Initial Counter-Strike:Global Offensive release contained no weapon skins. However, after a couple of updates, Valve decided to introduce various new skins for each and every weapon. To be more precise, skins were added on 14.8.2013., in “The Arms Deal Update”. As you can imagine, this was a big boom in the CS:GO community, as people could trade skins between them, or even sell them for Steam money, or even sell them on external trading sites, which were created in order to let people withdraw real money.
BASIC INFORMATION ABOUT SKINS
Skins can appear in three different variations: Stat-trak, souvenir, and regular skins. One thing to be careful in this department is that skin cannot be a souvenir and a stat-trak. Souvenir skins can only be acquired by opening souvenir drops, which drop from the Major matches, or by purchasing them for crazy amounts of money. One more thing about souvenir weapons, every souvenir weapon will have a gold sticker of an MVP of the round it was dropped in. Stat-trak weapons are skinned weapons which will keep track of your kills, every single kill will be tracked on that particular weapon. However, regular skins are easy to understand, they are regular skins, with nothing special attached to them, they are here only for the looks.
WEAR
There is another variable when it comes to skins in CS:GO. Those are wear values. All the weapons come with one.
- Factory New
Minimal Wear
Field-Tested
Well-Worn
Battle-scarred
As you can probably understand, having a Factory New skin is probably the best and most profitable grade of skin you can acquire. These type of skins look really nice and clean. Minimal wear and Field-tested are also looking decent enough for most of the people. However, the last two types of wear look very used, scratched and overall ugly.
SKIN MARKETS
As CS:GO was becoming more popular, so were the skins. Especially in the last couple of years, the skin industry was blooming, especially in the gambling and trading section. Sites like opskins.com, bitskins.com and similar trading posts were stocked with numerous expensive and less expensive skins, as people could actually sell them for real money, with only a small fee.
Alongside gambling and selling/buying skins, sites like skinsjar.com appeared. They were set up as trading platforms, but you were trading with the site, to be more precise, their bot. You were able to exchange skins that bored you and acquire a new one, with a fee included in the trade.
Skin industry is going to even deeper depths. Trades and collectors started to appear. Some people were able to trade up their 1$ skin to a 100$ knife, just by trading. There are numerous videos evidence about it. Furthermore, a lot of rich people decided to create a special edition of their CS:GO inventories. For instance, there are numerous collector groups on Steam, where only people who have a total inventory value over $25.000 are invited. There are also people who are willing to pay an enormous amount of money just for one special skin. Youtuber called Sparkles unboxed a souvenir AWP Dragon Lore, and sold it to a Chinese collector for a whopping $20.000.
EASIEST WAY TO GET FREE SKINS
A lot of younger CS:GO players can not afford the best looking or the most expensive skins in the game. However, there are a couple of solutions for those type of players. Websites like idle-empire.com and free.gg are some of the most popular ones. You can win points on these sites by watching different videos, doing surveys or even joining random servers and being idle on them.
There are also other ways to earn free Counter-Strike:Global Offensive skins. Let’s take hellcase.com as an example. If you decide to put advertise them by putting their site in your steam username, you will be awarded a daily free spin on their site. You can win money or a free opening of a case on their site, where you will definitely win a fully withdrawable skin, no questions asked.
BEST AND THE MOST POPULAR CS:GO SKINS
At the moment, there is a crazy amount of different skins offered by Valve. Not only that, they are releasing new ones in each of new cases, which are added on a regular basis. In this article, I will go over 2 most popular skins for most used weapons in the game.