A bug affecting the CS:GO Steam Community Market has seen prices for every item in the game skyrocket, with some skins, cases, and stickers doubling or even tripling in cost almost overnight.
If you wanted to sell a few CS:GO skins on the Steam Community Market, you might want to wait. A bug has seen prices skyrocket, but it could lead to a massive market crash in the coming days.
Players started reporting higher-than-usual prices on the Community Market early on March 30, specifically on the CS:GO marketplace. Since then, the issue has spread to other games, including Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2.
All items, including weapon skins, agent skins, cases, keys, and stickers, have seen their prices on the front-end go up. According to community speculation, the reason behind the community market price hike is a high load on market servers.
With more people using the market than ever, some listings are not appearing for a long time, or at all. As the cheaper items get snatched up, they don’t get replaced with the newly-listed items.
Although these server issues usually iron themselves out after a few minutes or so, the community market has been bugged for a number of hours as of publishing.
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If you list an item while the market servers are under stress, it will take a while to appear. However, your listing should still go through, and people with buy orders will be able to grab their desired items if the price is right.
The greatest fear out of all of this is a massive market crash though. The longer it goes on, the more artificially inflated the prices get. Once the new supply comes through, people desperate to get rid of items will have to put them up for a lower price than normal.
This has been seen before in TF2, when an in-game glitch caused mass hysteria. Tons of legendary items flooded the market, devaluing entire inventories by hundreds, if not thousands of dollars within 24 hours.
Valve are yet to comment on the issue, although it’s likely they are aware and working on a fix. They’ll be looking to avoid another market catastrophe, so getting a solution out ASAP will presumably be the number one priority.
The advice for players for now is to not list any items on the market, and if you need to buy anything immediately, submit a buy order. Else, just wait for it to drop back to normal.