A look at the first half of 2020
The first two quarters of 2020 haven’t been the most interesting in the game’s history, but definitely strengthened its economy and reinforced its position among the biggest game item markets in the world. In April this year, during the peak days of the pandemic, CS:GO had over 1.3 million players simultaneously, and this directly lead to more people getting involved in item trading, making it their part-time job, or in an indirect way – by simply purchasing skins for themselves.
Skins Set New Records
If we’re talking about booming market such as CS:GO market, we can’t help but notice it has outgrown Steam Marketplace with its $1800 per item price limit. This has never been so apparent until recently, as some top-tier skins started renewing their all-time high prices and discovering their true market value. The divide between Steam Market, trading platforms (such as CS.Money) and OTC/P2P deals is growing bigger by the day.
For instance, some of the expensive knives that have recently been sold on the CS.MONEY platform, will probably never be sold on the Steam Market again:
To prove the point about OTC market being the only way to properly handle some of the most expensive skins, see this piece of news about the StatTrak M4A4 Howl with 4 iBUYPOWER Katowice 2014 stickers, which is rumoured to have been bought for $100,000 and is supposed to fetch a $130,000 price tag when changing the owner the next time.
The key takeaway from these examples is that the market as of 2020 has matured enough to accommodate such expensive items, which derive their price via unique/rare combinations of skin itself, its float value and expensive stickers.
If you have an item like that, you may not even suspect how quickly it can grow in value.
Stickers Get the Attention They Deserve
Historically if you looked at the price of stickers released around 2015-2017, their all-time price movement would resemble a flat line. At the end of 2019 and still going strong in 2020 we can see that stickers are clearly attracting more attention from investors than ever before.
Some stickers get picked up as they find themselves in the spotlight of community discussions, some are carried by the performance of their teams and players, and for the rarest and expensive stickers the primary factor of price growth is their limited supply because we know stickers are consumables.
Take a look at the top gainers from June 2020 for example:
Shattered Web stickers that the trading community keeps bringing up on Reddit almost every week, are now demonstrating how the laws of supply and demand eventually set things right. As a trader noticed, the quantity of SW stickers has been decreasing lately, with the number of available Counter-Tech stickers dropping from 22k to 11k, and Golden Web from 24k to only 14k.
This has lead to the prices almost doubling, and unless Valve intervene by re-releasing the stickers (which is unlikely), the price will keep rising, making these stickers a good long-term bet for the patient trader.
Another thing that came as a surprise to many, was the success of team BIG which struggled to find an optimal form in 2019, but since the addition of Tabsen (who started calling shots as IGL) and Xantares they’ve been slowly getting better. Their rank 1 on the top team list at HLTV is something they’ve completely earned, and this couldn’t but reflect on their players’ stickers (just like it did for Na’Vi earlier this year):
There is one little concern about them that many fans voice, is that due to the sheer absence of offline events, they could be a team of “onliners” who just won’t be able to replicate the success at an offline Major event.
Regardless of which team starts performing great or when, we can now safely conclude that stickers reflect their performance price-wise and this is a great opportunity for investors to reflect upon ahead of the upcoming Rio Major, or even just before an important online tournament like DreamHack or ESL One.
The outlook for the rest of 2020
Realistically, not every prediction the gaming community makes in general and relating to the future of CS:GO trading market necessarily comes true. For instance, Valorant was as a killer of CS:GO prior to its release, but has not affected the player base negatively in any way, in spite of some pros retiring to compete in it. Besides, speaking to Forbes, Riot’s revenue lead Joe Lee confirmed that skin trading will never a thing in Valorant, and it’s largely because the game also doesn’t feature loot boxes, which just confirms that the economy of CS:GO will continue developing without a worthy rival.
With this out of the way, what WILL affect it in the coming months then?
Possible Rio 2020 Cancellation
This is in no way an official statement, but the decision to hold the next major in Rio this year was taken a long time ago, and the situation since then has taken a turn for the worse in Brazil, and hasn’t improved enough in lots of other countries.
Rumours are circulating that the next major may be postponed the same way Dota’s International was postponed to 2022. Do not get us wrong, it will not kill the game or reduce the fan base, but in the light of people being hyped about the returns on investment of major stickers (Berlin 2019 being a great example), a record number of players playing the game and CS:GO investing in general getting more popular (look at how many YouTubers are talking about it) – there will be a void without the next batch of stickers that’ll be hard to fill.
It’s very likely that the prices for the capsules of stickers of the older majors will surge, as the money that otherwise would’ve been invested in the next big thing – Rio, will have to be put elsewhere. However, instead, it may go towards something else…
A new operation
Last time, it was Operation Shattered Web, which was presented to players after Valve proposed a poll between a new operation or Krieg nerfs. Players ended up getting both.
The CS:GO Twitter account went rogue on July 15 — and it wasn’t because of the bitcoin hacks. Instead, there were three very purposeful messages put out across July 15, leaving players hyped for a potential operation coming soon. The Tweets ended up being deleted and players are left in the dark for now.
Whatever form the next operation takes, whether it’s more old school, or made in the form of a Battlepass like Shattered Web, it will definitely feature new items, stickers, possibly player models.
Historically, the pause the developers make between the operations is a little over a year, but to keep the economy flowing and the player base engaged, something can probably be pushed up sooner. However, the reward/drop model of the potential new operation has to be consistent with that of the previous ones, with certain limits that would create a balanced supply/demand situation even if this time around more players than ever before will be in it for the money, treating their operation pass as an investment.
