Small CS Skins / new Trade-Up Update rant ‼️
As someone who makes CS skins content on YouTube, I have to admit it was getting to a ridiculous point. It came to the point where a $500 budget would be considered CHEAP for a Knife + Glove combo and with that $500 you couldn't even get something anywhere near "nice"
In recent months, it only got worse, gloves considered "ugly" were going up in price 2,3,4x out of nowhere. The hand wraps spruce ddpat went from 100ish$ to 650$ in FIELD TESTED (!!) from one week to another, this was happening with different gloves every week. Don't get me wrong, I don't think every player should be able to afford an M9 Doppler Phase 2, if you can't afford the highest of the highest in a free market where people set the price, THAT'S FINE. You're not entitled to it, just buy something cheaper. The problem is, it wasn't about players being priced out of high tier skins, average CS players were getting priced out on EVERYTHING in the "gold items market", and if it continued the way it was going, it was only going to get worse (thank China for that)
My DMs and YT comments in the last few months have been full of crypto people just wanting to buy Knives and Gloves to sit on them because it was the cool and popular thing going up in price, they were not going to play with them.
This isn't going to "wipe the market" as many claim, the long term result here imo will be: Knives and Gloves will be much cheaper, this is guaranteed, a lot more people will be able to afford nicer stuff. Coverts and Pinks (with good float specially) will be much more expensive than they were. What this will do is kind of re-balance the market, take money out of gold items and put SOME of it into coverts.
There will still be ways to make money and "invest" into CS skins, but people won't be nearly as priced out of nice things as they were. It's also true that people lost a lot of trust on Valve with this update, idk how much that will affect the market long term. But let's be honest, $20K for a Butterfly Emerald was ridiculous, 500$ for some random below average gloves in terrible condition was even more ridiculous.
I know a lot of people are upset right now, I also lost money of course. But even as a skincel myself I can say this is a game, not a stock portfolio. Was this the best way to drive prices down for high tier items? I'm not sure, maybe there were better ways, either by releasing old golds in new cases or just increasing the amount of case drops you get per week. But I've been saying for months that I think Valve want to discontinue cases in the long-term, and if that's true, those 2 options weren't realistic. If they did it this way, there's for sure a reason behind it we don't know yet.
Overall, what do you rate this new CS2 Update from 0-10 and why?