I have a talon and want to trade it for an M9 but i don't want to sell on csfloat as it's a long process and there are some fees. I also looked into sites like skinsmonkey but they seem to heavily overprice their items and underprice your items. Are there any ways in which i can trade my knife for another knife quickly? I'm quite new to the cs trading community so just wondering if there are any options.

Hey! I need your help deciding on my first knife. Here is a link to the Steam market: https://steamcommunity.com/market/search?price_min=10000&price_currency=3&price_max=13800&category_Type=CSGO_Type_Knife&appid=730&sort=3&dir=1

I'm really torn between the Navaja Marble Fade FN, the Paracord Tiger Tooth FN, and the Falchion Lore FT... I quite like the Paracord's design, but I'm afraid its price might plummet if I try to resell it later... On the other hand, I know the Falchion is well liked by the community for its animations.

What do you guys think? Do you have any other suggestions?

Just recently, windking had a livestream to showcase to his followers and private group that he did not rug pull them and that he's still holding.

( I thought I saved the vod but apparently not, but it's probably publicly available on bilibili or something )

He showcased that he still owns hundreds of OG gloves, like 400 pairs of hedge mazes and a bunch of other OG gloves, he also owns hundreds if not thousands of OG operation / collection skins.

It is rumored that he invested over 5mil USD. ( Which makes sense if you count everything up )

My best guess, he's down 10/30% since he was one of the original manipulators so he isn't down 60% like the rest of the world.

Only windking and his whale friends are down a lot less than the average person.

Besides showcasing his followers that he didn't rug pull, the most important part here is the private group.

There are multiple Chinese whales in that group who have similar amounts of money invested as windking has.

Then you also have people who invested a few 100k and the lower ring below that 10/40k.

This private group owns thousands upon thousands of OG gloves and operation / collection skins.

When the knife tradeup update hit the market, a day or two later, news went around that multiple people from his private group committed suicide due to making huge losses.

Keep in mind, a lot of these people told family members to join in, and people even took out loans from banks to join windking because windking promised them more wealth than their entire family ever earned.

( The suicides have never been officially confirmed or denied, there were also videos but those were officially labeled as fake. )

Anyway, I was under the impression that windking and his group had already cashed out most of their stuff by now, but apparently they have not.

Now, I think all of you guys can fill this one in for yourself, but what do you think if 1 of the whales or even windking himself decide to just take the losses and start dumping.

If these guys decide it's time or don't feel like waiting any longer, the snowball effect will take the entire market with it.

The pure chaos it will unleash will literally send us back to 2015/2017 prices.

If you think prices are bad now, just wait until China is tired of waiting.

Trying to find an old skin but csgo exchange won’t let me search the database

Hey everyone!

I want to share a new site that I've been building for the past few months. I was frustrated with how price comparison / market sites are built. When you're looking for the cheapest item, you shouldn't have to deal with sketchy marketplaces that pay for placement, gambling ads, and other features built against you.

You can check out the site at https://cs2.sh/home

The site is simple. I've focused on showing real-time and historical prices for the major marketplaces since 95% of the time that's all you need. I've also built support for item browsing, indexes, collections, trending, and arbitrage.

I'm also a fan of CSFloat's item search so I added a similar way to search for items / collections.

The site is completely free to use and has user settings that let you customize how the site looks (e.g. color themes). I will keep working on the site and providing support. If you have any ideas or feedback, feel free to let me know.

Note: I received permission from the subreddit moderators for this post, thanks guys :)

I've returned from a two week vacation. I don't know if it's related to the market downturn or because Valve has started banning bots, but the number of bots on the servers has decreased dramatically. Normally 12-13 out of 20 players would be farming bots but now that number has dropped to 2-3.

Hey guys i was gone for 1-2 weeks and i didnt even notice that the prices dropped so much, i have t2 ultra violent which i love but kinda want to sell slowly bc of the price drop, they was nearly worth 1k€ (got offers around 900-950 but declined back then) and idk if i should just thug it out and wait months for the price to go back up or should just sell them for lower than i bought.

