Video Game Skin Analysis – CS:GO

This is my second article on video game skin analysis (the first was on Rust) using data collected using Python via Steam’s API on the Community Marketplace.

TL;DR: Read the headings and bold text, look at pictures

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At the top I have to admit I am out of my element here. Not only am I a noob at CS:GO the game (less than 100 hours, many more on Source though!) but I know next to nothing about the CS:GO skin market. So if you have an interesting question you want answered please leave a comment.

Introduction to Counter Strike: Global Offensive

Counter Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO) is the most recent iteration of the 20 year old Counter Strike franchise of first-person shooter games. CS:GO is hyper competitive with tournaments generating roughly $80M for players with lightening fast reflexes coupled to deadly hand-eye coordination. Competitively, the game is played with two teams of five players each over a number of rounds. Rounds can be won by either completely objectives (e.g. terrorist team planting a bomb, counter terrorists rescuing hostages) or eliminating every player on the opposing team. Despite being 7 years old CS:GO still has a large community of dedicated players; roughly half a million people play every day.

And, as it is very pertinent to this post, you have to know that knives are a very big deal in CS:GO. Yes there are a few dozen guns to kill the enemy with, but every player also has a knife. Bringing a knife to a gun fight is no easy feat, but if you do get a kill with a knife you get all the honor and prestige that comes with that level of badassery. Also, if a player has a knife equipt (instead of a gun), their character will run a little faster. Thus the knife is often out on screen and skins for it are highly desirable and thus expensive.

Introduction to the CS:GO skin market

I assume if you’re reading this you know what skins are. But in case you don’t, skins are simply alternative designs to the way weapons or items look in game. They don’t make a gun better in anyway, they only change the way they look. Now, the CS:GO skin market works very differently than the Rust skin market from my last post. In Rust you can buy skins from a store ran by the game’s development company then buy and sell them on the Steam Market to other players. CS:GO uses a crate system and a random “drop” system to get skins to players. Whenever you finish a game in CS:GO you have a small, random chance to get a random skin for free. However, rather than getting a skin at the end of a game you may instead get a crate (or nothing at all). There are many different crates “active” at a time that players may get. Crates contain a select group of skins and opening a crate grants you one of those skins. However, you have to open the crates with special keys. Keys can be purchased through the game for $2.50 USD. Additionally, if you have 10 skins of a lower tier you can trade them up for one skin of a tier higher.

Lastly, and where all this data comes from, is the Steam Community Market. Seeing how every way to get skins within the game is random (drops or crates), the only place to go to get a skin you really want is the Community Market. The Community Market is where players can buy and sell skins to each other using real life money. Rather than hoping to one day get the skin you want in a crate spending untold amount of money on keys, you could just go buy it from someone who is selling it on the Market. Due to the random nature of item generation, some items are extremely rare and highly desirable. This scarcity can make demand skyrocket and prices go to absurd values. My data set has 146 skins that sold for over $1,000 NZD in their market histories. About a 1/4 of skins have moved in price more than $100. However, analysis here is quite different to analysis in Rust where you could buy items from a store then flip them on the market. Rather, analysis for CS:GO is going to focus more on long term trends. Let’s dive in and see if we can make better decisions about skins to invest in and make money in the market.

Quick data caveats

I only have data for 7,795 items (skins plus crates, keys, stickers, etc) of which 5,117 are skins for CS:GO weapons and gloves. I know this is not all of them. But some items are so rare there aren’t always listings. If there wasn’t a listing at the time I made a request to the Market I missed it. However, I still have a pretty decent sample to get a picture of the broader market.

All prices are in New Zealand Dollars. You can roughly convert $1.00 NZD to $1.50 USD if you have to but really it’s the trends that are important. These data are from the median price a skin sold for and the volume (number of sales) for every day the skin was on the market, starting from April 26th 2013 until May 1st, 2019 when I collected all of this data. I have NOT compensated for the share of the price taken by Steam for their 15% fee. Thus, all reported values here are 15% higher than when they get to your wallet as a seller. Since the buyer covers the fee, the prices accurately represent the prices paid from the buyer side.

Unlike Rust where skin names could literally be anything (including in Russian), the item the skin is for is in the name of every skin. This made analyzing this data 1,000x easier. Thank you Valve.

CS:GO item skin analysis

Data overview

At the start I am only going to analyze data for item skins (guns, knives, and gloves). I will split the data for stickers, cases, and keys into another section to keep the content of the data consistent.

