Overview

The Counter-Strike 2 Knife Market Crash, also known as the CS2 Knife Value Crash, CS2 Gloves Market Crash or Counter-Strike Skins Market Crash, refers to a late October 2025 Counter-Strike 2 (CS2) update pushed by Valve that allowed players to trade up "covert-rarity" items for rare knives or gloves, leading to a massive market crash in the video game's in-game items market, with many plummiting in value overnight. Before the update, knives were only obtainable through low-odds loot cases, crates or expensive trades, with community hype around particularly rare skins leading to their resale price ballooning to thousands of dollars.

The Valve update that changed the game's "knife-crafting" feature led to the Counter-Strike 2 item market capitalization dropping from $6 billion to around $4 billion within 24 hours. The price of high-end knives and gloves fell steeply, while the price of low-value, covert-rarity "red" items spiked after users realized that they could be used to "trade up" to a rare skin. The event inspired outrage and numerous memes online, with internet users joking about the idea of using in-game skins as an investment portfolio.

Background

Counter-Strike 2 skins had grown to be a massive secondary market nearly a decade after the in-game weapon and item skins were first introduced in CS:GO in 2013, with an April 2023 report in Ars Technica^[1] noting that an "ultra-rare CS:GO gun" sold "for over $400,000" on the CS:GO market clearinghouse SkinBid.

On October 22nd, 2025, Valve^[2] announced an update to the Counter-Strike 2 item market that allowed players to exchange Covert (red-tier) items for a knife or gloves from the same collection. This meant that players could trade items previously priced at $100 for knives previously priced at thousands of dollars or had a very low drop rate.

News about the update was posted on the subreddit^[3] /r/GlobalOffensive on October 22nd, where it gathered over 2,400 upvotes and 1,100 comments in a day.

Meanwhile, websites like Price Empire noted that the price of some Counter-Strike 2 items dropped from $14,000 to around $6,000 overnight, as seen in this graph for the in-game knife called the Karambit Doppler Ruby,^[4] and the overall market cap^[5] for items in CS2 had fallen from $6.3 billion to nearly $1.7 billion before rising again to around $4.3 billion as of October 24th, 2025.

Online Reactions

Reactions to the update quickly flooded social media platforms and other websites in late October 2025, with some claiming the value of items had gone up, while the community largely reacted negatively as prices for numerous items plummeted.

For example, users on 4chan's /v/ board^[6] discussed the Valve knife trade-up update on October 23rd, 2025, with one anonymous user posting a compilation of Steam posts and comments made by disgruntled Steam users and Counter-Strike 2 players.

That same day, X^[7] user @CS2News_EN tweeted a Two Guys on a Bus meme referencing the controversy that gathered over 29,000 likes in a day.

Also on October 23rd, 2025, X^[6] user @HotelDon tweeted, "Every 5 years or so someone in Valve's accounting department realizes they're one mistake away from accidentally becoming a bank so they do something really funny," in reaction to another X user writing, "i think valve and epic chungus gaben get a lot of weird undue neckbeard praise for everything they do but i gotta say changing the entire cs skin system and tanking a billion dollar fake economy for no reason overnight is really, really funny."

The post gathered over 27,000 likes in a day.

Later on October 23rd, X^[7] user @Liv_Agar tweeted a meme joking about a Counter-Strike 2 player saying, "I paid $5 for a $3000 Knife!!!," writing, "He thinks he didn’t just pay 5$ for a 5$ knife."

That day, X^[8] user @avoxio tweeted an image of a man hunched over a large pile of money, writing, "My future kids when they inherit my steam account with my shiny pixel gun collection," and following up with "It's all gone." The post gathered over 90,000 likes in a day.

Also on October 23rd, 2025, Redditor thatguywithbeers posted a Kazuma Kiryu Slams Table meme to the subreddit^[9] /r/whenthe that read, "The US Government watching as Valve does more to affect Russian morale than they could do in 70 years," gathering over 15,000 upvotes on a post captioned, "They don't play around with Counter Strike."

Several internet users also reposted clips of Counter-Strike 2 players losing thousands of dollars in value for knives or skins they were holding, including Redditor u/number384759, who shared a Twitch link to the subreddit^[10] /r/LivestreamFail on October 23rd alongside the caption, "Olofmeister checks if his inventory's worth (58k last week) changed after today's update."

Later on October 23rd, 2025, Redditor Unhappy-School-8026 posted a clip of Kick streamer Trainwrecks to the subreddit^[11] /r/LivestreamFail, writing, "Trainwrecks says his CS2 inventory is now worth 100x more after the new update."

Also on October 23rd, the X^[12] account @SkinomiCS2 posted a tweet saying that their sources had told them that some Chinese Counter Strike 2 players were ending their lives after facing massive losses in the game's skins market.

Search Interest

External References