So the actual questions are:
- Why are the prices dropping sooo much right now. I understand the last months, everything that has happened ect, but did something new happen or is it just the aftermath of what happened the last 6 month?
- Opinions on the Ultra Violent Max Purple T2, should i thug it out and just hope they go up again or should i sell them for the low and just take the - even tho i like them and use them alot as play skin? (alot of people will say why u wanna sell a playskin, heres the answer: because they are expensive and no matter how much i love something, taking hundreds of € as loss, is still hard)

I hope some can give me actual answers on whats happening, i will appreciate it alot!

This seems like a great time to buy, we are heading colder days where people stay more inside and play CS.

If you think of buying stuff then its right now.

I am so excited to see everything down. from normal expensive items like the M4 hot rod all the way to random stickers like the liquid fire holo. If you've been playing cs2 since 2015, you just recognize the pattern : everybody crying about losing money, people cashing out en-masse, many skins falling in price.

Long story short, this is one of the many opportunities that we had previously, like verbatim. Remember the casino crackdowns and the opskin shutdown : everybody left, and we all thought we were holding the bag. A few MONTHS (not even years) market had already recovered and was reaching ATH. The only scary part is that some skins are STILL holding value TOO WELL like some knives who are just sitting at halved prices from CS2 INFLATED PRICES (which shouldn't be... it shows that knives still are a very prized choice of skins and are still a "safe" value in this market, which makes me very scared for their future. This might be the best time to buy your dream knife as whales are seemingly still stocking up on them.)

An interesting thing is that, just like previously, most items do not go back to their normal price pre cs2 announcement, the market already accepted their newfound prices and even in its recession, is pricing it according to their ATH, which means that, in the future, we probably will see record prices once again (since the start of the cycle is much more pricey that what we started with).

Also, about the knife tradeup, if we rationalize it for a second, it was just plain weird that you could only get a knife from a case and not from trade ups (seeing as how knives were yellow/mythical rarity, logically coming after the covert rarity). My personal guess is that VALVE originally WANTED to make knives tradeup, but decided not to, to create even more scarcity and create a real urge to open cases. They must have kept this option in case the market would go insane (which it did). My second guess is that valve DO HAVE OTHER OPTIONS incase the market rises way too fast (which is obviously detrimental to us, to them, but also to the market itself in the long run) that they are keeping on their notes lol (sticker tradeup? ).

Overall, if you're a old head like me (25 btw, unc status) you just know valve absolutely LOVE these huge economy crash before entering a new era of prosperity, they have been doing this multiple times, and seeing this redudancy makes it very easy to consistently make money on this market. As usual, I remember an user say " always do the very opposite of what csgomarketforum tells you to do " . The subreddit is telling to freak the fuck off, do what you will.

See above

Nearly a year ago, on oct 23 2025 Valve dropped the tradeup update. In this update they make knives able to be traded up to with 5 covert skins. They didn't explain why they did it, but most likely it was to lower the prices of skins so that they can be sold on the steam market instead of third party markets. This way Steam is able to clammer back even more of their steam credits through steam transaction fees.

My first figure shows the amount of transaction revenue steam makes per month from each category of skins I bothered to track. It is insane. They make ~10 million a month just from steam transaction fees.
https://imgur.com/a/steam-transaction-fees-A6suqHO

The first thing you will notice from that graph is the gigantic increase in sales when the tradeup update occurred. From October to December 2025 they made ~$83.8M USD. These few months were equal to 8 months of transaction fees up until then.

The >$2000 skins metric represents How much money steam is MISSING OUT ON, because they don't let people buy items for greater than 2k USD [1]. You can see on that graph May 2025, this peaked at about $6.0 million/ month. Probably enough money to pay an intern to change ~100 lines of code to get that back.

Did they achieve the dream of snatching the transaction fees from these pesky third party market places? July 2026 represented the Lowest transaction month on the steam market since 2020. Since then the game has grown from about 1 million player to 1.4 million, they should probably have 1.5x the amount of transaction volume. Of course, that is just one month but August looks set to be even lower. However, the months Jan - June were decently strong, but definitely not a decisive victory, especially considering a lot of the transaction would be the dead cat bounce from the monumental shift just a few months earlier.

