Is it worth investing in players at the end of their careers?

Counter-Strike has been around for a long time, it has seen a few generations of players come and go. Some of them had legendary status, but we had no market built around that during 1.6 or Source, to really see if in-game items attributed to these players would mirror their achievements. CS.MONEY Blog shows how pro players leaving for other games or ending their careers affects the price of their CS stickers.

By the way, all stickers or any skins can be quickly purchased on CS.MONEY in just a few clicks! And most often at prices lower than Steam. Come in and explore!

How sticker prices react to players’ retirements

We have already established in our previous analytical articles that sticker prices reflect teams’ performances at important tournaments, especially LAN events. A lot of traders in the community started thinking in a similar direction. So is investing in stickers of retired players worth it or not?

Fundamentally we have the following reasons to support this theory:

• Stickers are consumables – once applied, they never come back into circulation on their own, so the supply slowly but steadily declines.
• Stickers of a particular retiring player become a limited supply item after his retirement. The only way for a player to get his set of stickers is by playing in a Major, which retired players for apparent reasons won’t do anymore.
• Almost any item in CS2 gets more expensive as it grows older, although that’s never the primary factor explaining why items appreciate.

We’ve had the chance to observe lots of examples throughout the last few years and we’ve enough data on our hands to give a positive answer.

On February 4 2020 SmithZz announced his retirement and the news immediately caused a sharp spike in price – making his London 2018 sticker almost double in price from $0.10 to $0.19. As we can see, there was a period of accumulation before the real bull run began for this sticker, and the price climbed slowly, while the sale volumes were usually below 10 per day. 

The retirement of SmithZz coincided with that of Ex6TenZ, and across the stickers of Ex6TenZ we actually did not observe such significant price gains on February 6 when he made his announcement. However, only to prove our point – his stickers are now seeing huge gains after a certain period of stability.

Now to more recent examples: on June 4 2020 Hiko announced his retirement from professional CS:GO in favour of Valorant. As you can guess – the extremum point on this chart is the 4th of June: as people learned the news they hurried to scoop up the stickers, then there was a drop, but in the future, we will still see a stable upward movement.

It’s noteworthy that the market doesn’t care one way or another if a player leaves CS:GO for another game, or just quits esports for good – the pattern remains the same for sticker prices more or less. Across all the examples we selected we’ve seen about 100-150% price gains, that can be expected to go further as scarcity of the players’ stickers starts to kick in.

Esports players ending careers guarantee nothing

Let’s start with the basics. When a player retires, the market reacts to it. In most cases, this ends with a rapid increase in price for stickers. The wave of hype subsides in a week and the prices, just as they skyrocketed, fly down in the same way. This is a classic story.

When a player retires, this does not guarantee that stickers with his name will become more expensive. Let’s take an exemplary example – Christopher “GeT_RiGhT” Alesund. He is rightfully considered a legendary player. This Swede was the main star of the CS esports scene long before s1mple, zywOo or coldzera appeared on it.

The last major with Christopher Alesund was StarLadder Berlin Major 2019. Metal stickers with the player’s autograph from that major now cost… about 70 cents. Gold ones are more expensive, almost 14 dollars. But Robin ropz Cool’s gold sticker from the same tournament is five times more expensive, although Robin ropz Cool still plays and actively performs in majors.

In other words, even if a legendary player ends his career, this does not guarantee that his stickers will sharply increase in price or will grow in price faster than other autographed stickers.

What to look for when choosing stickers for investment?

A player’s retirement does not guarantee price growth, so what does? The answer to this question is simple – there are no guarantees. None. But CS.MONEY Blog recommends paying attention to signals that may indicate that stickers may become more expensive:

• Small Amount
• Popular Sticker for Crafts
• Legendary Player
• One-time success

Let’s dwell on each point separately. The fewer the stickers, the more expensive they are. At some point, they stop being stickers in the literal sense of the word and turn into a status item or an investment. Titan (Holo) Katowice 2014 is not bought for $50,000 to stick it on M4A1-S Blue Phosphor. This sticker is bought because it is rare and well-known. Because of this, the market price of the sticker is more expensive than a new car.

The second reason is popularity in crafting. Let’s get back to the StarLadder Berlin Major 2019 stickers. Whose autograph do you think is the most expensive? kennyS? Ropz? S1mple? No. The most expensive sticker is Oliver DickStacy Tierney’s. 400 bucks for gold and almost 45 for a metal sticker. And all because with this sticker you can collect crafts with all sorts of obscenities.

Another area for investment is iconic players. If you look at the entire history of majors with stickers, you can see that some players have great fame in the community. S1mple, Niko, ZywOo, m0nesy, Twistzz and others. This is not a very large list. It is also important that cult status, as the example of GeT_RiGhT showed, does not guarantee price growth, but is one of the possible factors.

Finally, it is worth taking a closer look at the players and teams that appeared at the Major for the first and, most likely, the last time. The calculation is simple here. Due to the fact that the success was one-time, there will most likely never be new stickers. And this, in turn, means that the number of stickers is strictly limited. And a limited number leads to an increase in price.

Summary

Is it worth investing in stickers when eSports players retire? Yes, but carefully and weighing all the risks. Retirement can affect the sticker price in the short term. But in the long term, the sticker price is determined by a lot of factors, from attractiveness in crafts and the presence of a frame with a background to the overall dynamics of the market. But even with all these reservations, most tournament stickers grow in price over time, which makes them attractive investments.