Metric	avg ± sd
Market Price ($)	$79.14 ± 169.30
Initial Change ($)	-$6.66 ± 89.85
Max price (day)	315.75 ± 518.03
Appreciation ($)	-$15.54 ± 97.15
Swing ($)	$157.13 ± 282.25
Wear (level)	2.94 ± 1.38
StatTrack (%)	33% ± 47%

All reported as average ± SD. Store Price - Average original price on the store. Market Price - Average skin price on the market. Initial Change - Average item price change from day 1 to day 2 on the Market. Max price - Average time on the market for a skin to hit it's maximum price. Appreciation - Average change in price from day 1 to May 1st 2019. Swing - Average difference between maximum price to minimum price. Wear - wear level of an item, 1 being factory new and 5 being battle-scared. StatTrack - % of items with StatTrack on them.

Oh boy, this is gonna be hard. Above you can get a general picture of the market for CS:GO skins. Some of these numbers are incredible. The average market price of a skin is $79.14! For pretty pixels! But why I think analyzing this data will be hard is the spread of it, as indicated by the very large standard deviations. While mathematically not the nicest data to work with, this does make sense in the context of the CS:GO market. There are some skins worth a few pennies with some skins worth thousands of dollars. Furthermore, the rarest and most expensive items are so rarely traded that accurately measuring their value is impossible. All this just means we need to be careful with the analysis we do and cautious about conclusions we make with the data as measuring averages will not be accurate.

The most and least skinned items

1. p250 – 177 skins
2. AUG – 167
3. AK-47 – 161
4. M4A4 – 148
5. MAC-10 – 146
…
53. Specialist gloves – 23
54. Moto gloves – 23
55. Sports gloves – 20
56. Hydra gloves – 14
57. Bloodhound gloves – 12

Glove skins are relatively new, added in November 2016, which helps to explain their lack of skins. Some of the most popular guns, the M4A4 and AK-47 top the skin frequency charts, however, there’s a few other guns in there I didn’t really expect. Do people actually use MAC-10’s??

Do CS:GO skins appreciate in price?

No. Sorry to burst your bubble but the vast majority of skins are losing value over time. To analyze this I took the average price of an item on its first 10 days of trading and the final 10 days of trading leading up to May 1st, 2019. Overall, it is clear most skins are losing value over time. HOWEVER, this is a big caveat here. Very expensive CS:GO skins can be very thinly traded, with many rare skins having trading volumes of less than 1 per day. Thus, many of these items are missed in this analysis since there is no to limited sales data for these time periods.

Since items are so thinly traded this appreciation metric may not be very satisfying. Let’s try to do better. Instead, for every skin I calculated the slope of a linear regression on its average sale price over time. Basically, if prices go up over time the slope will be positive and if they go down over time they will be negative. Unfortunately, for all you skin buy-and-holders, the slope analysis confirms are above appreciation (or really, depreciation) analysis: The average slope is negative. However, as I warned, these data are so spread out and have very large tails. But even still, the median slope is a whooping -0.0003. At best, you can expect to retain the value of a skin over time, losing a penny or so every month.

WHEN can we make money with CS:GO skins?

If you can’t buy and hold for the long term, when can you make money with skins? For a start, be the first! As been below, the vast majority of skins have their maximum price on the very first day they are on the Steam Community Market. Again, there is a massive tail here (cut off) but over half (53%) of skins have their max price on the first 10 days they are traded and 60% within the first 60 days. Thus, if you get a skin from a new crate, it’s a good idea to sell it immediately.

And the worst time to sell / best time to buy? Answering this question is much harder. Unlike when skins tend to have their maximum price, minimum price distribution is much broader (note x-axis). Still, earlier is better, again with 53% of skins having their minimum price within their first 10 days on the market. These data may indicate trading skins is most profitable when they are brand new.

Since I am by no means a CS:GO expert, I will just leave this graph here for anyone to interpret. It is the time between a skins max price and its minimum price. There are some odd peaks in here (remember, everything is from April 26th 2013 until May 1st, 2019) so if you know what caused them please leave a comment! Either way, these data taking the difference of the maximum price day minus the minimum price day further confirms that, on average, skins depreciate over time (if they appreciated, we’d expect more positive values).