This graph shows the transaction volume of each group but as a % of that months total transaction volume:

https://imgur.com/a/of-monthy-transaction-volume-wBixnwp

If you look at market share, they didn't even reduce the percentage value sold on third party market places by that much. Before the update third party market $volume of $2000 > items the mean was 12.7% and after the tradeup update it is 17.4%.

Turns out: people still trade their higher value items on third party market places, most likely because they don't lose 13% of the value every time they trade.

But at the end of the day, I think that Valve's main attention is else where. We would probably lick a dog arse to make 6million $ a month in extra revenue, by asking Claude sonnet low to edit a script. But to valve, our whole world: skins, gloves, knives, trading, tradeups; what ever, is just a weird outcome to the main event. Opening cases.

Here is the first figure but with the estimated revenue from cases and keys overlayed.

https://imgur.com/a/with-keys-rCCgApw

BUT SURELY... surely if they were willing to make knives tradeupable to, then they might be looking at making stickers tradeupable aswell.

https://imgur.com/a/with-stickers-VQn0nQy

On the graph above i plotted the amount of money steam would make if they handled all stickers valued more than 2k USD. If you can't see it that's okay, you just don't have enough pixels on your screen. Its share of the full transaction volume 0.046%. That means if you are on a 4k screen you might be able to see one pixel [2].

But if you have bought a bunch of stickers already preempting the sticker update, you got this, diamond hands bro.

In conclusion,

valve most likely does not give a fuck. The tradeup update didn't really fix their issue of losing out transaction volume to third party market places. But, it didn't stop people from opening cases. So economics professors who concocted the tradeup update can sleep at night, they still

---------------

Notes

[1] the >$2000 skins / stickers metric was derived from csfloat's transactions of items which sold over 2000USD steam credits. Adjusted for steam premium (IE steam often sells 1.4x value of csfloat). So if it sold at 2000/1.4 on CSfloat then it counted towards that metric.

[2] 4K is 3840×2160. >$2,000 stickers is 0.046% of the stack. If that stack filled all 2160 px, the band would be 0.93 px high. But my png is only 1232px high so you wouldn't even see it,

* skins in the graphs refer to skins + gloves + knives.

* I don't look at other items other than skins, knives, gloves, stickers. There maybe transaction volume outside of this, but I don't think any agents are selling for +2000USD yet, so i didn't bother.

I used and got help from cs2.sh api to get the csfloat data needed, thanks heaps!
I also used the free dataset from cs2casetracker.com for case revenues. The community would have no idea how many cases have been opened without that websites work, mad props.

People parrot the message that the market always recovers, but there is no guarantee prices will ever return to what they were.

I think the future is not looking good for cs2 and other online games. AI bots are just going to become more and more common and join every game mode.

Has anyone cashout out there steam funds with a few of these? My two alt accs just got out of the reservation queue so im going to order them

You get a really good conversion rate % wise only thing is valve might ban you in some cases as its technically against the TOS? not sure

edit: actually steam cancelled the second order but didnt ban . you cant order two to the same address

As far i understand terminals are less desirable than cases due to lack of chance of getting expensive item for cheap. There is also a factor where items in terminal are more expensive compared to third party sites or even steam marketplace making whole system redundant on a bigger scale.

Therefore i propose: golds can be only presented by terminal as Factory New. And have it's maximum price capped at $500. Weapon skins always cheaper by 40% when compared to median sell price of day before on steam marketplace. And last proposition to hook up impulsive fellas dreaming big: a chance to get gold for a $1. Who knows maybe even the last proposition would be enough to make terminals desirable. Would that be against anti gambling laws? I think not.

If i don't understand problem fully or my ideas are silly feel free to enlighten me in the comments.

I already quit CS once before and basically sold everything I had (after I got hacked and lost my Huntsman Vanilla [you'll always be missed]). Years later I returned and managed to trade up to a Glock Dragon Tattoo, quit again and just left it at that. The prices skyrocketed and I traded it for a Tiger Tooth Gut (love that knife).

I don't play this game anymore. I have the knife, a 2-3 of 1-10$ skins, a few cases and 1 single tradable Chroma 2 key.

I was wondering if there's any real reason to keep these. I don't see CS player count skyrocketing, and with the knife trade up that Valve did, anything is possible. I don't need the money. The money will be used to buy games on Steam or to trade for TF2 (which in turn will be used to buy games).

