u/HydroCSGOD

In less than a month, the market cap is down ~700 million USD.

At this rate we could easily see -1 billion towards the end of October.

I know this isn't a popular opinion but I actually think the market going down is great for the average player and future playerbase.

I'm not even talking about gloves/knives being more affordable but just play skins in general.

When I started playing CSGO back in 2014 I fell in love with skins and was very active in the collecting and trading scene and quite frankly, I wouldn't mind going back to 2015/2016 prices.

I firmly believe that skins should be something anyone can own and not just the rich.

Back in the day a karambit doppler would set you back 300$, before the knife tradeup update in 2025 a karambit doppler would set you back 3000$.

Don't get me wrong, 300$ is still a lot of money but it's definitely an achievable goal.

It's going to be interesting to see how far the market can go down in total, and hopefully some of you guys can buy things you always wanted to own before it goes back up.

Play Here: epidemic.gg/dangerzone

Epidemic and his team have been working hard on this Danger Zone mod, making it almost 1:1 with CSGO.

They said they're planning on adding more things very soon so keep an eye on that.

I've tried the server myself and it feels great so far and that's coming from someone with over 1000 CSGO DZ matches played.

Let me start off by saying, this is not my post.

OG poster: maciek10372

I just saw this post on the cs2 reddit and thought it was somewhat interesting to share here for the people who aren't subbed there.

I'm cutting into his post a little bit because certain parts aren't interesting for investors / skin owners.

"Some thoughts after AustinCSGO trip to Valve

Link to the VOD where Austin was talking about his trip and conversations with the devs: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2869921880

Some highlights from the VOD that I will paraphrase, but please go watch it in full:

\- there are way more people working on the game that one could think, number 30 was thrown around if I recall correctly

\- they would like the community to play more maps than just mirage and dust2 and they are thinking of ways to do that

\- Austin asked about cbble and the snow texture leaks and Valve said that these don't mean anything

\- Austin talked about adding gamemodes like surf to the game but Valve said that it would be very confusing to the new players because it's so different from normal gameplay, and "All the fixes we did was to make surf good for the community, everybody is happy with it, (the community) do a better job hosting them"

\- they were talking about some problems that even Austin wasn't aware of

\- CS devs play the game a lot even more than some of you, the people from the community

\- they hate cheating as much as we do and are working to improve things

\- about operations: "When you think about it, what the community misses from it the most? You guess it: the missions." He goes on a long explanation that what we have now its basically what we got in the past (you do missions, play community maps, get stars etc). Although Operations were more about doing with a friend, bots, comic etc -- but from what he said in a tl;dr moment: Not something they are working on atm but Operations is not out of the table. \*"

Once again please go watch the VOD, there is more stuff there."

To me personally as an investor / skin owner but also a player, this all just feels really underwhelming.

Don't get me wrong, I firmly believe that the market will see much better days again at one point, but after reading that they're not actively working on new game modes or that an operation is on the horizon feels incredibly underwhelming to me.

Of course it's possible that they're just lying to Austin but after seeing how stale the game has been for the past 3 years, I highly doubt they're lying.

Cheating and the community playing mirage and dust2 non stop in premier has been a thing for the past 3 years as well.

They say they're "thinking" of ways to change that but so far, nothing has changed and they probably won't be releasing any changes anytime soon.

Maybe it was just foolish of me but I was actually expecting to see some new game modes, or even an operation to attract more players to the game but it seems that that's not going to happen anytime soon.

A little over a month ago I made a post about me saying that I don't think Cologne is a good investment for the people buying them at ATH prices instead of day 1 prices, even if they have low supply.

I still stand by that, but that's not what this post is about.

I made that post after looking at the demand and supply, sticker sales on markets and sticker application rates.

So I added some sticker application information in that last post, and we will take a look at what changed within a little over a month to the application rates.

Edit: for clarification, this is about the circular stickers, square ranked stickers are NOT included in these numbers.

Numbers 1 month ago

Liquid 107 4x crafts

Thunderdownunder 87 4x crafts

Flyquest 58 4x crafts

Falcons 50 4x crafts

Spirit 30 4x crafts

Furia 25 4x crafts

Vitality 8 4x crafts

Numbers today

Liquid 112 4x crafts

Thunderdownunder 99 4x crafts

Flyquest 60 4x crafts

Falcons 53 4x crafts

Spirit 39 4x crafts

Furia 30 4x crafts

Vitality 10 4x crafts

I think it's safe to say that people don't enjoy crafting newly released expensive stickers.

With the Singapore major coming up in a few months, I actually have very high hopes that we're going to see some new features and items that we've not seen before to increase revenue for teams and valve themselves.

