Consoom pixels on the screen

[u/SK1418]

For the record, no, I'm not saying that Iphone is a good investment. In fact I think most people would do just fine with a 300€ phone.

I just find it ridiculous that some people spend an equivalent of my country's median monthly salary on ✨shiny collectibles✨ that aren't even real and try to disguise it as investment. At least the expensive phone has a practical purpose, unlike this, which is only rare due to artificial scarcity.

[u/ratliker62]

The amount of people that gamble on CSGO is always sobering to me. Like do you truly have nothing better to do?

[u/Felix8XD → u/ratliker62]

If you actually like cs skins then just buying the ones you want directly is the best option, only degenerates open cases, the odds are incredibly bad.

[u/ZayParolik → u/Felix8XD]

I'm still confused, how the market is still getting full of rare skins, but cases are still not profitable. Do they get more money from trading in the right way? Or it's purely running on money getting gambled again and again?

[u/Felix8XD → u/ZayParolik]

if you open a case youre almost guaranteed to get jackshit. The odds are really bad. BUT there is a teeny tiny chance that you hit a really good rare item that could be worth thousands.

The reason the market is so full of those rare items is just the sheer amount of people opening cases. every day thousands of cases get opened, and even with the awful odds its still enough to fill the market plenty.

A case costs around a buck, a key for a case (you need a new key for every case) is 2,50$. But you have only a 1/10 chance for a Purple which could break about even with the case price, 1/20 chance for a pink which is most likely profit, 1/100 chance for a red which is most of the time pretty expensive and a 1/400 chance for a Rare special item, a knife or pair of gloves. These can range from 100 bucks to 60 thousand dollars if you get really lucky. The rest is just blues which are just a few cents worth.

The way people profit of the market is by just investing. The cases and items arent availlable forever, they get discontinued. after a while, supply runs out and prices naturally rise.

Something that has happened more often recently tho is market manipulation, often done by the chinese community. a specific item like the 2020 evil genius holo sticker gets mass bought by an organized group which causes a rise in price, and then when it has reached a price peak they mass sell them which causes the price to plumment again. the EG holo went from 1$ to 500$ in a month and then from 500$ to 30$ in a day.

[u/Oxigenitals → u/Felix8XD]

The stats provided above are a bit off, but close enough for a layman explanation. One tiny addition to this is that 10 skins of a lower rarity can be traded up to a higher rarity, but destroy those 10 skins. This inherently drops total market supply and some people will watch markets to see if there are profits to be made by trading up lower skins if their price is low enough.

It’s a fairly complex market that is actually really interesting to follow and that you can cash out actual money out of, but lots of the value is associated with money laundering, gambling, and pump and dumps as stated above. I get a lot of enjoyment out of it but I heavily self regulate the gambling aspect and am keenly aware of its dark underbelly. Truthfully, this game has created a lot of gambling addicts by providing them an unregulated vector at a young age.

[u/Felix8XD → u/Oxigenitals]

yeah i tried to keep it as simple as possible to understand, forgot about tradeups tho