Gaming has become an integral part of many young people’s everyday lives and routines. In fact, competitive video gaming and eSports are considered to be the absolute way of getting entertainment, interacting and socializing and of course, engaging for the younger generations.
Games like CS:GO are hitting all-time highs in terms of popularity and they are creating an entire gaming ecosystem of their own. And within this ecosystem, skins hold an extra special position. In the last few years we’ve seen the birth of skin betting and trading taking place in all the best CS:GO trading sites and this has only been the beginning. Analysts indicate that skin betting and skin trading will eventually become not only dominant in the gaming industry, but will also drive eSports betting industry growth overall.
Much of all the hype about CS:GO skins has been driven by the variability in the value of the different skins. This should not come as a surprise, given that just as in real life, different products have different prices and different values, in the gaming world, cosmetic goods are differently appreciated by players and bettors so they have different value as well.
There are a number of factors that affect the price of skins: the unmatched demand, the extremely low supply, the rarity of a skin as well as the origin of the skin are all aspects that increase the price for anyone interested in getting their hands on expensive skins.
This is quite natural, given that skins which can’t be found easily because everybody wants them, skins that are not available in large quantities in the market, skins that are extremely unique and rare or even skins that are discontinued as well as skins that have been used by professional players or that have some kind of unique story behind them, will definitely be far more pricey than the exact opposite skins.
The thing is that the more valuable and rare a skin is, the more the users are willing to pay or trade in order to obtain it. And just as people in their everyday lives want to get what they desire and then feel the satisfaction and pride of acquiring it, while showcasing it, gamers do the same exact thing. Only in the case of gamers, the object of desire has one very distinctive characteristic: it is digital (which means that it is not real and can’t be transferred in the physical world) but it has value like it is physical.
Many times, skins come with price premiums. The price premium however does not only stand for the collector’s value, but it stands for real monetary value as well.
We’ve seen skins being sold for thousands of dollars and this means that there are people who have in fact given such huge amounts for getting something that does not exist in the real world.
We’ve seen players betting CS:GO skins in betting sites or rust skins in rust gambling sites, with the hope of managing to get their hands on extremely rare or simply highly desired games’ cosmetics. In fact, skin trading and skin gambling have become very popular lately, as more and more gamers come not only to appreciate the hedonic value of these digital accessories, but also to appreciate the monetization of the aforementioned skins.
Now, there are many sports bettors who get involved in skin betting or skin trading, without even being involved in any way with competitive video gaming! They are only interested in skin betting, because they have realized its potential value!
It’s kind of a paradox, but this is how everything seems to be in the digital world. Just like cryptocurrencies, which are not tangible currencies (nor they are tangible assets), but they can get you rich in the physical world or just like the NFTs (Non-Fungible Tokens), which are digital identifiers of unique digital assets, which can be worth millions, the world of skins appears to be getting real dimensions in a virtual environment!