Multiple pro teams and players have spoken out on twitter on how bad the Cologne revenue has been for them and that if revenues like these continue, the pro scene would slowly but surely die, especially the T2/T3 part of the scene which would be horrible for new talent.

I'm expecting some new and cool stuff during the Singapore major but most importantly, cheap and affordable stickers.

We'll have to wait and see.

Just saw a reel on IG of ohne's stream of the game Five Hearts and the whole comment section is just filled with tags towards Gran.

Went over to check her posts, and every single post is just filled with 50/200 comments tagging ohne and some comments are even disrespectful as shit.

Other big streamers played the game and guess what their communities are posting under her posts?

Nothing.

Tagging ohne or gran was funny for a day but some of you are insanely unhinged and parasocial as shit and don't know when to quit.

Some of you are so borderline parasocial that you guys stalk him with everything he does.

Playing games on his day(s) off? Let's stalk him, oh he's liking a post on IG, let's stalk him, oh he's interacting with a girl? Let's stalk him and her.

Imagine some of you weirdos would know where he lives.

No wonder the guy isn't enjoying streaming anymore the way he used to, he can't do shit without some of you weirdos finding out what he's doing in his private time.

I always wondered why China has been mass buying limited edition items, so I asked a Chinese "collector" in my FL on steam, because I saw that he owned a bunch of m4's solitude and a bunch of deagles and even a bunch of AK's.

( A mix of like 3/400 of them )

His reply was, that China believes that one day there will be limited time gloves and knives in the armory and that besides buying the gloves or knives with stars, can only be obtained through tradeups.

So my Initial answer was obviously that something like that was never going to happen, until he made me realize that just like regular skins, there is a rarity label attached to them.

So far, we have 1 Restricted, 2 Classified and 1 Covert.

He said, if the knife / glove tradeup won't be a thing in the future, why add rarity types to the skins?

You can't use the limited items in regular tradeups so it would only make sense to end up with limited item tradeups.

I told him a FN ak Aphrodite is ~250€ atm so it would end up being a 1000€ tradeup which in my opinion is highly most likely not going to be worth the knife or gloves in the armory due to people also being able to just buy them with stars.

And then he said another thing I didn't think of.

He said, with terminals, Valve are limited to the steam wallet cap ( ~1700€ ), armory stars on the other hand, they are not.

They could in theory ask whatever amount of stars they want.

They are not capped by the steam wallet cap in the armory since it's about stars and not cash.

On top of that he said, every single skin in the armory so far has been pattern based so the odds are very high that potential knives / gloves will also be pattern based, making certain patterns very valuable and probably worth the 1000€ tradeup for FN.

I thought that was a pretty interesting theory.

Me personally though, I honestly don't know, I don't think it will happen and if it happens, it will probably be years from now.

You guys think he can be right? Or is it just pure copium from the people who "invested" in these limited items.

Just recently, windking had a livestream to showcase to his followers and private group that he did not rug pull them and that he's still holding.

( I thought I saved the vod but apparently not, but it's probably publicly available on bilibili or something )

He showcased that he still owns hundreds of OG gloves, like 400 pairs of hedge mazes and a bunch of other OG gloves, he also owns hundreds if not thousands of OG operation / collection skins.

It is rumored that he invested over 5mil USD. ( Which makes sense if you count everything up )

My best guess, he's down 10/30% since he was one of the original manipulators so he isn't down 60% like the rest of the world.

Only windking and his whale friends are down a lot less than the average person.

Besides showcasing his followers that he didn't rug pull, the most important part here is the private group.

There are multiple Chinese whales in that group who have similar amounts of money invested as windking has.

Then you also have people who invested a few 100k and the lower ring below that 10/40k.

This private group owns thousands upon thousands of OG gloves and operation / collection skins.

When the knife tradeup update hit the market, a day or two later, news went around that multiple people from his private group committed suicide due to making huge losses.

Keep in mind, a lot of these people told family members to join in, and people even took out loans from banks to join windking because windking promised them more wealth than their entire family ever earned.

( The suicides have never been officially confirmed or denied, there were also videos but those were officially labeled as fake. )

Anyway, I was under the impression that windking and his group had already cashed out most of their stuff by now, but apparently they have not.

Now, I think all of you guys can fill this one in for yourself, but what do you think if 1 of the whales or even windking himself decide to just take the losses and start dumping.

If these guys decide it's time or don't feel like waiting any longer, the snowball effect will take the entire market with it.

The pure chaos it will unleash will literally send us back to 2015/2017 prices.

If you think prices are bad now, just wait until China is tired of waiting.

