valve

RAM shortage hits Valve’s four-year-old Steam Deck, now available “intermittently”

gaming, ram shortage, steam deck, steamos, Tech, valve / DJ Henderson / February 17, 2026

Earlier this month, Valve announced it was delaying the release of its new Steam Machine desktop and Steam Frame VR headset due to memory and storage shortages that have been cascading across the PC industry since late 2025. But those shortages are also coming for products that have already launched.

Valve had added a note to its Steam Deck page noting that the device would be “out-of-stock intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages.” None of Valve’s three listed Steam Deck configurations are currently available to buy, nor are any of the certified refurbished Steam Deck configurations that Valve sometimes offers.

Valve hasn’t announced any price increases for the Deck, at least not yet—the 512GB OLED model is still listed at $549 and the 1TB version at $649. But the basic 256GB LCD model has been formally discontinued now that it has sold out, increasing the Deck’s de facto starting price from $399 to $549. Valve announced in December that it was ending production on the LCD version of the Deck and that it wouldn’t be restocked once it sold out.

The Steam Deck’s hardware is four years old this month, and faster hardware with better chips and higher-resolution screens have been released in the years since. But those Ryzen Z1 and Z2 chips aren’t always dramatically faster than the Deck’s semi-custom AMD chip; many of those handhelds are also considerably more expensive than the OLED Deck’s $549 starting price. When it’s in stock, the Deck still offers compelling performance and specs for the price.

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Why $700 could be a “death sentence” for the Steam Machine

console, gaming, microsoft, Nintendo, pricing, Sony, steam, steam machine, steamos, valve / Shannon Garcia / February 6, 2026

Bad news for Valve in particular?

On the surface, it might seem like every company making gaming hardware would be similarly affected by increasing component costs. In practice, though, analysts suggested that Valve might be in a uniquely bad position to absorb this ongoing market disruption.

Large console makers like Sony and Microsoft “can commit to tens of millions of orders, and have strong negotiating power,” Niko Partners analyst Daniel Ahmad pointed out. The Steam Machine, on the other hand, is “a niche product that cannot benefit in the same way when it comes to procurement,” meaning Valve has to shoulder higher component cost increases.

F-Squared’s Futter echoed that Valve is “not an enormous player in the hardware space, even with the Steam Deck’s success. So they likely don’t have the same kind of priority as a Nintendo, Sony, or Microsoft when it comes to suppliers.”

PlayStation 5 in horizontal orientation, compared to Xbox Series X in horizontal orientation — Sony and Microsoft might have an advantage when negotiating volume discounts with suppliers. Credit: Sam Machkovech

The size of the Steam Machine price adjustment also might depend on when Valve made its supply chain commitments. “It’s not clear when or if Valve locked in supply contracts for the Steam Machine, or if supply can be diverted from the Steam Deck for the new product,” Tech Insights analyst James Sanders noted. On the other hand, “Sony and Microsoft likely will have locked in more favorable component pricing before the current spike,” Van Dreunen said.

That said, some other aspects of the Steam Machine design could give Valve some greater pricing flexibility. Sanders noted that the Steam Machine’s smaller physical size could mean smaller packaging and reduced shipping costs for Valve. And selling the system primarily through direct sales via the web and Steam itself eliminates the usual retailer markups console makers have to take into account, he added.

“I think Valve was hoping for a much lower price and that the component issue would be short-term,” Cole said. “Obviously it is looking more like a long-term issue.”

Why $700 could be a “death sentence” for the Steam Machine Read More »

SteamOS continues its slow spread across the PC gaming landscape

AMD, ARM, gaming, Lenovo, NVIDIA, steamos, valve / Shannon Garcia / January 7, 2026

Over time, Valve sees that kind of support expanding to other Arm-based devices, too. “This is already fully open source, so you could download it and run SteamOS, now that we will be releasing SteamOS for Arm, you could have gaming on any Arm device,” Valve Engineer Jeremy Selan told PC Gamer in November. “This is the first one. We’re very excited about it.”

