The price fluctuations of skins in CS:GO can be quite impressive. Some game items skyrocket in price shortly after release when player interest is at its peak, and then slowly become cheaper. Others, on the contrary, rise in price gradually, but steadily. You can see the price trend for specific items on the official Marketplace on Steam or other platforms. It often helps to understand in which direction the price is moving and whether it is profitable to buy a skin for CS:GO right now. And for those who are serious about collecting skins, information about the factors that can affect their value is also useful.
Supply and demand
The
main reason why skin prices change – is the fact that Valve does not impose any restrictions on the market. Players can exchange with each other, sell and buy skins on different sites, which means that the price will obey market laws. This means that it is influenced by supply and demand, i.e. the popularity of the skin, the number of players and the total number of skins available.Skins appeared in the game in 2013, and since then the number of players has grown by several orders of magnitude. Ten years ago, the daily peak online was around 50,000 users and now it can exceed a million. (One of the record highs was recently, just after the update was released). As a result, the price of skins increases – especially when it comes to items from old collections, which no longer fall out or fall out very rarely.
Popularity of cases
The ratio of supply and demand explains well the price dynamics of old skins, but it is roughly the same with relatively new ones. Even weapon coloring, which appeared in the game after it began to gain hundreds of thousands of players, can also rise sharply in price.
To understand why this happens, we need to take into account another factor – the probability of a particular game item falling out. From the beginning, the main way for players to get skins in the game has been to open cases that drop after a match. That said, the probability of them falling out is different. For example, «Fracture» comes across players quite often, with over 200,000 copies sold on the Marketplace. Unsurprisingly, even the rarest items a player can get when unlocking them drop in value. For example, AK-47 Anubis has become cheaper by about five dollars over the past year.
Availability of skins
But the situation is the opposite with the prices of skins for CS:GO, which can fall only for a limited time. A good example – is one of the relatively new, but already high priced – AWP Gugnir skins. Because it is part of a collection that was only available during Operation Shattered Web, it is limited in quantity on the market. Now there are just over 3000 copies in the game, and considering that this is a skin for a popular weapon, it is not surprising that its price can be measured in thousands of dollars.
Thus, the price of skins changes under the influence of several factors at once: the ratio of supply and demand, changes in the number of players, the popularity of certain items, as well as their availability. If you plan to buy skins for CS:GO with the expectation that they will go up in price in the future, pay attention to items from rare cases and collections, as well as those that may turn out to be rare in the future. No matter which skins you like, you can buy them at very attractive prices at Lis-Skins.ru.