After the release of the first terminal, I honestly wasn't expecting another terminal.

When the first terminal was released, people quickly found out, that it just wasn't profitable to buy the coverts anymore from that terminal and people stopped opening them.

Then the second terminal was released, but this time with gloves.

However, the same exact problem happened in terminal 2 as it did in terminal 1.

There are currently only 2 pairs of gloves from terminal 2 that are worth buying from the terminal.

FN ultra violent & FN pillow punchers.

You do not have to worry about buying the MW or worse versions, since you're not going to make profit.

Everything in terminal 2 will lose you money and only 2 items can make you profit from terminal 2 so the odds of actually getting 1 of those 2 pairs is absolutely atrocious and not worth spending your time on by opening hundreds or thousands of terminals.

The reason 20/40 million cases a month were being opened wasn't because the odds of opening a knife were great, it was because valve gave people the illusion that for just 2.5€, you could unbox something worth thousands.

At the start of terminals, people were given that exact same illusion.

You "unboxed" FN ( random pair ) of gloves and valve was offering to sell them to you for "only" 1500€.

People thought to themselves, that's an absolute steal and ended up buying them.

I would say that for 90% of the gloves in terminal 2 even at FN, it's not worth buying them anymore.

And the word "anymore" is exactly where the danger lies.

The moment you open up a terminal, it will say on the bottom that the prices of items found inside the terminal are based off of demand.

The reason that this is actually incredibly scary, is because valve can literally change prices manually inside terminals by tweaking their algorithm that they use for terminals.

For example, right now a pair of FN ultra violent gloves are ~1700€, MW ~1400€ inside the terminal.

Valve has the ability to lower the price of every single skin inside of their terminals by 30% and claim that it was due to low demand.

You can imagine if gloves go -30% inside the terminal, a lot of people are going to be buying gloves left and right again, adding hundreds if not thousands of new gloves to the already existing supply.

Within a few weeks, prices will be back to previous prices inside of the terminal due to increased demand however, with thousands of new gloves added to the supply.

This will cause cash prices to go down and the problem is, valve could initiate a 3rd wave whenever they feel like it.

Valve can rinse and repeat this over and over whenever they feel like people aren't buying enough stuff from their terminals.

I'm not saying this is going to happen, but it's definitely something you should keep in the back of your head if you own any expensive terminal items.

Some remarks after 900 reviewed VACNet clips:

- I got invited on my vac banned account (by someone else) and I can do verdicts and invite others. Your account standing does not matter.

- The player is absolutely abysmal, it's way too small and there's insane amount of dead space. The full clips are around 5 minutes but each "task" is a 12 second segment of that big clip, the player control bar shows the full 5 minute duration but you can only watch the 12 seconds, clicking outside the "clip" goes back to the start. Impossible to seek/rewind.

- I had to make a userscript that fixes the media player, adds youtube arrow jumps, comma and dot frame seeking, hold to 2x speed, make player fullscreen and verdicts table on the right side. This insanely increased my productivity.

- The clip system is insanely effective, not having to open a full demo insanely speeds up the review, this would be 100x better than old overwatch if this would convict players

- You will see the same segments and you will go insane, after 900 clips I recognize pretty much every single segment and "rarely" find a new clip.

- If you won't see the same segment you will very likely see the same clip but just a different segment of it, e.g. you might suddenly see what happened before the segment you just saw.

- Rage hackers are actually pretty rare, you will very much see 5k elo lobbies.

- Clicking each of the 4 cheat options made me go crazy, I made presets for legit (all nothing, most common), WH and RAGE and then edit accordingly (e.g. uncertain)

In a few days most definitely everyone will be invited, this is very much a deadlock invite system, cheat devs surely have access to this already.

I have no idea if psp is trolling or not but if this is real, that's pretty bad no?

Like, this looks like a pyramid scheme lol.

Valve: work for us and review 100 demos, after that, invite your friend and make him watch 100 videos to invite another friend.

This GTA hide and seek is the biggest slop trash stream you've ever done.

It's absolutely horrible to watch ngl.

Exerpas I like you but please don't ever be this cringe again holy fuck just stick to modding and pit streams buddy, RP is not for you.

You are no Elden lord, you're afraid of Sekiro!

Admit that you are shaking in your little new balance boots!

You beat Elden Ring by cheating your way through with OP builds and OP weapons.

I saw a midget the other day who was missing 2 eyes and missing 1 hand and he beat radahn in a bare knuckle fight.

The moment you heard that in Sekiro EVERYONE has the same weapon, your left eye started twitching, your left cheek started shaking and I KNEW, he's going to say "VAS alta... Thats boring no?"

You're a coward onepixel!