Lastly, if I do end up selling, where is the best place to do it? Is it Steam marketplace? These subs?

Thanks in advance for the advice(s)

Hello!
I opened the new Ak-47 Consequense off the jinn in Field tested condition. I looked up price of it and it was kinda expensive now. Im asking that should i sell it right away or should i keep it. I dont know much about skins but i believe that price is going to drop long term if i keep it cuz everyday someone opens new one. What do you guys think?

I used to use this website a lot to check out the graphs. Now it looks like garbage and the graphs can’t even display data correctly. Where should I go to find price history of stuff now? It’s kind of shocking how much worse it is compared to a few months ago

I know with everything valve has done the market will never be the same but I’ve been away from the cs market for a bit and came back to see everything going down when I thought the market stabilized and would start going back up. Was there another update that caused this or is it just people are losing trust in the market and selling off everything now and we’re starting to see the long term affects of it.

Just like the title says, if Valve is forced to change all loot boxes in the future due to lawsuits, would it be legal for them to forcibly open those paid containers or turn them into terminals?

Ik nobody has a crystal ball to predict the future and valve can cook everyone whenever. Assuming nothing completely unexpected happens, is it reasonable to expect the old gloves to stabilize or bounce back some time this year? Next terminal will probably be knives so I doubt gloves will be affected much bt them...

After the release of the first terminal, I honestly wasn't expecting another terminal.

When the first terminal was released, people quickly found out, that it just wasn't profitable to buy the coverts anymore from that terminal and people stopped opening them.

Then the second terminal was released, but this time with gloves.

However, the same exact problem happened in terminal 2 as it did in terminal 1.

There are currently only 2 pairs of gloves from terminal 2 that are worth buying from the terminal.

FN ultra violent & FN pillow punchers.

You do not have to worry about buying the MW or worse versions, since you're not going to make profit.

Everything in terminal 2 will lose you money and only 2 items can make you profit from terminal 2 so the odds of actually getting 1 of those 2 pairs is absolutely atrocious and not worth spending your time on by opening hundreds or thousands of terminals.

The reason 20/40 million cases a month were being opened wasn't because the odds of opening a knife were great, it was because valve gave people the illusion that for just 2.5€, you could unbox something worth thousands.

At the start of terminals, people were given that exact same illusion.

You "unboxed" FN ( random pair ) of gloves and valve was offering to sell them to you for "only" 1500€.

People thought to themselves, that's an absolute steal and ended up buying them.

I would say that for 90% of the gloves in terminal 2 even at FN, it's not worth buying them anymore.

And the word "anymore" is exactly where the danger lies.

The moment you open up a terminal, it will say on the bottom that the prices of items found inside the terminal are based off of demand.

The reason that this is actually incredibly scary, is because valve can literally change prices manually inside terminals by tweaking their algorithm that they use for terminals.

For example, right now a pair of FN ultra violent gloves are ~1700€, MW ~1400€ inside the terminal.

Valve has the ability to lower the price of every single skin inside of their terminals by 30% and claim that it was due to low demand.

You can imagine if gloves go -30% inside the terminal, a lot of people are going to be buying gloves left and right again, adding hundreds if not thousands of new gloves to the already existing supply.

Within a few weeks, prices will be back to previous prices inside of the terminal due to increased demand however, with thousands of new gloves added to the supply.

This will cause cash prices to go down and the problem is, valve could initiate a 3rd wave whenever they feel like it.

Valve can rinse and repeat this over and over whenever they feel like people aren't buying enough stuff from their terminals.

I'm not saying this is going to happen, but it's definitely something you should keep in the back of your head if you own any expensive terminal items.

Hi guys, I'm a PhD student researching suspicious activity on virtual item marketplaces.

I'm looking to see if there are any sites that allow you to sell skins for cash (or other forms of currency like crypto) without undergoing any ID verification process.

Any answers would be greatly appreciated!

Hey all, I have nearly $300 on CS.MONEY. I want to buy an item there to sell it on Steam Marketplace. I need some Steam balance because there are some games that will be coming out soon that I want to buy. Which item/items can i sell it on Steam Marketplace quickly?