Who Are Skin Traders? Research Report by ex corp.

When CS:GO was released in 2012, it did not receive the warmest welcome: the memories of CS:Source failing to replace CS 1.6 completely were still fresh in the community. To rally both casual and hardcore players around it, the game needed to have new killer features that added something fresh while not making the game unrecognisable. The Arms Deal update in August 2013 was the turning point which introduced weapon skins into the game and created one of the pillars of the game’s continued and sustainable success — skin trading.

To answer these questions, we conducted a detailed survey of a small group of cs.money’s users, considered semi- or professional traders by the analytics. We also interviewed a number of prominent traders within the community. You can read the complete research here.