Imagine if handhelds like the Retroid Pocket Flip 2 could run SteamOS instead of Android… Credit: Retroid

It’s an especially exciting prospect when you consider the wide range of Arm-based Android gaming handhelds that currently exist across the price and performance spectrum. While emulators like Fex can technically let players access Steam games on those kinds of handhelds, official Arm support for SteamOS could lead to a veritable Cambrian explosion of hardware options with native SteamOS support.

Valve seems aware of this potential, too. “There’s a lot of price points and power consumption points where Arm-based chipsets are doing a better job of serving the market,” Valve’s Pierre-Louis Griffais told The Verge last month. “When you get into lower power, anything lower than Steam Deck, I think you’ll find that there’s an Arm chip that maybe is competitive with x86 offerings in that segment. We’re pretty excited to be able to expand PC gaming to include all those options instead of being arbitrarily restricted to a subset of the market.”

That’s great news for fans of PC-based gaming handhelds, just as the announcement of Valve’s Steam Machine will provide a convenient option for SteamOS access on the living room TV. For desktop PC gamers, though, rigs sporting Nvidia GPUs might remain the final frontier for SteamOS in the foreseeable future. “With Nvidia, the integration of open-source drivers is still quite nascent,” Griffais told Frandroid about a year ago. “There’s still a lot of work to be done on that front… So it’s a bit complicated to say that we’re going to release this version when most people wouldn’t have a good experience.”

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Reporter suggests Half-Life 3 will be a Steam Machine launch title

gaming, half-life, Half-Life 3, hl3, rumor, steam machine, valve / Kelly Newman / December 16, 2025

If you can take your mind way back to the beginning of 2025, you might remember a fresh wave of rumors suggesting that Half-Life 3 was finally reaching the final stages of production, and could be announced and/or released at any moment. Now, though, 2025 seems set to come to a close without any official news of a game fans have been waiting literal decades for.

That doesn’t necessarily mean a Half-Life 3 announcement and/or release isn’t imminent, though. On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that “everybody I’ve talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be a launch title with the Steam Machine.”

Straw—who has a long history of reporting gaming rumors from anonymous sources—said this Half-Life 3 information is “not [from] these run-of-the-mill sources that haven’t gotten me information before. … These aren’t like random, one-off people.” And those sources are “still adamant that the game is coming in the spring,” Straw added, noting that he was “specifically told [that] spring 2026 [is the window] for the Steam Machine, for the Frame, for the Controller, [and] for Half-Life 3.”

For real, this time?

Tying the long-awaited Half-Life 3 to a major hardware push that has already been announced for an “early 2026” window certainly sounds plausible, given previous leaks about the game’s advanced state of development. But there are still some reasons to doubt Straw’s “adamant” sources here.

For one, Straw admitted that the previous information he had received on potential Half-Life 3 launch and/or announcement dates was not reliable enough to report in detail. “I had been told a date. I was not going to report that date because they weren’t 100 percent confident in that date,” he said. “That date has since passed.”

Reporter suggests Half-Life 3 will be a Steam Machine launch title Read More »

Microsoft takes down mod that re-created Halo 3 in Counter-Strike 2

counter-strike 2, CS2, DMCA, engine, gaming, Halo, microsoft, source 2, takedown, valve / DJ Henderson / December 15, 2025

Last month saw the release of Project Misriah, an ambitious modding project that tried to re-create the feel of Halo 3 inside Valve’s Counter-Strike 2. That project has now been taken down from the Steam Workshop, though, after drawing a Digital Millennium Copyright Act complaint from Microsoft.

Modder Froddoyo introduced Project Misriah on November 16 as “a workshop collection of Halo ported maps and assets that aims to bring a Halo 3 multiplayer-like experience to Counter-Strike 2.” Far from just being inspired by Halo 3, the mod directly copied multiple sound effects, character models, maps, and even movement mechanics from Bungie and Microsoft’s popular series.

