When it comes to investing, one of the most important terms you’ll need to know would be risk appetite.
Risk appetite can be described as someone’s willingness to take greater risks in hopes of earning greater rewards.
Going back to investing, this means that someone with a lower risk appetite would not be willing to sustain great losses and would be content with lower gains.
For these people, some of the investments they choose could be government bonds or fixed deposits, which pose minimal risk at the cost of smaller returns.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, people with a higher risk appetite would want to go for higher-risk, higher-return investments such as buying stocks of individual companies or even cryptocurrency. 🪙
However, if one has an even higher risk appetite, there are certainly more options and one of them is today’s topic, CS2 Skins.
CS2 Skins? What Are They And How Are They Investments?
If you are not familiar, Counter-Strike 2, shortened as CS2, is a competitive online First Person Shooter (FPS) game, which is the current mainline instalment of the Counter-Strike series.
It’s considered a continuation of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CSGO), which was the game that kickstarted the skins investment craze.
In CS2, being an FPS game, the player wields guns and players can choose from many different guns.
What’s important to know, however, is that each gun can have a different paint job, known as skins which players can equip to make their guns different from other players’ guns.
So why do these skins have real money value? Simple, it’s due to the presence of supply and demand.
Just like in real life, when something is scarce, its price is bound to go up and down depending on how scarce it becomes. 📈
Once you’ve understood this concept, you’ll understand why CS2 skins go up and down in value, which is because their supply and demand change as time goes on.
How Do We Obtain CS2 Skins? What Makes Them Scarce?
To obtain CS2 skins, players will need to fork out an amount of money to either buy them directly from others or gamble for them.
The main method that drives the CS2 skins market is opening skin cases, considered by many to be a form of gambling. 🎰
In CS2, there are actually many items that have real-life monetary value and another one of them is skin cases, obtainable by playing the game.
If you are familiar with loot boxes, the concept is similar, where in CS2, a player would purchase a case key from Valve, then open the weapon case of their choice and get a random weapon skin, which varies in rarity and thus value.
In general, the rarer a weapon skin, the greater its value as they are harder to get and are usually more desirable, meaning they have lower supply and higher demand.
CS2 Skins Costing More Than A House!?
Source: Why the most expensive CSGO knife costs more than $1.5 million – (win.gg)
As you can see from the article above, the prices of CS2 skins can be outrageous at times. You would question, “Who would pay the price of a nice bungalow for a bunch of virtual pixels?”
Fortunately or unfortunately, someone indeed did try to buy a CS2 skin for 1.2 million Euros (US$1.5 million) once but the owner of said skin rejected the offer because it was “too low.” 🙀
However, even if the average CS2 Skin might not cost millions, the prices can still be outlandish for a virtual item. A quick look at any skin-selling website that shows the sales records would show you how thousands of dollars are being spent on purchasing these skins every hour.
Okay, So What Do These Maniacs Look For In Skins?
In CS2, each skin has multiple attributes, and each of them may cause the price to either shoot up or down significantly.
What you’ll need to look out for include but are not limited to the following:
- Weapon Type
To understand why the same skin pattern can cost so much on one weapon but be barely worth anything on another weapon, you’ll need to understand a bit of CS2’s gameplay. 🎮
In CS2, some weapons are more popular than others. When a weapon is deemed as more viable or meta than another, the skins for this weapon would be much more valuable.
Source: Prices of AWP and R8 Revolver Fade from Skinport
Take a look at one of the signature weapons of CS2, the AWP rifle. You can see above that the same skin, Fade, costs so much more for the popular AWP than the rather ignored R8 Revolver. 🔫
Then there’s the infamous knife skins, which prices you’ve seen before. In CS2, knives are always equipped no matter the situation, and combined with the unique animations that knife skins tend to have, players tend to adore them more. 🗡️
- Looks
Since skins are ultimately cosmetics, whether a skin looks cool or not would surely affect its prices. After all, why would anyone buy an ugly-looking skin and try to show it off? 😎
- Method of Obtaining
Back to the concept of scarcity, skins that can no longer be obtained will almost cost more than their still obtainable counterparts.
These skins can be from cases that have been discontinued (no longer obtainable from playing the game) or those that used to be obtainable by playing the game but are now unattainable.
- Float Value
In CS2, weapon skins have this attribute called a float value, ranging from 0.0 to 1.0. The lower the value (closer to 0), the cleaner or shinier it looks while the higher the value (closer to 1), the more damaged or dull it looks. 🌟
In general, skins with very low float values are more sought after and thus cost more. This is not the case for all skins though as some special ones have greater value the higher their float values are.
- Pattern
Source: Steam Community :: Guide :: Karambit Case Hardened: Blue Gem Patterns
In some CS2 skins, the pattern may be a deal-breaker when it comes to the skin’s value. The Case-Hardened skins, which include the US$1.5 million knife skin, are prime examples of this.
A skin may be of the same weapon, look, and float value but the pattern is another attribute that changes in appearance.
In case-hardened skins, the amount of shiny metallic blue chunks defines the value of a case-hardened skin. ✨
Combined with a low float value, if you have an almost completely blue case-hardened skin on a desirable weapon, you can start looking for a house to buy.
Now you know what makes these “bunch of virtual pixels” also known as CS2 Skins so expensive!
That’s not all there is to investing in CS2 items though as we haven’t talked about cases, stickers, and many more that some consider as good or even better investments than skins.
Of course, if you want to start delving into the strange world of CS2 investing, you’ll have to do a lot more research and always remember to know your financial situation and spend wisely.
After all, the prices of CS2 items are known to be extremely volatile with no real guarantees, so are you willing to take the risk? 🤔
If you are, be sure to plan your finances properly, continue to learn more about them and perhaps stick around our website as there may be more info we can share about the world of CS2 Investing.
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