CS:GO skins are extremely diverse. Some of them cost less than 10 cents while others can be worth more than a car. Expensive skins in CS:GO can determined by multiple factors and you will learn about all of them in this guide.
Skin Rarity
In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, some skins are a lot harder to find than others. This rarity is usually a combination of two things: case rarity and skin rarity class.
If a CS:GO case is rare, even if the skin you’re looking for a mere Mil-Spec, that skin will be very expensive because it’s still difficult to find.
If on top of the fact that the weapon case is rare, the skin itself is Exceedingly Rare, Covert, Classified, or even Restricted in some cases, the rarity factor increases exponentially and price will reflect this.
Case Price
Some CS:GO cases are easy to find and cost less than a dollar. Others are nearly 10 years old and extremely hard to find, so they can dozens or even hundreds of dollars.
If the price of a case is expensive, the skins inside of it will naturally be more expensive because they cost more to find. This has nothing to do with the design of the skin or its rarity. You can often see CS:GO skins that aren’t impressive at all but still cost $50 – $100 because obtaining them via the case-opening method can cost $500.
Float Value
For a lot of skins, this is one of the biggest factors in determining their value. There are five wear classes in total:
- Factory New
- Minimal Wear
- Field Tested
- Well Worn
- Battle Scarred
Factory New skins are vastly more expensive than Battle Scarred ones. If you want to own a skin that’s in perfect or near-perfect condition, you will need to pay more money for it because such skins are hard to find.
Whenever you open cases and try to find high-quality skins, those skins can usually be in one of the five wear conditions described above. So to find a rare skin that’s also Factory New is incredibly hard. Because the probability is further divided.
StatTrak
StatTrak skins are those that allow you to see how many kills you made with their associated weapon. These types of skins are in high demand for certain weapons, such as the AK-47, because people like to brag to their friends about how many opponents they’ve killed.
The price of a StatTrak skin is usually two or three times bigger than that of a standard one. But the odds of getting such a skin are 10 times lower!
Market Demand
Some skins are in high demand because they’ve been popularized by the game’s best players. When people like s1mple or ZywOo use a skin repeatedly in professional tournaments, that skin becomes fashionable and lots of people will want to have it. This naturally drives up its price.
Just take the example of the AWP Dragon Lore. Its price skyrocketed over the years because s1mple uses it all the time and he’s the number one player in CS:GO. The skin went from hundreds of dollars to thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars.
How to Obtain Expensive Skins
There are two main methods for obtaining expensive skins in CS:GO. The first is to open cases and the other is to buy them directly on Tradeit or the Steam Market. In most cases, buying a skin directly is a lot cheaper than trying to find it by opening hundreds of cases.
The case-opening method makes sense only if you expect to be very lucky and find what you want rather quickly. But even then, there’s no guarantee that you will get a Minimal Wear or Factory New skin. You might get a Battle Scarred one that’s not worth that much.
