Valve has finally made an effort to turn CS:GO’s skin trading system around. The developer has extended its seven-day trade cooldown to the game’s items received in trades, which includes skins.
This means that players will have to wait seven days before the item they just received in a trade can be traded again or sold through the marketplace. This already applies to skins that are bought on the Steam Market, but until now trades between players have been exempt from the cooldown.
The lack of a cooldown allowed skin trading sites, legit or otherwise, to offer customers instant access to skins they bid on, win, or receive as part of trades. After eSports team Cloud9 won a major event a few months ago, the sniper rifle skin Dragon Lore sold on one such site for over $60,000.
Sites like this are prevalent because they allow players who own expensive or rare skins to cash out. These sites offer PayPal transfers, which are much more enticing compared to the Steam Wallet funds the players would receive by selling their items on the Steam Market.
The arrival of the cooldown isn’t likely to remove the need for these sites completely. However, it will deal a fairly critical blow to their business model, especially when it comes to erratic prices for some skins.
Valve’s goal is to reduce some of the negative unintended uses of trading in CS:GO. A blog post on the game’s forums addressed the addition of the cooldown and the impact it will have on third-party sites.
“Unfortunately, some of these third party services have become a vector for fraud or scams,” it said. “Unlike players, these services rely on the ability to trade each item very frequently. In contrast, a given item moves between actual players no more than once a week in the vast majority of cases. We want to make sure that Steam item trading is a useful feature that continues to provide customers with the freedom to give and receive items as they wish.”
Valve went on to say it will continue to evaluate trading policies as time goes on and encourages community feedback, but this change has not gone over well with a portion of CS:GO’s player base. Many YouTubers and community traders whose businesses depends on the immediacy of trading have deemed it the end of skin trading for the game.
Some players even started a petition, which has already gathered over 118,000 signatures, asking Valve to reverse its decision. Only time will tell how the game’s skin trading economy will be affected by this change.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is now available for the PC, Xbox One, and PlayStation 3.
