Counter-Strike skins market loses $2bn of value overnight after knife Trade Up update

The Counter-Strike skins market has collapsed overnight from its record market cap of $6 bn (~4.5 bn) to $4.1 bn after Valve introduced the ability to Trade Up for knives.

Players can convert five Covert skins from a collection for a knife or gloves, depending on what is available in the original skins collection.

The CS skins market had soared in value recently, rising 12.95% in 90 days in late summer and setting a record market cap.

The landscape of that economy has changed forever with this most recent update.

Why did the CS2 update crash the market?

Previously, there were only two ways to get knives or gloves: Buy them from markets or open them in a case. The odds of opening a knife or gloves in a case are 1 in 385.

Players would have to use a key to open every case, which costs $1.99/£1.85, earning one a week with Premier or buying cases separately.

As a result, the prices of knives and gloves were extremely high, with those highly valuable items representing a huge proportion of the skins market.

Now that those skins are more predictably and easily available, the market has crashed from a peak of $6,057,593,023.86 (£4,536,077,096.09) to $4,129,933,434, according to PriceEmpire.

Unpopular opinion, but thank god the CS market crashed

Mental the price of some of these things and there has been so much market manipulation recently. Counter Strike needed a bit of a reset or pull back

— Ne0kai (@Ne0Kai) October 23, 2025

Conversely, the value of low-value covert skins has exploded, with many being 10 times more valuable than yesterday.

Undesirable covert skins were seen as dead-ends, because they could not be Traded Up for something players wanted, which made them cheap in the market.

However, the update has now meant that many of them are now effectively worth 1/5th of a knife or gloves, with players gobbling up all the listed cheap skins quickly to secure new golds.

Millions of Counter-Strike players have woken up to see that their skins inventory has collapsed in value, potentially causing financial distress.

However, some have expressed gratitude for the change, as skins had become prohibitively expressive.

Additionally, the value of the largely unregulated skins market had led to several high-profile ‘pump and dump’ schemes, where bad actors were purposefully inflating certain skins’ value to increase their own wealth when they sold those items.

Whether the drop in skins value will cause behavioural change in the community is unclear, but what is clear is that skins market has vastly different dynamics from the dynamics it had just hours ago.

Retakes return to Counter-Strike in new update

Retakes have returned to Counter-Strike after a long absence. The mode was last available in CSGO, being a notable absentee of CS2’s launch and first year.

The mode, which sees four CTs attempt to retake the bombsite from three T-side players, is a community favourite and a valuable warm-up tool for in-game scenarios.

While the gamemode has been absent from CS2’s official modes, players have relied on third-party practice servers and software to fill the gap.

The update also sees slight changes to Inferno’s Balcony position to improve sightlines.

Retakes is back! Check out today's Blog Post, Re-Retakes: https://t.co/7PC61OrsOe

— CS2 (@CounterStrike) October 22, 2025

Counter-Strike 2 October 22 update in full:

[ GAMEPLAY ]

• Adding Retakes as official game mode supporting Defusal Group Alpha and Defusal Group Delta maps on official matchmaking servers.
• Fixed Molotov and Smoke interaction logic in cases when multiple smokes are active in the map.

[ MAPS ]

• Updated Golden to the latest version from Steam Community Workshop
• Updated Palacio to the latest version from Steam Community Workshop
• Updated Rooftop to the latest version from Steam Community Workshop

Inferno

• Adjustments to top of Quad and under Balcony to improve visibility.
• Various optimizations.

[ CONTRACTS ]

• Extended functionality of the “Trade Up Contract” to allow exchanging 5 items of Covert quality as follows:
  • 5 StatTrak™ Covert items can be exchanged for one StatTrak™ Knife from a collection of one of the items provided
  • 5 regular Covert items can be exchanged for one regular Knife item or one regular Gloves item from a collection of one of the items provided

[ MISC ]

• Performance optimizations when the game is in the main menu and item inspect UI
• Fixed inventory item icons sometimes rendering in blurry state or not rendering
• Fixed several server-only sound events to not start multiple times
• Stability improvements