Valve has caused CS2’s biggest skin market crash to date. The
CS2
update on October 22 introduced a new way for players to get knives or gloves, which consists of trading five Covered (Red) skins for a knife or glove via a trade-up contract.
The CS2 skins market cap has gone down 30.48% in the last 24 hours, according to Pricempire, a platform that monitors the skin market in real time.
For comparison, the CS2 skin market was valued at $5.940 billion on October 21, and now it is valued at $4.129 billion.

Well, RIP skin investor. Credit: © Pricempire
Though the CS2 skin market has crashed, this is a good time to sell any Covert items you have in your inventory, as there are a lot of people already buying them to get a knife or glove.
To cite one example, the FAMAS | Roll Cage cost around $3 before this update. The skin peaked at over $50 after the update went live.
That’s the key takeaway of the CS2 October 22 update, but you can find the full patch notes below. Valve also notably reintroduced the Retakes game mode.
CS2 update October 22 – Full patch notes

The community had been asking for Retakes for a long time. Credit: © Valve
Gameplay
- Adding Retakes as an official game mode supporting Defusal Group Alpha and Defusal Group Delta maps on official matchmaking servers.
- Fixed Molotov and Smoke interaction logic in cases when multiple smokes are active on the map.
- Updated Golden to the latest version from Steam Community Workshop.
- Updated Palacio to the latest version from Steam Community Workshop.
- Updated Rooftop to the latest version from Steam Community Workshop.
Inferno
- Adjustments to top of Quad and under Balcony to improve visibility.
- Various optimizations.
Contracts
- 5 StatTrak™ Covert items can be exchanged for one StatTrak™ Knife from a collection of one of the items provided.
- 5 regular Covert items can be exchanged for one regular Knife item or one regular Gloves item from a collection of one of the items provided.
Miscellaneous
- Performance optimizations when the game is in the main menu and item inspect UI.
- Fixed inventory item icons sometimes rendering in blurry state or not rendering.
- Fixed several server-only sound events to not start multiple times.
- Stability improvements.
Feature image credit: © Valve
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