Counter-Strike: Global Offensive has a good base to build on its popularity - it has grown on an acknowledged franchise with million fans worldwide. Beside tuning up the visual quality to get closer to modern-day standards and conjuring rehashes that would not change the gameplay in a drastic way, Valve had to come up with a feature that would make CSGO different than its previous incarnations. Weapon skins might have just done the job.
The hype is undeniable - the skins proved to be a great way for the community to take part in building the CSGO world, they are discussed far and wide (even having dedicated YouTube reviews) and the global market for skins has created its own economy, to a point where it was once used by black market parsers to launder money, which Valve fought strongly with severe regulations and trade limits.
Skins come in many different variants. They can be pasted with stickers, they come in different types of rarities and different wear levels, which all influence their price greatly. The focus of this article is to show how one can check skin wear on CSGO marketplaces and use it to consciously evaluate the skin’s price.
What is CSGO skin wear?
Skin wear is a statistic that is responsible for the actual visual quality of the skin. It is represented by a float value in a way that minimal float - closest to zero - means the purest skin look. The higher the float value (meaning the closer to 1.0), the more visual damage there is to the skin. You can read more about wear tiers in
Does skin wear worsen with time?
The word “wear” might suggest otherwise, but actually no, it doesn’t. It’s not a reality simulator, there’s no perma-death and displaying impermanence is not the focus point of this game. Wear level is an aesthetic feature that brings variety and more referable aesthetics to the various, colorful skins that could just look very out of place if only presented in mint condition. There are websites that offer a sort of “upgrade” of your skins, which would implement you could improve the wear of your item, but in the end, it’s just a gamble with what you have for a chance of getting something better, but the chance is not always in your favor. There is also no way to “repair” high float, it’s fixed to a given copy of a skin.
Summary
There’s more to skin wear and float than just simple black and white division for cheap and expensive, as it heavily depends on trends. To go about it, it’s good to know the exact float value except for the wear tier. We’ve shown the importance of checking wear on CSGO marketplaces or with other services for the ability to evaluate your item’s price properly. This knowledge and a little research into the market can help you get the best price for what you have.