On October 22, 2025, Valve shipped a Counter-Strike 2 patch that let players trade five Covert skins for a knife or a pair of gloves. Until then, the game’s rarest items came almost entirely out of cases at odds of about 0.26%. The market’s reaction was instant: as we reported at the time, the update wiped almost $2 billion off the CS2 skin market within a week.
The headlines moved on, but the prices kept going. A year later, the cheapest gloves and knives in the game are trading at the lowest monthly prices in their Steam history, which goes back to 2018.
The Cheapest Gloves Lost Two-Thirds of Their Value
Take the bottom of the glove market. On October 21, 2025, the day before the patch, a Field-Tested pair of Driver Gloves | Racing Green sold for about $107 on the Steam Market. As of October 22, 2026, Steam buyers pay around $34 for the same pair, 68% less.
Off Steam it’s cheaper still. At the time of writing, Racing Green is one of the cheapest pairs of gloves you can buy in CS2, at about $26 in Field-Tested.
Source: Skins Wiki
To be fair to last year’s number, $107 was a short-lived high. The pair had climbed 43% in the week before the update. Measured from the first week of October 2025, before that run-up, it’s still down about 55%.
Two Drops, Not One
The first drop is the one everyone remembers. On October 23, the median Steam sale for the Field-Tested Racing Green came in 44% below the price two days earlier, and the pair changed hands 480 times in a single day. On October 21, it had sold 25 times.
Then the price barely moved for half a year. From November through April, the monthly median stayed between 41% and 47% under the pre-update level, close enough to a flat line that it looked like the market had found its floor.
It hadn’t. Since May, the slide has picked up again, and the April-to-October drop alone is about 38%. The pair’s old record low, a monthly median set in December 2022, was broken in August, and every month since has gone under it.
Knives Followed the Same Curve
Knives took a smaller first hit and then followed the gloves down. The Navaja Knife | Safari Mesh, one of the cheapest knives in the game, sold for around $100 on Steam in Field-Tested during the first three weeks of October 2025. Right after the patch it lost about 30%, and from December to April it held 35-37% below its old price.
Since April it has dropped another 30%. It now sells for about $44 on Steam, 56% under last October, and like the gloves, its October median is the lowest monthly figure Steam has recorded for it since 2018.
If you bought a cheap knife as a “safe” first knife in 2025, that’s the part that stings. The low-tier knives and gloves were never the speculative items. They were the ones players bought to finally have something gold in their loadout, and they’re the ones that keep sliding.
The Contract Math Keeps Pulling Prices Down
The reason sits in the trade-up itself. Every contract destroys five Coverts and creates one brand-new knife or pair of gloves from the collection of one of those skins. Before October 2025, that supply only grew as fast as people opened cases. Now anyone holding five Coverts can mint a gold item, and the count never stops climbing.
The Coverts moved the other way. The MP7 | Bloodsport, one of two Coverts in the Clutch Case, which is where Racing Green comes from, went from about $2 to about $38 in Field-Tested overnight, with more than 24,000 Steam sales on October 23 alone. That price has eroded too: down 32% from April to October.
That leaves the contract upside down at the cheap end. In October, a single Field-Tested MP7 | Bloodsport has sold for slightly more on Steam than the Field-Tested Racing Green gloves it can be traded into. A player who feeds five of them into a contract is betting on one of the expensive Clutch pairs. Land the cheap one and you’re selling it for less than any of the five skins you put in, which adds another Racing Green to a market that already has plenty.
Gloves also picked up new competition of their own. In March, Valve added 22 new pairs with the Dead Hand collection, dropped through the Arms Dealer terminal, so there are more ways than ever to get gloves on your hands.
The slide is slow, but the gloves haven’t had a single up month since December. As of October 22, this month is on track to be the cheapest month on record for both Racing Green and the Safari Mesh Navaja. If you’re waiting to buy your first pair of gloves, the Steam chart says you’re not late. If you’re holding a pair from before the update, it hasn’t shown a floor yet.
