CS.MONEY analysts have prepared for you a detailed analysis of the situation on the skin market in the fall of 2020.
A few months ago nobody would expect we’d be in this situation – without LAN tournaments for so long, yet here we are – with the next major being postponed to 2021, the esports community has to do with whatever is available. And, to everyone’s surprise, the CS:GO pro scene is still going strong with the most recent Blast Premier 2020 Fall Series viewership numbers peaking at 512k!
These numbers contrast the somewhat underwhelming concurrent online player count, which has been hovering below 1M players after hitting a 1.3M record earlier this spring, and show that even in this new “online era” that was forced upon us the game, its community and its market will find room for growth.
Skins
Apart from the MP7 Cirrus (Field-Tested) in the 5th place, that wasn’t here last month, there are no unexpected entries in the Top 5 most traded skins on the CS.MONEY platform. In fact, it’s one of the most predictable lists with AK-47 Redline (Field-Tested), in particular being very stable – it hasn’t been out of the top 5 list for months!
This month on our marketplace there were no notable double-digit gains in expensive skins, but on the contrary – a decent selection of knives: StatTrak™ Flip Knife Boreal Forest (Field-Tested), StatTrak™ Stiletto Knife Night Stripe (Field-Tested), Paracord Knife Fade (Factory New) и StatTrak™ Talon Knife Urban Masked (Field-Tested) all went on sale, shedding up to 10% of their price, which is noticeable in absolute value too in some of them.
These knives are rather popular and liquid items, so snatching them at a low price isn’t a bad decision.
Stickers
Something extraordinary happened in October as a whole range of Krakow 2017 (Gold) stickers emerged on the CS.MONEY market, sold for up to x43 (in case with ropz (Gold) | Krakow 2017 ) their last known price. We double-checked the prices actually seem pretty fair, seeing how it’s an extremely rare lineup of stickers, some of the stickers are sold on Steam Market itself only once in a month or even more rarely.
While some of them have been snatched up, some are still available on the marketplace. We can not with good conscience say that such rare items are worth buying as an investment now, but this was just a paranormal event as a couple of dozens of stickers from the Krakow 2017 collections appeared on the open market at the same time and place, so we couldn’t keep quiet about it!
Among more liquid items that aren’t collectors’ items yet, Virtus.pro (Foil) Katowice 2015 gained 67% and costs $88 to buy now!
Until a new set of stickers is released, that becomes an object of massive investment from regular users, the Shattered Web stickers will continue to dominate the volume charts in the sticker segment.
What we can’t fail to notice though ,is that the absolute numbers of deals for each of these stickers have been on a steady decline month after month, decreasing by about 10% MoM.
Does that mean the community is ready for the next set of stickers already? Absolutely – with the price being relatively stable since summer, and volumes going down (but they won’t be small enough for the price to be easily manipulated, probably ever) it’s definitely an indicator that these stickers are more likely to become a form of a “stablecoin” such as AK-47 Redline, rather than an attractive investment, at least in short/mid term scenario.
Community insights
Have you ever wondered, how do you compare to other CS:GO item traders in terms of your inventory value and ROI? Look no further, a discussion is underway right now. A poll with over 2.2k participants (and still counting) produced quite interesting results.
Unsurprisingly, lots of people started investing and earning on CS:GO skins accidentally, after trading up from a lucky drop, or just working hard starting from $10 or so.
What’s more surprising is that some people do admit SPENDING thousands of dollars as an investment in such a risky and volatile market (let’s be honest!) that CS:GO market is. Regardless, the thread is rather positive and it’s full of what you can call success stories, as many investors managed to get x3-4 returns on whatever they initially invested.
Future trends – what to look out for
Historically there aren’t many examples of big releases truly making an impact on Steam Marketplace item prices, it’s rather Steam seasonal and holiday sales that do it. However, GTA V is known to have caused a great impact and somewhat of a skin selloff as people were simply getting rid of their skins and hurrying to buy it on release. There’s been a great buildup before the expected (this time for real, hopefully) release of Cyberpunk 2077 in December this year, but will the more mature CS:GO market be affected by it?
Some argue that it will, not only because people are more likely to sell their skins, but also because it’s a game that comes once in a generation of consoles, and it may take away a large chunk of the user base from other titles, even such as CS:GO for brief period of time, and that in turn also affects the market.
Last but not least, a very interesting research, based on extrapolation and educated guesses, was published by a trading enthusiast, who came to a conclusion that over the last 50 days, 233 000 Shattered Web Cases have been unboxed, with a daily average of 4700 cases.
Can this data be trusted? Not exactly, there is a chance they’re pretty inaccurate as they were extrapolated from a chance of an item dropping from the cases, namely the AWP Containment Breach (Battle-Scarred).
The amount of this item in public inventories was taken into account, knowing that people normally don’t trade up to a battle-scarred skin. Still, this is a somewhat encouraging dynamic for the SW Case owners, because as it appears, less and less of them are being opened every day starting from the date of the beginning of the operation, which indirectly proves that their supply is decreasing, which will eventually make it a good investment.
