Glitches That Caused Sudden Price Spikes in CS:GO Skins

A bug affecting the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) Steam Market has seen prices for every item in the game skyrocket, with some skins, cases, and stickers doubling or even tripling in cost almost overnight.

CSGO has once again outdone itself, and this time it’s the previous monthly unique player count that the competitive shooter has surpassed, that too by a significant margin. According to their official blog, CSGO has managed to reach a record high of 26.2 million unique players in the month of April 2020, which is about a whopping 30% increase in the unique player count of the game since March.

Apart from the fact that the COVID-19 outbreak has forced people indoors, the main reason behind the rapid increase in player count is the amount of love Valve has shown towards the game recently. They have shipped out constant updates for CSGO, adding weapon skins, new music kits, quality of life changes, weapon fixes and bug fixes to improve the gameplay experience. The devs have given the community what they wanted and the players reciprocated the love by repeatedly setting new milestones.

The influx of new players raining into the game has had an impact in an overlooked sector – the skin economy. The prices of the weapon skins for CSGO on average, has seen a considerable spike in the last month. But it is only expected to increase further, and looks like players can potentially earn a lot of extra cash by hopping onto the hype train.

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In-Game Items Monetization

CSGO skins can earn you quite a hefty amount if you can auction it at the right time. With a simple makeover of your weapons, players are ready to pay upwards of $1000s of dollars for the virtual theme. In essence, their wide popularity and cashout process makes sense because of betting and gambling sites. Already halfway through the year, there are several ways to do so successfully.

It is a powerful feature that makes games thrilling and more entertaining is the ability to win and acquire skins, a form of in-game asset, which you can later put up in the community market for sale. These CSGO skins are cosmetic items that don’t make unfair gaming but only help with visual aesthetics. They don’t ruin the game’s balance, diversity, and equality. There is no pay to win affair and yet an opportunity to spend and make a lot of real money.

CSGO is one such game where players can show off their skills, by endurance and years of practice, and win accolades. With mega tournaments, the best of the best players come together to compete against each other. So much so that since December of 2018, you can play CSGO, one of the best games out there, without any money. And, with this strategy, CSGO is able to bring forth up to 1,000,000 games concurrently playing online.

CSGO Skins & Their Popularity

One must always remember that your skills matter the most, but when players have invested years into crafting it as a professional talent, they tend to develop emotional bonding with the game, its characters, abilities, and more. They become a master craftsman of the game. And, naturally, customizations play a huge role in uplifting your skill, psychologically. It is just like you tend to do well in your favorite clothes, shoe, and pen during an exam, with CSGO these are skins.

Skins give players the power of mental superiority, confidence, and yet maintain a balanced playing field. You don’t get a powerful weapon than anyone else with money; you have to do better with the same. Of course, those who kill enemies and do better are ranked higher.

Buy and Sell CSGO Skins for Real Money

When CSGO began, it came with a default inventory but gradually exclusiveness and unique customizations became a norm. Not only did the best players want to have unique names that were their identity in the world gaming community, but they also wished to have aesthetics, skins for their weapons that can identify them to the world. IN a sense, consider Apple defending its Apple logo from anyone but itself. It is the mark of the company and people instantly recognize it. It stands for superiority and quality.

CSGO skins do the same effect for gamers in the online community, as well as offline.

CSGO begins with an inventory that replenishes over time with free weapon skins, which are given to players as they reach a certain experience level. Players can always complete the inventory with different skins from the market, starting with the skin for a price of under $1 to rare exclusive single skins for $1000s. Every time you want a new skin you don’t have to buy them with your card, instead, you can trade yours in return for others. It is best to sell your old ones and get new ones.

Incidents that affects Price Spikes in CSGO skins

A bug affecting the CSGO Steam Community Market has seen prices for every item in the game skyrocket, with some skins, cases, and stickers doubling or even tripling in cost almost overnight. If you wanted to sell CSGO skins on the Steam Community Market, you might want to wait. A bug has seen prices skyrocket, but it could lead to a massive market crash in the coming days.

Earlier this year, on the 30th of March, the prices of CSGO items like weapon skins, knives and agents were suddenly hiked in the Steam community market. In fact, some players have also encountered some bugs in the official Steam application, where they were unable to list any CSGO item on the market. Players started reporting higher-than-usual prices on the Community Market early on March 30, specifically on the CSGO marketplace. Since then, the issue has spread to other games, including Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2.

All items, including weapon skins, agent skins, cases, keys, and stickers, have seen their prices on the front-end go up. According to community speculation, the reason behind the community market price hike is a high load on market servers. It turned out that the Steam servers were experiencing some problems, possibly due to heavy traffic load, which made them non-functional. As a direct result of this, fresh items got restricted to list on the market, which caused a sudden hike in the price of all the trade items. When the users were trying to sell anything on the market, an error was shown every time on the screen:

“We were unable to contact the game’s item server. The game’s item server may be down or Steam may be experiencing temporary connectivity issues. Your listing has not been created. Refresh the page and try again.”

With more people using the market than ever, some listings are not appearing for a long time, or at all. As the cheaper items get snatched up, they don’t get replaced with the newly-listed items. A pertinent example is AK-47 Elite Build Field-Tested exterior, which was typically sold for around $2, and was being traded for approximately $3.50 by community members. As a rule, when there’s a shortage of items in the market, its price suddenly shoots up. Therefore, the existing items on the market were being sold for a higher amount. 

Although these server issues usually iron themselves out after a few minutes or so, the community market has been bugged for a number of hours as of publishing. If you list an item while the market servers are under stress, it will take a while to appear. However, your listing should still go through, and people with buy orders will be able to grab their desired items if the price is right.

The greatest fear out of all of this is a massive market crash though. The longer it goes on, the more artificially inflated the prices get. Once the new supply comes through, people desperate to get rid of items will have to put them up for a lower price than normal. As of now, the Steam servers are again working normally and many of the listed items have been restored to their original prices. However, some users managed to get lucky during this and made around 3X profit, adding some extra money to their Steam wallets.

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CSGO skins trade remains undeterred

It is a business model where you play and show off your skills, use them to earn experience and win higher ranks, and skins. Then, you can trade your skin and sell them for a price. Doing so doesn’t make anyone a better player, but still allows them to have an aesthetic they wish for. So, it doesn’t harm anyway in any manner.

Steam Market or third-party marketplaces like SkinCashier are the two major retailers for cashing out your CSGO skins in 2020. If you wish, you can spend all your money inside Steam, and use it to buy games, and in that case, stick with the Steam Market. But, if your goal is to make profits, earn money with your trade and gameplay skills, choosing a third-party like SkinCashier is a better option. In some cases, it is the only option.