Valve Upends the CS2 Item Marketplace with New “Trade up” Update

Valve upends the CS2 item marketplace with new “trade up” update

Once rare $14K knife now sells for $7K, some common guns jump from $10 to over $100.

CS2 item market loses nearly $2B in value overnight due to “trade up” update

Valve benefits from any panicked trading in the short term, with every Steam Marketplace sale carrying a 5 percent “Steam Transaction Fee” on top of a 10 percent “Counter-Strike 2 fee… that is determined and collected by the game publisher” (read: Valve). In the long term, though, making some of the rarest items in the game easier to obtain will likely depress overall spending among the whales that dominate the market. Wild CS2 update tonight. I…

CS2 market cap crashes 40% overnight after Valve update

Prices of rare digital collectibles linked to the popular game Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) crashed by up to 70% on Thursday after developers pushed a surprising update. Specifically, prices of some gloves and knives, two of game’s most expensive “skins” (in-game items), plummeted on secondary marketplaces when the game’s creator, Valve Corporation, decided to allow the exchange of five relatively inexpensive “Covert items” for ultra-rare knives. The …

Controversial CS2 Update Triggers Counter-Strike Skin Market Crash Wiping $2 Billion

New CS2 Knife trade up contract update crashes the billion-dollar skin market. Here is everything you should know.

Valve breaks the skins market with trade-up contracts for CS2 knives

The possibility to sell Counter-Strike skins for real-world cash is one of the pillars of the game’s impressive player count numbers and the general amount of money around it, including esports prize pools. With the update from October 23, 2025, Valve changes the industry rules and shakes up the market to a potentially critical point. Here are all the details. CS2 knives from trade-up contracts The official patch notes of this Counter-Strike 2 u…

Covert skins can now be traded up for knives in game

Retakes return to CS2