The game Counter-Strike kinda nutured a market: the weapons and gloves that players use in battle are tradable aesthetic assets known as skins.
(i) some skins are rare (eg. getting them isn’t simple: players can either open loot boxes each costing about 2.5usd, with less than a 0.3% chance of lotteried on a rare item), and
(ii) tradable (one can purchase them on the Steam Market, Valve’s global exchange where millions of players list and trade items in real time).
Therefore, while the skins only change how guns or knifes looks and do NOT alter gameplay power, players value these digital collectibles partly as expressions of identity and status — showing off a rare knife skin during a match is the virtual equivalent of driving a supercar down a crowded street. Gradually this cosmetic feature gradually evolved into a virtual market economy: The market supports global liquidity—skins are tradable in many currencies via peer-to-peer marketplaces (including real-world cashouts); some individual skins (especially rare knives or gloves) fetch thousands of dollars, and, transaction data and charts exist analogous to financial markets: eg CSGOStocks.
The market was estimated at 6-billion dollar, before October 22 2025 it announced a “Trade Up” update where:
- 5 StatTrak™ Covert items can be exchanged for one StatTrak™ Knife from a collection of one of the items provided
- 5 regular Covert items can be exchanged for one regular Knife item or one regular Gloves item from a collection of one of the items provided
So it’s like, before you can only dig up gold but now you can make 1kg of gold out of 5kg of silver. And the market plummeted half:
Source: Pricempire