Appreciation update! July 27, 2019

So after hitting “Post” and sending this off to Reddit I had a shower thought, “Of course skins aren’t appreciating over time, all their maximum prices are on day 1!”. CS:GO skins have quite a different market to Rust skins and my cookie cutter analysis did transfer well. See, in Rust, skins are first purchased for a limited time from a store. Afterwards, skins are no longer sold on the store and are only available from other players on the Steam market. This store mechanic is key, it provides a fixed base price for all skins. A skin that went for $2 on the store will probably not go for $20 on the market the day after it is no longer available in the store. However, after a year or two the skin may appreciate to $20. Now, CS:GO skins, seeing how the only way to get them is randomly from crates, there is no fixed, anchor price. This makes price discovery of a skin very difficult. Furthermore, this price discovery is confounded by the initial ultra-scarcity when new skins come out; there may only be a handful of a skin the first few days its on the market. However, as more crates drop and more players get the skin, supply increases. So, along with many Redditors who were adamant skins appreciated over time, I have re-analyzed the data. These data are limited to skins with an average price of at least $5 and had to be skins for either knives or guns. The below graph is using the prices from the first 10 days of trading and the most recent 10 days (same as the one above but now limited to guns/knives and avg price > $5). Results are still the same here; skins on average depreciate.

Ignoring the first 10 days of trading

What I did here was ignore the first 10 days of trading and then take an average over the next 10 days, i.e. the average price from trading days 11 to 20. Now, skins are still depreciating if we ignore the first 10 days of chaotic price discovery, but price changes are significantly better than just taking the first 10 days as was done above, by approx $10 (p < 0.01).

Ignoring the first 30 days of trading

I’m sure you got it now, ignore first 30 days, take average of days 31 to 40. Now we might actually be getting somewhere with an average greater than $0! Indeed item appreciation ignoring the first 30 days is much greater than from the first 10 days (p < 0.0001) and just better than ignoring the first 10 (p < 0.02).

Ignoring the first 90 days of trading

This is as far out as I cared to go, but this is getting impressive! On average gun and knife skins will appreciate by almost $14! Sure, plenty still depreciate, but even the median is $3. Ignoring the first 90 days results in greater appreciation than all the previous periods (all p’s < 0.001). These data may indicate that you could make a decent amount of money waiting between 30-90 days to buy skins then holding them and selling later.

How long does CS:GO skin price discovery take?

While we’re here reanalyzing data I thought this would be an interesting question to tackle. Now my method is by no means perfect but I think it gives us a least some idea of how long it takes for gun and knife skins to settle in price. I asked how many days does it take for a skin to go from its initial price to the first day it drops below its overall average price (across all trading days). As you can see below, a lot of skins are below their average price on day 0, or their first trading day. These 800 or so skins must appreciate strongly over time. However, overall, skins take about 60 days to settle down.

Trying to find when skins price settles isn’t easy. I came up with a second analysis which I check how many days does it take for the change in price day-to-day to fall within one standard deviation of the day-to-day price change. Essentially, when do the wild swings end? Now this may work on average but some skins have random massive spikes up or down in price which will throw this analysis off. Overall, we see that on average skin prices become more stable after about 16 days.

How much do CS:GO skin prices fluctuate?

So we showed above WHEN to trade, but how much do they change over time? In order to calculate the swing in price of skins I took the difference in the maximum price of an item and the minimum price of an item. Now, we have to keep in mind here this is the Steam Community Market and we cannot short skins. And, as I’ve shown below, most skins tend to depreciate. This means that a skins max profit was likely in the past and it’s minimum price is in the future. Thus, the swing is likely not a good indicator of the max profit you could make and more a measure of how much items fall over time.
The average swing is pretty absurd and not very accurate. It’s largely driven be a small group of highly expensive items which can swing hundreds of dollars. To get a better idea of what most items are doing we can look at the median where a skin’s price will move about $36. Twenty-eight percent of skins will move less than $10 in their lifetimes while 55% will move less than $50 bucks. Thus, if a skin your holding moves more than $20 it’s a good idea to sell (though there are certainly greater riches with a few items).

What’s the best way to make money in CS:GO skins?

These data are all a little depressing and aren’t very useful to making money in the market. Really, all they tell us is to try to get lucky and be the first to get skins from crates. Lets take a different tact and look at the top items which have appreciated overtime and try to learn from them. To do this I parsed down the data to the top 50 skins by their appreciation. The top 50 skins to make money on tend to be quite old skins, on average four years old. StatTrack isn’t too important where just 34% of skins have it. However, wear is and the items should be factory new or minimal wear (2.1 average). They should be relatively scarce but not prohibitively so. On average, these good investments have trading volumes around 2 sales per day. Critically, you have about a 200 day window between the skins minimum price and maximum price where you’ll want to sell; don’t get greedy! Most of these skins are for gloves (26%) or knives (36%) with Assault Rifles coming in third at 22%. Specifically, if you get a nice skin for sports gloves, a karambit, or m9 bayonet, you may be able to retire a few years early.

