Counter-Strike's player economy is in a multi-billion dollar freefall

It's lost nearly $2 billion of its value, and counting

Counter-Strike has long been known for two things: tight tactical FPS gameplay and a thriving player marketplace effectively valued at literal billions of dollars. Now, thanks to a recent update from Valve, the latter is in a downward spiral, having lost 25% of its value — or $1.75 billion — overnight.

First, some context. Counter-Strike is a free-to-play multiplayer shooter. As with most other F2P games, it generates revenue from selling cosmetics. They arrive in lootbox-like Cases, which are opened by Keys purchased with real-world currency. They can also be obtained through trading with other players and purchasing from Steam Community Market. Beyond Steam, unofficial third-party marketplaces for CS cosmetics have also popped up as channels for buying and selling items.

Because items are obtained at random through opening Cases, rarer items fetch the highest value on the open marketplaces. Items of lower-rarity tiers can also be traded in at volume for an item of a higher tier via trade up contracts. Previously, Knives and Gloves could not be obtained through trade up contracts, exponentially increasing their value as highly sought-after items. Prior to the most recent update, some Knives, like a Doppler Ruby Butterfly Knife, could fetch around $20,000 on third-party storefronts like CSFloat.

Following Valve's Oct. 22 update to Counter-Strike, the second-highest-tier, Covert (Red), can now be traded up and turned into Knives and Gloves. Essentially, this means that a previously extremely rare and highly sought-after cosmetic is going to be much more obtainable for those who increasingly want it, reducing the value of Knives and Gloves on the open marketplace.

And this is where the market descends into a freefall. Now, that Butterfly Knife mentioned above? It's going for around $12,000, as people are essentially dumping their stock, with 15 sold over the past 16 hours at the time of this writing.

Bloomberg reported the market for Counter-Strike cosmetic items dropped 25% overnight from Wednesday evening into Thursday morning. It's lost about $1.84 billion in value, according to Pricempire, which tracks and analyses the market for CS items. "This completely changes the supply of Counter-Strike’s most sought-after and expensive tier of items," Pricempire marketing manager Ethan MacDonald told Bloomberg.

As sellers attempt to recoup their investments, similar fire sales like the one happening at CSFloat are occurring at other sites. One such site, Skin Port, even put us in a waiting room to access it; traffic was overwhelming its servers.

Just like how NFT or cryptocurrency values can drastically shift, Counter-Strike item traders are seeing their stock rapidly change in value, and not for the best. While some items of lower-rarity tiers have gone up in value, and Reds might see a bump now that they can be traded up into Knives and Gloves, that can't make up for the sudden drop at the top of the cosmetics market.

We'll have to wait and see if the market levels out or if it continues to crash. Plenty of players and CS traders must be eagerly awaiting more news: As of this writing, Pricempire's servers had crashed.