Counter-Strike 2 – a game that is unique not only for its popularity, but also for the market for virtual items that has developed around it. In 2023, its performance reached a new level. Here are a few indicators that are interesting to look at to guess how the market will develop in 2024 or just to be impressed by the scale it has reached.
Cases and skins in 2023
According to Valve, the amount the company earned from opening cases exceeded a billion dollars. Players opened a total of 400 million cases, purchasing 360 thousand keys for this. The average cost of a case has increased by 178% over the past year. To appreciate the scale of these numbers, you can imagine that 12 cases were opened every second around the world.
However, there were actually three peaks throughout the year when cases were opened the most actively. The first of them – in early spring, when the first CS2 trailers were released and the upcoming update spurred interest in the game. The second peak came soon after when the Anubis Collection case was released. The third peak, which is quite logical, occurred in September, when CS2 became publicly available.
Profitability of cases in 2023
The container that was opened most often was Dreams and Nightmares, accounting for 13% of the total number of open cases. In absolute numbers, this is more than 50 million containers. Interestingly, Dreams and Nightmares Case cannot be called a profitable investment. Judging by the cost of dropped skins, players received three times less than they spent on purchasing it. Probably, they choose it not to resell items profitably, but to replenish their own inventory with original items. The second and third places in popularity were taken byFracture Case and Anubis Collection.
The average return on cases was 44%. This means that the total cost of the skins that players received by opening containers was more than half the amount spent and amounted to about $422 million. Other sources of obtaining skins, such as trade contracts, are not taken into account.
The biggest increase in price
The prices of skins in CS2 fluctuated quite a bit throughout the year. At the end of 2023 – At the beginning of 2024, some rare items even fell in price (for example, at the end of the year, the price of copies decreased M4A4 Howl), but there was one item that showed a unique increase of approximately three times.
This is a 2014 EMS One Katowice sticker capsule. Due to the small number on the market, they were already highly valued, and over the past year their value has risen from 11 thousand to about 30 thousand dollars. The number of such capsules on the market is limited, and many large investors in 2023 preferred them over skins.