In the weeks since, Project Misriah has drawn a lot of praise from both Halo fans and those impressed by what modders could pull off with the Source 2 engine. But last Wednesday, modder Froddoyo shared a DMCA request from Microsoft citing the “unauthorized use of Halo game content in a [Steam] workshop not associated with Halo games.”

A trailer announcing Project Misriah, posted last month.

In a social media post sharing that DMCA text, Froddoyo ruefully said that players should “make sure to give your thanks to Microsoft” for the project’s fate. But in a comment on Project Misriah’s YouTube trailer, Froddoyo noted that, following the takedown, the project “will not be worked on or uploaded in the future. But hey, it was fun while it lasted. Thank you to all of the players and supporters of [the] project. We will use the knowledge and skills obtained from this to cook up something else!”

Microsoft takes down mod that re-created Halo 3 in Counter-Strike 2 Read More »

Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama.

AMD, drivers, gaming, steam, steam machine, steamos, valve, Windows / Shannon Garcia / December 4, 2025

When Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine hardware last month, some eagle-eyed gamers may have been surprised to see that the official spec sheet lists support for HDMI 2.0 output, rather than the updated, higher-bandwidth HDMI 2.1 standard introduced in 2017. Now, Valve tells Ars that, while the hardware itself actually supports HDMI 2.1, the company is struggling to offer full support for that standard due to Linux drivers that are “still a work-in-progress on the software side.”

As we noted last year, the HDMI Forum (which manages the official specifications for HDMI standards) has officially blocked any open source implementation of HDMI 2.1. That means the open source AMD drivers used by SteamOS can’t fully implement certain features that are specific to the updated output standard.

“At this time an open source HDMI 2.1 implementation is not possible without running afoul of the HDMI Forum requirements,” AMD engineer Alex Deucher said at the time.

Doing what they can

This situation has caused significant headaches for Valve, which tells Ars it has had to validate the Steam Machine’s HDMI 2.1 hardware via Windows during testing. And when it comes to HDMI performance via SteamOS, a Valve representative tells Ars that “we’ve been working on trying to unblock things there.”

That includes unblocking HDMI 2.0’s resolution and frame-rate limits, which max out at 60 Hz for a 4K output, according to the official standard. Valve tells Ars it has been able to increase that limit to the “4K @ 120Hz” listed on the Steam Machine spec sheet, though, thanks to a technique called chroma sub-sampling.

Why won’t Steam Machine support HDMI 2.1? Digging in on the display standard drama. Read More »

Valve’s Steam Machine looks like a console, but don’t expect it to be priced like one

gaming, pc, PC Gaming, price, steam machine, steam machines, valve / Beth Washington / November 25, 2025

After Valve announced its upcoming Steam Machine living room box earlier this month, some analysts suggested to Ars that Valve could and should aggressively subsidize that hardware with “loss leader” pricing that leads to more revenue from improved Steam software sales. In a new interview with YouTube channel Skill Up, though, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais ruled out that kind of console-style pricing model, saying that the Steam Machine will be “more in line with what you might expect from the current PC market.”

Griffais said the AMD Zen 4 CPU and RDNA3 GPU in the Steam Machine were designed to outperform the bottom 70 percent of machines that opt-in to Valve’s regular hardware survey. And Steam Machine owners should expect to pay roughly what they would for desktop hardware with similar specs, he added.

“If you build a PC from parts and get to basically the same level of performance, that’s the general price window that we aim to be at,” Griffais said.

The new comments follow similar sentiments relayed by Linus Sebastian on a recent episode of his WAN Show podcast. Sebastian said that, when talking to Valve representatives at a preview event, he suggested that a heavily subsidized price point would make the Steam Machine hardware into “a more meaningful product.” But when he suggested that he was imagining a console-style price in the range of $500, “nobody said anything, but the energy of the room wasn’t great.”

Forget about $500

Based on these comments, we could start estimating a potential Steam Machine price range by speccing out a comparable desktop machine. That would likely require building around a Ryzen 5 7600X CPU and Radeon RX 7600 GPU, which would probably push the overall build into the $700-plus range. That would make the Steam Machine competitive with the pricey PS5 Pro, even though some estimates price out the actual internal Steam Machine components in the $400 to $500 range.