And the worst way to make money in CS:GO skins?

So we look at the best 50 items to invest in, what about the worst? The items that lose the most money over time and break the bank. These poor investments tend to be newer, about 3 year old skins. They will more often have StatTrack (54%) and be of slightly higher quality (1.92) when compared to our winning skins. Trading volume is also higher, roughly double at 4 sales per day. These items tend to peak early, about 20 days into the market, then fall over the course of a year. Making things difficult, these loser skins tend to be for AR’s (48%) as well, mainly the M4A1 (16%) and AK (14%). Knives also make up a good proportion of losers at 30% mainly due to dagger or huntsman skins.

Specific item type analyses

Lets delve a little more into the specifics and try to see what types of guns, knifes, and gloves can make the most money.

What’s the best gun for CS:GO skins?

Please note the y-axis is logarithmic! Due to the massive spread of the prices of skins a log scale is more appropriate for visualizing the data. The type of gun you get a skin for has a significant impact on its worth (p < 0.0001). Below we can see skins for assault rifles are on average more expensive than all other guns (all p’s < 0.05). Snipers and pistols are just about tied. Machine Gun (MG) skins are not very desirable.

Does StatTrack™ matter when it comes to a gun’s skin price?

Yes it does. This graph looks a little silly due to the massive range but on average a gun with StatTrack™ will cost $16 more than one without (p < 0.0001).

What’s the best glove type for CS:GO skins?

I know this is a little disorienting but the names of gloves are so long that putting them over on the y-axis makes them much easier to read. Overall glove type does matter (p < 0.001) with sports gloves being what you’re hoping for when you open a crate.

What’s the best knife type for CS:GO skins?

CS:GO skin enthusiasts also have clear preferences for knife types. Mainly, talon knives and karambits are highly desired while all others tend to be just “meh”. Though a few hundred dollars of meh.

How much does a skin’s wear influence its price?

Keep in mind we’re back to a log scale and wear goes from 1 being factory new to 5 being battle-scarred. Wear does indeed have a strong effect on a skins price (p < 0.0001). However, comparing the different wear levels is interesting. Factory new and minimal wear are not significantly different from one another. However, they are significantly better than all other degrees of wear. Field-tested, well-worn, and battle-scared are all not different from one another. Factory new and minimal wear command about a $50 premium over the worse wears.

The PHOENIX Index Fund: An index to track CS:GO skin market

For my Rust skin analysis I developed a way to create an index of ALL the skin market activity over time just like an index fund for the stock market. If you’re interested in how I came up with this the details are in the Rust post. All you need to know if the price of the index reflects all of the CS:GO market activity while the volume reflect the number of trades.

The talented people over at Steam Community Market Manager have adopted my index fund for CS:GO and Rust. They keep their updated hourly. Go check it out! https://csgo.scmm.app/stats

As a CS:GO noob I’m not too sure what, or when, to look specifically but we can see some obvious interesting points here. If you want to look at this graph with the history of the CS:GO market you can use this timeline made by u/steamfrag in r/csgomarketforum. There is SO much information in the timeline it’s best to go through it on your own. First, we can see when the first crates were introduced in August 2013 where the price goes from less than $10 to above $30. Surprisingly, the price stays pretty damn stable over the next 5 years. The volume of trades tracks pretty well with the rise in popularity of CS:GO. 2014 was a year of massive growth for the game which peaked in mid 2015 with 800,000 players. Since then it has steadily declined to around 550,000. Interestingly, the dip in trade volume for mid 2018 tracks really well with a decline in players at this time which fell to around 420,000 players before picking back up at the end of 2018.

At the very end of July 2017 we can see a massive spike in trade volume which a modest boost in index value. However, I have no idea what caused this? The only note at this point is “Gold Autographs”. If anyone knows, please leave a comment.

Best days of the week to trade CS:GO skins

Those with keen eyes may have noticed the volume chart is jagged an saw-tooth like. This is due to trading occurring much more often on weekends than during the week. In the graph below, 0 is Monday, 1 is Tuesday, and so on until Sunday which is 6. The effects are pretty small but Saturday (5) tends to have the most trade volume.