Play Sekiro and show the world you're an Elden lord.

Or go through history known as,

Markus "Elden Cuck" pixel.

The choice is yours.

Let me start off by saying, I fully believe that in the near future we will have sticker tradeups.

I think the sticker tradeups will work the same way as weapon tradeups where 10 blue's = 1 purple / 10 purple's = 1 pink / 10 pink's = 1 red.

( These numbers could obviously be different for sticker tradeups but personally, I don't think so. )

Anyway, moving on from that part.

Me and 4 other irl friends decided to invest 1/1.2k€ each by buying 20.000 Cologne team paper stickers each. ( Cheapest teams available, purchased at 0.05/0.06 each. )

Now, if we simply go by the numbers I mentioned above for "normal" tradeups.

This means that per 20.000 paper stickers, I will end up with 2000 foil stickers, and eventually 200 mixed holo stickers.

If I would've purchased regular Cologne holos like other people are doing, I could've bought 20/25 falcon holos for ~45/50€ each for 1000€.

Or a mix of stickers ranging between 20/50€ each for 1000€.

When sticker tradeups are added to the game I will end up with 200 mixed holos instead of 20/45 holos that I would normally get by just purchasing the holo stickers.

This means, that if I end up with 200 holos for 1000€, I need each holo sticker to be an average of 5€ to break even, 10€ = 2x, 15€ 3x, 20€ 4x and on and on.

If we take the current price of the average sticker being 25€, that would instantly 5x my 1000€.

So even if the Cologne holos end up completely and utterly crashing, just keep in mind that i only need them to be an average of 5€ each to break even.

We did this with 1/1.2k each but obviously this can also be done with 100€ or less.

For 100€ you would end up with 20 mixed holos.

( Although I don't know current prices for paper team stickers, so this might no longer be worth it. )

This can be done with any other major sticker, but due to low supply we went with Cologne.

If they don't add sticker tradeups in the next few years? Fuck it we'll lose 30/50% after selling all the papers again.

Losing 300/600€ or gaining 5/20.000€ sounds like a solid gamble to me.

Why drop this strat?

I don't see a reason why not.

My 200 holos are not going to crash prices and even if 100 people decide to do the same thing, it will only introduce 20k holos which i would still consider low supply for stickers.

What if the tradeup contract is not 10:1 but 20:1?

That would simply mean that instead of 5€ each to break even, the average price needs to be 10€ each to break even, and considering that the average price right now is 25€, that would still mean an instant 2.5x on my 1k investment.

Me personally though, I think the ratio will be 10:1.

Anyway, I thought some of you with lesser money to invest or the people who were asleep during the first few hours of the sticker release might enjoy this post.

Why is it that the developers working on CS2 don't see the importance of having content to play.

CS2 developers robbed us from Operations, Danger Zone and community made content.

CS2 was released on September 27 2023.

The game has been out for almost 3 years now and besides all the garbage game modes that are filled with bots, all we have is MM/premier.

Premier to me was fun in the first few seasons but we're currently in season 5 and besides playing Dust / Mirage 75% of the time or seeing cheaters almost every single game, it's just boring to me.

( No I don't want to play Faceit, fuck Faceit )

Back in CSGO I absolutely loved Danger Zone, I don't like Battle Royale games such as PUBG or Warzone but Danger Zone was imo something completely different compared to those games but still with a hint of the BR genre.

The excuse from Valve to remove it was, "not enough players".

Which is extremely odd because whenever I would queue for Danger Zone, I always instantly got into a game.

I'm not even saying that we need Danger Zone back, just add similar stuff with a ranking system so people get to play/grind for something else other than non stop premier.

Same shit can be said about community made content.

The reason CSGO was so incredibly popular, wasn't because of MM.

It was incredibly popular, because it felt like you could basically just do anything you wanted, and that there was always something to do.

CS2 is an empty shell case compared to CSGO.

Normally with a sale, capsules are 0.25c.

The most expensive static holo sticker is 8$ and the most expensive gold 60$.

With capsules you would be able to open 32 capsules for 8$ and 240 capsules for 60$.

I honestly don't think that the static holo prices are bad if you compare them to capsule results.

I've watched plenty of streamers open hundreds of major capsules only to end up with a handful of holos so I don't think the holo prices are bad.

The golds tho, 60$ for a falcons gold is basically a triple A game so I do find that a pretty hefty price.

Personally, I don't see dynamic stickers making a return to cs but the static ones though, I wouldn't be surprised if that's going to be the new norm from now on due to new laws, where at the end of the major we will just see a sale on the static prices.

So what is everyone thinking about the new static system?

Back to capsules or stick to static prices?