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Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be.

Analysts, components, gaming, Hardware, steam machine, steam machines, tariff, valve / Mike M. / November 15, 2025

If you ask random gamers what price they think Valve will charge for its newly announced Steam Machine hardware, you’ll get a wide range of guesses. But if you ask the analysts who follow the game industry for a living the same question… well, you’ll actually get the same wide range of (somewhat better-informed) guesses.

At the high end of those guesses are analysts like F-Squared‘s Michael Futter, who expects a starting price of $799 to $899 for the entry-level 512GB Steam Machine and a whopping $1,000 to $1,100 for the 2TB version. With internal specs that Futter says “will rival a PS5 and maybe even hit PS5 Pro performance,” we can expect a “hefty price tag” from Valve’s new console-like effort. At the same time, since Valve is “positioning this as a dedicated, powerful gaming PC… I suspect that the price will be below a similarly capable traditional desktop,” Futter said.

DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole similarly expects the Steam Machine to start at a price “around $800” and go up to “around $1,000” for the 2TB model. Cole said he expects Valve will seek “very low margins” or even break-even pricing on the hardware itself, which he said would probably lead to pricing “below a gaming PC but slightly above a high-end console.”

A loss leader?

At the other end of the spectrum, Superdata Research founder and SuperJoost newsletter author Joost Van Dreunen predicted the entry-level Steam Machine could come in as low as $549, rising to $749 for the 2TB version (plus an additional $50 for bundles including a Steam Controller).

To Van Dreunen, Valve’s unique position as a private company with a loyal fan base means it can “price its hardware to hit its own strategic sweet spot rather than mirror the competition.” And in this case, he said, that could mean taking a “modest” loss on the hardware as a way to get more gamers invested in SteamOS.

Getting people to buy more games on SteamOS could be worth a lot more to Valve than any Steam Machine hardware profits. Credit: Valve

“Just like Sony and Microsoft, the real money isn’t in the box, it’s in the ecosystem you enter once you buy it,” Van Dreunen said. “To me the question isn’t whether Valve can afford to eat margin. It’s whether they want the SteamOS footprint to grow fast enough to justify it. … Strategically, this is about expanding the platform, not squeezing the hardware.”

Are you ready for a $1,000 Steam Machine? Some analysts think you should be. Read More »

Valve rejoins the VR hardware wars with standalone Steam Frame

gaming, headset, steam, valve, virtual reality, vr / Beth Washington / November 12, 2025

Valve also tells Ars that streaming to the Steam Frame will be “as efficient as possible,” maximizing battery life from the included 21.6 Wh battery. “Standalone battery life will be much more variable, depending on the game and its settings,” Valve Engineer Jeremy Selan and Designer Lawrence Yang told Ars via email.

While a wired PC connection would go a long way toward addressing those battery-life and extra latency concerns, Valve said the Steam Frame won’t even support it as an option. “We’re focused on a robust wireless streaming experience, which is why we included a dedicated wireless adapter, have a dedicated radio on the headset just for streaming, and invented a new streaming technology to optimize the streaming experience (Foveated Streaming),” Selan and Yang told Ars.

A low-weight modular “core”

All told, the Steam Frame comes in at just 440 grams, a welcome and sizeable reduction from the 515 grams of the Quest 3. Interestingly, Valve’s spec sheet also specifically calls out the 185 gram “core” of the headset hardware, which comprises all the main components besides the battery, headstrap, and speakers (e.g., lenses, displays, motherboard, cooling, processor, RAM, tracking system, etc).

That core weight is important, Selan and Yang told Ars, because “it’s designed to be modular so one could imagine other headsets connecting to this core module that bring different features.” So tinkerers or third-party headset makers could theoretically build modified versions of the Steam Frame with lighter batteries or streamlined headstrap/speaker combos, for instance. The Steam Frame’s monochrome passthrough cameras can also be accessed via a front expansion port with a standardized Gen 4 PCIe interface, Valve said.

