If there is one game that has impacted competitive gaming and the eSports market the most, it is none other than Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, or simply CS:GO as it is more popularly known. CS:GO’s popularity has given rise to an entire generation of gamers who are passionate about the game.
Apart from fragging enemies, grinding for better ranks, and matching with your friends to dominate enemy teams together, CS:GO also has one more aspect to it that is unique to the game – its marketplace. The CS:GO marketplace is exactly what it sounds like – a place where you can buy and sell in-game commodities.
Someone who isn’t familiar with CS:GO might ask what these commodities are and the answer to that question is – skins. Weapon skins, to be more specific. The idea of buying skins was popularized in CS:GO much before other games like Fortnite and PUBG adopted it. According to wiki.cs.money, a rare CS:GO skin is the pride of many CS:GO players’ inventories.
There is no surprise to that because getting a rare CS:GO skin involves a lot of money and luck. In fact, some CS:GO skins are notorious for being insanely expensive. A M4A4 stattrak howl skin was recently sold for a whopping $130k in cash! In this article, we are going to find out exactly why these skins are so expensive, what factors influence their value and why some skins would always be expensive.
What are the chances of getting expensive skins?
Skins can’t be bought on their own, but rather come out from cases or crates. These skin crates can be bought from the marketplace along with their keys and they drop a skin with a random rarity (more on that later). Even the most basic skin crate, the prisma crate, costs about $2.5 to purchase and unlock. These have a very low chance of dropping super rare skins.
If you want to increase your chances of getting rare skins, you can consider buying more expensive crates that have better drop rates for rare skins. Skins in CS:GO are categorized by their rarity and are assigned a color depending on how common they are, much like as you see in other multiplayer games.
The most common skins are blue, followed by purple, pink, red, and finally, golden. Golden skins, or legendary skins as they are commonly referred to, are the rarest skins in CS:GO and have the lowest drop rates. These legendary skins are almost always knife skins and the chances of you getting one from the basic skin crate are about 0.25%.
If you put that down in numbers, it basically means that you even might have to go through 400 basic crates to finally get a legendary skin. Basically if worst comes down to worst, you might have to spend over a thousand dollars to get a legendary knife skin. This makes some skins super expensive than others because the chances of them dropping are so low.
Additional factors that influence a skin’s value
If you thought crate drop rates are the only thing that influences a skin’s value, you are mistaken. These weapon skins have factors of their own that influence their rarity even more. The primary factor is the skin condition. Weapon skins come in various conditions like battle scarred, well worn, field tested, minimal wear, and factory new.
Factory new skins, as their name suggests, look the cleanest and most pristine. That’s why they have much more value than other skin conditions. To put things into perspective, a Dragon Lore skin is expensive by itself but adds a factory new condition to the basket, and the value skyrockets instantaneously. A factory new Dragon Lore skin is considered to be one of the most expensive skins you can get from crates.
It is priced at a whopping $25,000 and has a 1 in 250,000 chance of dropping from a crate. Blown away? Hold on, because there is more. Apart from skin conditions, skins can also have stattrak. A stattrak basically holds a counter of how many kills you get on that weapon. The chances of getting a stattrak are tremendously low – about 0.0020%. Basically, for every 10 legendary knife skins you get, one of them can have stattrak.
Skins also have variants of their own. These variants differ from each other massively in aesthetics and color. Thus, they are also rarer than the normal variant of the skin, boosting a skin’s value much higher.
Why some CS:GO skins would always be expensive
You must be well familiar with all the factors that influence a CS:GO skin’s rarity and thus its value by now. Theoretically, a legendary skin from a basic crate that has factory new condition, stattrak, and is also a rare variant of the skin, would have the lowest drop rate in CS:GO and would also have a considerably tremendous value.
Imagine the Dragon Lore skin we mentioned before also came with stattrak and in a unique variant. The skin, without any modifications, already sits on the top with a hefty price tag of $25k, but adding stattrak and rare variants can easily boost its core value to triple figures.
By now, you might be wondering – earlier we said that a M4A4 skin was traded for over $150,000 and it only had stattrak and factory new condition. Then how come the rarest Dragon Lore would struggle to get triple figures?
The answer to that question is simple – stickers. Stickers are, well, stickers of the famous championship and team logos. The most expensive stickers are Katowice 2014 stickers and iBUYPOWER stickers since they are super rare and won’t be produced again. Each weapon skin allows a maximum of 4 stickers to be placed on it. That’s why the M4A4 had such a hefty price tag on it! It had 4 iBUYPOWER stickers covering it which boosted its value even further than it originally was.
Conclusion.
CS:GO skins are so expensive because of a number of reasons and these reasons should be kept in mind when figuring out a skin’s value. We hope this article proved informative for you and if it did, please consider following our website for regular updates as it will help us immensely.
