So you want to buy CSGO Collectibles…
I’ve been into CSGO since ~2015/16 and have gained some knowledge in the space since I’ve always liked having cool skins, maybe this is helpful for some. This is more meant for people that don’t know much about the game rather than long term players.
Steam + Security
I won’t go into detail here but to get started you will need to get to know Steam if you haven’t before which is the platform all CSGO related things go through and make sure your account is properly secured via Steam Mobile Authenticator etc. I’m not good at explaining security stuff so you will have to figure it out yourself. Never give your API keys to any site you don’t trust.
Marketplaces
Buff163 (2.5% fee) is the main marketplace items are bought and sold through, the currency is CNY by default and you can only deposit/withdraw cash with AliPay, WeChatPay etc. but it is pretty easy to buy/sell buff balance by going through reputable Twitter traders (list below), once you’ve figured out the onboarding process it’s pretty straight forward especially since the mobile app is also very easy to use.
I can recommend this chrome extension for visually converting to different currencies (this only changes the visuals not the actual payments so don’t enter anything but CNY prices while buying or selling).
CSGOFloat (2% fee), DMarket (3% fee) and CsDeals (2% fee) are also decent alternatives but not close to as liquid and as good prices usually as on buff. They also accept Crypto deposits and withdraws with additional fees. You should usually never buy on the Steam Community Market (15% fee) unless it’s the cheapest option. Out of these CSGOFloat seems to be most liquid + user friendly option.
Skins VS Other In-game Investments
While skins have proven to be great investments over the past decade I personally view skins as something I mostly only buy to actually play with them instead of as an investment vehicle, in my mind it’s perfectly fine if they don’t appreciate in value and they’re generally pretty good at holding their value which is all I want. The best recipe to well performing skins is usually just getting those that look the best and are not easily obtainable through cases, also pros using them can help a lot as well. Other items such as Cases, Sticker Capsules, Stickers etc. are way easier to have a fundamental investment idea on in the general sense, most of these items have reached their maximum numbers dropped or are just slightly rising and will likely only decrease from here on out (unless Valve decides to change something about that of course which is always a risk).
Taking Cases as an example here, there is an active drop pool of cases that users receive weekly for playing the game meaning these are generally inflationary as long as there’s more being dropped than opened. This database shows which ones are currently dropping and if you check the price charts there’s a big difference between actively dropping and rare/discontinued. Below is a chart of the Glove Case where u can see the impact of being moved from active to rare drop pool, demand was/is also high because this case has a chance of opening the best gloves in the game.
So while I think it’s not as easy as it used to be by just buying cases when they reach the lowest price possible on the steam market ($0.03) because they don’t go that low anymore, there is still a lot of upside in cases that get moved to the rare drop pool after new cases release, especially ones like the Recoil Case which has great skins in it (I have not bought any of them yet). I don’t want to tell you exactly what to buy and what not to buy but hopefully this will give you a general idea and help you build your own framework of what could be a good case investment, you’re also obviously betting on the game still being around in years and still being successful in making people gamble by opening cases as well as hoping Valve doesn’t fuck up your investments with updates.
A similar but probably riskier investment opportunity are Pro Tournament Sticker Capsules which are sold in-game for $0.25 during/after the event and depending on multiple factors like looks, supply and hype they can go up a lot or do nothing for years. After Valve ends the sale of capsules there will never be more of them again. There have been good and bad examples in the past few years like 2020 RMR Capsules vs 2022 Antwerp Capsules:
Easier bets are usually good looking Stickers from these Capsules, one of my best investments have been Antwerp 2022 m0nesy and Cloud9 Stickers where m0nesy is just a hyped (and one of my favorites) young player and C9 a great looking sticker:
For these I usually buy them a few months after they dropped and price has fallen enough.
Other good investments can be old stickers that look good but have a way lower float such as Krakow 2017 Autographs, Katowice 2014 Holos, MLG Columbus 2016 Holos, etc. but these are harder to accumulate and sell so expect to hold them for a while.
Another area of the market one could focus on since the Chinese community is very big into skins is chinese culture / anime related things, some good examples here being the AWP | Oni Taiji and the Antwerp 2022 rox Holo which have gone up a lot in recent history. I don’t know enough though to properly evaluate these atm.
Resources
Here are some good resources that can be helpful while looking at CSGO things in general:
- CSGOFloat Skin Database great for searching specific items with stickers
- Case Tracker for unboxing numbers of cases
- CSGOStash to browse items
- cantry.dev for rare sticker analytics
- CSGO Case ROIs though I’m not sure about accuracy of prices here
Reputable traders I’ve bought skins/buff balance from with crypto:
https://twitter.com/Astrooobot
https://twitter.com/zipelCS
https://twitter.com/MitaoCatCS
Astrooo also told me he’s open to questions regarding buff balance or anything like that, so go ahead and send him hundreds of dms.
I want to end this off saying that I don’t want you to blindly buy anything I mentioned or blindly buy anything in general, in my opinion it’s more suited for people who genuinely enjoy the game and spend a lot of time in it. CSGO investing has been gaining more and more hype in recent years so don’t expect the same gains as for example a Breakout Case (15,000%+) had now. It’s also not meant for people looking for super efficient higher frequency markets, to even hold more than 1,000 items you need to have multiple storage units in-game which can be very tedious to manage, speaking as someone with over 25,000 items in their inventory.
Thanks for reading.
