreased by 7 times, which caused an even greater increase in prices for skins and cases, which on average rose by 30%.
Subsequently, Valve also introduced restrictions on the exchange. That is, if you received an item, then you cannot use it for another week. This was an additional blow to traders because a week is too long a time to make good money.
What are the reasons for the rise in the price of skins and cases today
Perhaps one of the main reasons is the oversaturation of the market. In simple words, there are so many skins and cases in CS:GO now that no one needs them anymore. Of course, there is still some demand, but it is far from what it was 5-6 years ago.
