The future of skin economy
The future of skin economy
Valve takes another step in their fight against gambling and shutting Opskins down. While it seems like a hard blow to the gaming community, there is a huge upside to it that people tend to miss.
We all love skins as they allow us to better express ourselves in game and nourish our unique identity. However, over the past few years an entire new economy has developed upon skins: marketplaces, trades, gambling, paying methods and what not. It grew so fast and heavily that numbers reported last year tell us that this market alone was evaluated at $5B. Unfortunately, gambling and trades constitute a major part of this market, and it was just recently that Valve has decided to go against these phenomenons. It started with a 7-day-trade-lock rule that has been added to any trade and now continues with shutting down the biggest skin marketplace out there — OPskins. For those of you who don’t know, Opskins allows anyone to buy and sell skins for IRL money and has actually opened up the door for this industry to explode.
While closing OPskins gates may seem like a hard blow to the community and threaten the future of some key games like CS:GO, it has a great side as well which not many people are talking about and is definitely worth examination.
From recently conducted research at Lootbear, we found interesting insight. While one may think that skins mostly used to trade and gamble, the vast majority of respondents still think that the purpose of skins is to have fun, play in game and foster your digital identity. I can’t agree with them more, it feels like the rise of this economy almost made us forget the basic reason why we love skins so much, or even (and I’m being a bit dramatic here) why we love gaming.
So yes, the fall of OPskins is going to change the industry. Prices will be effected (just noticed earlier today a FN Dlore for $800 :O ), a lot of 3rd party sites will become irrelevant or just lose their capacity to run their sites, trading may become less profitable and even content creators will see less interest in sponsored content. However, the positive angle must be that we will get back to a sane market. Focus will return to the game and the actual purpose of skins — to have fun.
“..the positive angle must be that we will get back to a sane market. Focus will return to the game and the actual purpose of skins — to have fun.”
I face a lot of people that are criticizing Valve and while there’s some truth in their claims, Valve has its right to follow their ideology and values. If gambling doesn’t seem to be a part of their plans, coming up with a bypass like Express Trade, recently released by Opskins, is obviously ignoring and disrespecting Valve’s intentions and raises questions regarding the relationship between the two companies. At the end of the day we’re all playing inside Valve’s backyard, or to put it more professionally, Valve’s ecosystem.
It’s time for a community driven inventory
As for us at LootBear, we believe that we have a very interesting role in the new form of the community. We publicly go against gambling and are looking into a social solution that can make skins accessible to anyone, sort of a community driven inventory. It’s the nature of our skin renting marketplace that targets only those who are interested in playing the game. Those who rent skins, obviously won’t trade or gamble them and can find in LootBear a wide variety of rare skins for just few bucks instead of spending thousands buying them. So a drop in market prices only serves our community and will decrease renting prices as well, which is great for everyone!
To sum up, the upside of recent changes done by Valve to skin economy is that we can finally focus again on the game and the joy of using skins in sane prices and fun environment.
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