This is going to be a different post compared to most other topics here in the Economics sections. If this doesn't belong here, feel free to remove it. I am talking about the economy of virtual skins/items for the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (CS:GO). I don't know if there's any interest about it here but imo it's nevertheless an interesting topic, especially its investment potential.
For those of you who don't know, CS:GO is a first-person shooter by Valve where you can customize your looks (weapons, gloves etc.) with different virtual items/skins. These are both tradeable between two players and can be sold on the Steam community market. It basically works like this: By playing the game you get a weapon case from time to time. These can be opened by spending money to gamble for a weapon skin. Stickers (and capsules, which contain stickers) however are directly purchased ingame and can then be applied to a weapon skin.
While the weapon skins itself aren't that interesting investment-wise, stickers, cases and (some) capsules definitely are. The reason for this is that stickers, cases and capsules get removed from circulation when opened or applied. Let me give a good example that shows that: Back in 2014 Valve introduced 2 sticker capsules for a limited time to celebrate the CS:GO tournament in Katowice. These were sold for around $ 0,85 ingame (don't know the exact numbers but I think it was 0,75 €) and are now worth $1800 - $2500. Some of the stickers from that capsules are now worth $10.000+! (According to this site:
https://www.dexerto.com/csgo/top-20-most-expensive-csgo-stickers-in-history-1361385 There are hardly any up for sale). These are numbers usually only seen in crypto (and only very rarely!)
While this huge success of the Katowice 2014 capsules/stickers is mostly because the CS:GO playerbase was low back then and so the number of sold capsules was relatively low, the following tournaments with their individual stickers also would've been a decent investment. And I can imagine the stickers of the upcoming tournament in Rio to be also in high demand in a few years, depending on their looks and how many get sold during the time they are available. The profit margin however will be much lower.
Looking at cases, Valve releases a new one from time to time. This causes older cases to drop less frequently, eventually causing the supply to decrease when the number of opened cases exceeds the number of droped ones. So the prices for new cases usually drop to $0,03 - $0,05 on the Steam community market after their release but can go up $20+ when they are a rare drop (
https://steamcommunity.com/market/listings/730/Operation%20Bravo%20Case).
The huge downside with this kind of investment is that you have to rely on the success of the game (CS:GO) and to rely on Valve not making some weird changes to the whole ecosystem. You also have to keep in mind that the prices shown on the Steam community market are not what you'll get when you actually want to cash-out. To get your money out of the Valve/Steam ecosystem you have to use third-party-sites. Prices on these cash-out sites are usually 20-30% lower that on the community market.
I think the examples I have given show pretty good that there is (there were?) good investment opportunities in the CS:GO economy. The reason I made this post is that it seems like there is currently a real hype going around with a lot of items being sold right now, Youtubers making investment videos etc. (Kinda reminds me of crypto 2017) So I was wondering what your thoughts are. Is it something completly new for you or do you also hold some CS:GO items already? Even though I play the game occasionally, I just recently realized the immense value these virtual items hold.
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