It’s an interesting potential direction for new hardware that will launch into a more niche, less irrationally exuberant VR market than Valve’s previous virtual reality headsets. But with companies like Apple and Meta pivoting toward augmented reality and/or mixed-reality hardware of late, it’s nice to see Valve continuing to cater to the small but dedicated market of gamers who are still interested in playing in fully immersive VR environments.

Valve rejoins the VR hardware wars with standalone Steam Frame Read More »

Steam Deck minus the screen: Valve announces new Steam Machine, Controller hardware

controller, gaming, steam, steam controller, steam machine, steamos, valve / DJ Henderson / November 12, 2025

SteamOS-powered cube for your TV targets early 2026 launch, no pricing details.

Meet the ValveCube (not its real name) Credit: Valve

Nearly four years after the Steam Deck changed the world of portable gaming, Valve is getting ready to release SteamOS-powered hardware designed for the living room TV, or even as a desktop PC gaming replacement. The simply named Steam Machine and Steam Controller, both planned to ship in early 2026, are “optimized for gaming on Steam and designed for players to get even more out of their Steam Library,” Valve said in a press release.

A Steam Machine spec sheet shared by Valve lists a “semi-custom” six-core AMD Zen 4 CPU clocked at up to 4.8 Ghz alongside an AMD RDNA3 GPU with 28 compute units. The motherboard will include 16GB of DDR5 RAM and an additional 8GB of dedicated DDR6 VRAM for the GPU. The new hardware will come in two configurations with 512GB or 2TB of unspecified “SSD storage,” though Valve isn’t sharing pricing for either just yet.

If you squint, you can make out a few ports on this unmarked black square. Valve

Those chips and numbers suggest the Steam Machine will have roughly the same horsepower as a mid-range desktop gaming PC from a few years back. But Valve says its “Machine”—which it ranks as “over 6x more powerful than the Steam Deck”—is powerful enough to support ray-tracing and/or 4K, 60 fps gaming using FSR upscaling.

Externally, the Steam Machine is housed in a stark black cube measuring 160 mm (~6.30-inch) on each side, making it slightly larger than the old Nintendo GameCube (sans handle). The front of the Machine sports two USB-A ports, an SD card storage expansion slot, a power button, and a “customizable LED bar” that can change to reflect when the system is booting up, downloading updates, etc. A huge fan vent takes up most of the rear of the unit, alongside three additional USB ports (including one USB-C port) and HDMI 2.0 and DisplayPort 1.4 outputs.

Taking control

While the Steam Machine will be able to connect to standard USB and Bluetooth PC controllers and peripherals, it has been designed with a brand-new Steam Controller in mind. And while both pieces of hardware will be sold separately, they will also be available in a bundle for gamers who want an all-in-one living room gaming solution.

If it weren’t for those touchpads, it would be hard to distinguish this gamepad from a lot of other modern controllers. Valve

The new Steam Controller (not to be confused with the identically named old Steam Controller) will make use of a proprietary 2.4 Ghz wireless connection that allows for around 8 ms of end-to-end latency between a button press and the resulting signal received by the system. A radio for that connection will be built into the Steam Machine but will also be available via an included “plug and play” Steam Controller Puck that can support up to four wireless controller connections.

Without the puck, the new Steam Controller can still connect to PCs (including portable gaming PCs) and smartphones via Bluetooth or a wired USB connection. And while console connections are technically possible, Valve Software Engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais and Designer Lawrence Yang told Ars via email that it would “require collaboration with the vendor” that the company would be “happy to discuss… if it came up.”

The most striking feature of the Steam Controller is the dual touchpads underneath the thumbsticks, mirroring the similar, somewhat underutilized control options on the Steam Deck. Each touchpad will come with its own haptic motor for “HD tactile feedback” that should feel akin to rolling a clicky trackball under your thumb (two more haptic motors in the grips handle force feedback output from the games themselves).

