Counter-Strike 2 – a game that is unique not only for its popularity, but also for the market of virtual items that has developed around it. In 2023, his performance reached a new level. Here are a few metrics that are interesting to look at to speculate how the market will evolve in 2024 or just to be impressed with the scale it has reached.
Cases and Skins in 2023
According to Valve, the amount the company has earned from opening cases has surpassed a billion dollars. Players opened a total of 400 million cases by purchasing 360,000 keys to do so. The average case value has increased by 178% over the past year. To appreciate the magnitude of these numbers, you can imagine that 12 cases were opened every second around the world.
However, there were actually three peaks throughout the year when cases were opened most actively. The first of these – in early spring, when the first CS2 trailers were released and an upcoming update spurred interest in the game. The second peak came shortly thereafter with the release of the Anubis Collection case. The third peak, which is quite logical, came in September, when CS2 was released to the public.
Case yield in 2023
The container that was opened most often was Dreams and Nightmares, which accounted for 13% of the total number of open cases. In absolute numbers, that's more than 50 million containers. Interestingly, you can't call Dreams and Nightmares Case a profitable investment. Judging by the cost of the dropped skins, players received three times less than what they spent to buy it. It is probably chosen not to resell items profitably, but to replenish your own inventory with original items. The second and third most popular cases were Fracture Case and Anubis Collection.
The average yield of the cases amounted to 44%. This means that the total value of skins that players gained by opening containers was more than half the amount spent, totaling about $422 million. Other sources of obtaining skins, such as trade contracts, are not taken into account.
Biggest price hike
Prices for skins in CS2 fluctuated quite a bit during the year. At the end of 2023 – early 2024, some rare items even became cheaper (for example, the price of M4A4 Howl copies decreased at the end of the year), but there was one item that showed a unique growth of about three times.
This is a 2014 EMS One Katowice sticker capsule. Because of the small number on the market, they were already highly valued before, and in the past year their value has risen from $11,000 to around $30,000. The number of these pods on the market is limited, and many large investors in 2023 favored them over skins.