The Rust skin market had a similar weekday/weekend trend in volume, and I imagine all skins markets do. However, in Rust, day of the week had no effect on the price of skins, only the volume of trades. I thought this would be the same for CS:GO but it is not! Day of the week does have a significant effect on the price of skins (p < 0.0001). Mainly, skin prices on Friday (4) and Saturday (5) are significantly greater than Monday (0) through Thursday (3). Thus, sell your skins on Friday or Saturday and buy them on week days.

PHOENIX Index Fund – Knife Sector

Sometimes stock market indexes will have sub-indexes that are more specific. For example, there is an index of only the technology stocks the S&P 500 index. I applied the same principle and made an index fund that only has price data from knives. Knives are significantly more expensive than the broader market (as you’d expect) and seem to be on a bull run since 2017. There tends to always be a spike in volume on Christmas with a corresponding spike in price. The massive July 2017 volume spike above is not seen in knives volume so whatever was being traded fervently was not knives.

Stickers!

As if having skins for your items wasn’t enough, CS:GO also has stickers that you can put on top of your skins! Some of the great people over at r/csgoMarketForum were pretty interested in stickers so I did my best to look into them for u/lrleo and u/fadingGeneral. As with the other indexes I took out all the items on the Market that had “Sticker” in their name. This first index includes sticker capsules as I’m trying to depict the entire sticker sector of the CS:GO market.

There are some wild peaks in volume here, I imagine when new stickers come out? Stickers also seemed to be way more popular earlier on but have never recovered to pre-2017 levels.

CS:GO sticker rarity

Stickers come with different rarities so I thought I would break out stickers (and only stickers, no capsules) by their rarity type to see the premium you can expect for different rarities.

Gold stickers, being the most rare, are the clear winner and go for approx $20 more than normal stickers. Holographic stickers seem weird, I think it may just be due to how few sales there are of them. Are they very rare? The demand for Holos seems to be the driver in the overall sticker market decline in mid 2016.

CS:GO sticker lifetime

Again, only based on my noob knowledge, it looks like new stickers come out every year for different teams and tournaments. So I parsed out stickers by year and did the same index fund price analysis.

Ummmm, not sure what is going on here with 2014 stickers? I think they may be really rare and thus thinly traded and in high demand? Hopefully someone in the comments can give me some insight here. So ignoring 2014 stickers…

Update July 27th, 2019: Reddit u/beach- was able to shed some light on the 2014 stickers. First, stickers from the Katowice 2014 tournament are highly prized (and priced) due to them being the first tournament stickers to ever come out. In addition, most people didn’t think to invest in stickers and rather than keeping them to sell later, used them and applied them to guns. This makes them very scarce. Finally, beach- reports players tend to think these early stickers are some of the best looking, further driving demand.

Okay that’s a lot more pleasing to look at. 2015 stickers are still a little odd and jagged, but it looks like they retained their value for quite awhile before fading out. 2016 stickers did not do this, peaking right when they came out and then dropping. 2017 had two sets of stickers, one for ELeague Major in January (first peak) and a PGL Kraków in July (second peak). This second set of stickers appears to have held onto their value for a good month before plummeting. 2018 is similar with Boston (Jan) and London (Sep).

Update July 2020: Simon Kalemab has brought to my attention the initial pricing of stickers. At the start of a tournament stickers are priced at $1.00. Towards the end they tend to go on sale and can be as low as $0.25. Thus, should a sticker appreciate later on, those who buy up a bunch at $0.25 can see massive returns.

CS:GO Cases and Keys index funds

And last but not least, what would CS:GO be without cases and their keys.

I had to change the y-axis here and cut off the first few weeks of trading. Prices were insane when crates first dropped, peaking around $25. I imagine all the spikes in price are when a new case is released. Cases had their highest demand in mid 2016 when the CS:GO player base was the largest. It looks like they’re trying to make a come back in 2019. Spectrum 2 (Sept 2017) and Prisma (March 2019) cases seemed to have been very popular drawing large spikes in the index price.

Keep in mind everything is in NZ dollars and keys go for $3.49. Sellers of keys must sell them for $4.00 to break even after Steam’s cut. Thus, anytime the price is above $4 there is arbitrage opportunities to be made. At least at present (July 2019). I think Steam must have had different currency exchange rates or keys cost more from the NZ store previously. I find it very hard to believe that for nearly all of 2017 arbitrage was possible. Arbitrage opportunities generally never last in markets due to supply and demand fluctuations. If you have any insight into this please leave a comment.

That’s all for now folks!

As I’ve said, I am a complete noob at CS:GO and its market so please be kind in your comments. If you have any ideas after reading this post about things you want analyzed leave a comment or email me and I’ll make a part 2.