Attention, possible Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) skin traders/investors. In case you didn't know, Valve has unleashed a huge update recently, which brought back the Retakes game mode and absolutely wrecked the skin market.

A recent CS2 update from Valve brought back the Retakes game mode, and in the patch notes, the developer sent shockwaves through the skin investor community.

The long and short of the situation is that Valve has made a change to the game's Trade Up feature. This change allows gamers to Trade Up five Covert (red) quality items for one "exceedingly rare and special item," so either gloves or a knife. The CS2 patch notes read:

• Extended functionality of the "Trade Up Contract" to allow exchanging 5 items of Covert quality as follows:
  • 5 StatTrak™ Covert items can be exchanged for one StatTrak™ Knife from a collection of one of the items provided
  • 5 regular Covert items can be exchanged for one regular Knife item or one regular Gloves item from a collection of one of the items provided

According to Price Empire, this caused the CS2 skins market cap to drop from roughly $6 billion to approximately $3.5 billion, and this week, it increased a bit again to about $4 billion. A bit of stabilization at $4 billion suggests that the CS2 skins market lost roughly $2 billion in value. At the current Dollar to Rand exchange rate, that's roughly R35 billion in value.

Some believe that the worst is behind us now, and some have the completely opposite point of view. CSFloat did provide fans with some interesting stats, indicating that at worst, the amount of Gloves and Knives could double.

There's a good chance the market will stabilise and the value could increase again. It all depends on investor confidence, which isn't very high right now due to Valve's sudden, unpredictable high-impact change.

Header image via Valve.