Headhsot!! - The CS2 Saga

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We are still unable to digest the value of Crypto.
Last week witnessed free fall of another market, which I didn't even know existed.

Thanks to Varun Mayya's video.

I had played PUBG/BGMI and was aware of how gamers go crazy for in-game items, such as weapon skins, clothes, and others.




Similarly, there's a famous game - Counter-Strike 2 owned by Valve (an American Video game developer and publisher).
Similarly, It has in-game skins.

But there's more, the skins can be traded on a marketplace (Steam).

The Market Capitalisation of that Marketplace is - $ 6 Bn, that is ~50,000 CR INR.

Digest it, a marketplace of in-game skins!!

(Which, most think of as a waste of money)


Who controls the value in a marketplace?
Basic - Demand and Supply!

Who controls Demand and Supply?

Market players - those are sellers and customers.
But policymakers - Govt./Fed/RBI intervene, influence.

That's what happened to the Steam Marketplace.

A tweak by the owners (Valve, policymakers of its closed economy) and..

The marketplace is down more than 50% within a span of hours.

That is more than $3Bn.


What was the tweak? (Source: Forbes)

There used to be 4 skin colours:
Common - grey and blue
Rare - Red
Rarest - Gold


Players could trade ten skins of the same colour to get one of the next higher colour, but this didn’t work for gold skins.


In the game, gold skins couldn’t be obtained by trading red skins.


Before the update, the only way to get a gold skin was by opening weapon cases that gave random skins — and the chances of getting a gold were extremely low.

Because of this, the rarest gold skins often sold for thousands of dollars on Steam’s marketplace.


Then came Valve’s controversial update, which changed everything. It allowed players to trade red skins for gold ones, completely shaking up the market.


Almost instantly, gold skin prices dropped sharply, while cheap red skins shot up in value. The marketplace quickly adjusted, leading to chaos — with players rushing to buy and sell.


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It is feared that the crash is going to deepen further, with huge disparities in prices with other marketplaces reaching new lows.

Isn't this quite similar to what happened with NFTs? 

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