Aside from that, the Steam Controller seems a lot more standardized than Valve’s last attempt at a controller. It features thumbsticks, a d-pad, face buttons, and shoulder buttons pretty much where you’d expect them, plus four programmable “grip buttons” on the back side of the controller. The familiar Steam, View, Menu, and QAM (aka “three dots”) buttons also come over from the Steam Deck for quick access to useful SteamOS functions.

Internally, the Steam Controller will use magnetic TMR thumbstick sensors, which should hopefully limit the kind of stick drift we see with the mechanical sticks on the Nintendo Switch, for instance. A six-axis IMU will allow for gyro-based tilt controls as well, and a “grip sensor” can help make sure those controls turn off when you’re putting the controller down or picking it up.

Let’s try that again

Software-wise, the Steam Machine will of course run SteamOS, the custom Linux-based operating system popularized by the Steam Deck and recently officially expanded to other handhelds. Valve says that means fast suspend/resume features, easy access to your Steam cloud saves, “and all the other Steam features you’d expect.” It also means the ability to boot to a Linux desktop mode or install Windows with the help of drivers available on Valve’s website, Griffais and Yang told Ars.

Crucially, the new SteamOS offers compatibility with the vast majority of games made for Windows via Proton, a key feature that was missing the last time Valve pushed Linux-based “Steam Machines” hardware roughly a decade ago. Recent versions of SteamOS can actually boast better in-game performance than Windows on some games and hardware in Ars’ testing.

“One of our biggest learnings [from the first Steam Machines effort] is that it’s a tall order to ask developers to port their games to run on Linux—so we have done a bunch of work on Proton to the point where almost all games just work out of the box,” Griffais and Yang told Ars. “Since that time, we’ve gained valuable experience in manufacturing, made big improvements to Steam, Steam Input, and SteamOS, and we are excited to bring our own first party Steam Machine and the new Steam Controller to market.”

Valve’s ill-fated Steam Machines hardware rollout 10 years ago also relied on third-party manufacturers to handle the actual construction of a wide range of branded Linux boxes. This time around, Valve is handling the manufacture and distribution of a singular Steam Machine on its own, following the success of a similar rollout for the Steam Deck. And while we’ve seen leaked “Powered by SteamOS” branding suggesting third-party SteamOS living room boxes might be in the works, Valve hasn’t announced anything official yet.

“We’re always happy to chat with companies who are interested in making their own SteamOS powered devices,” Griffais and Yang told Ars. “We are working on broadening support, and with the recent updates to Steam and SteamOS, compatibility with other devices has improved, starting with other AMD powered PC handhelds.”

But while the Steam Deck filled an obvious market need for portable access to PC games, it’s harder to know where the new Steam Machine will fit in the already crowded market for living room gaming (not to mention the highly modular desktop gaming market). That’s especially true since the Steam Deck and its imitators can already serve as passable living room gaming devices when plugged into any number of third-party USB-C docks.

A lot will depend on pricing details and just how simple and convenient the new hardware makes the experience of playing PC games on the living room TV. We’ll keep you posted as more information comes in and when we’ve had a chance to get some hands-on time with Valve’s newest swing at the hardware market.

Kyle Orland has been the Senior Gaming Editor at Ars Technica since 2012, writing primarily about the business, tech, and culture behind video games. He has journalism and computer science degrees from University of Maryland. He once wrote a whole book about Minesweeper.

Steam Deck minus the screen: Valve announces new Steam Machine, Controller hardware Read More »

New project brings strong Linux compatibility to more classic Windows games

compatibility layer, gaming, Linux, Open Source, steamos, valve, Windows / DJ Henderson / November 10, 2025

Those additional options should be welcome news for fans looking for new ways to play PC games of a certain era. The PC Gaming Wiki lists over 400 titles written with the D3D7 APIs, and while most of those games were released between 2000 and 2004, a handful of new D3D7 games have continued to be released through 2022.

The D3D7 games list predictably includes a lot of licensed shovelware, but there are also well-remembered games like Escape from Monkey Island, Arx Fatalis, and the original Hitman: Codename 47. WinterSnowfall writes that the project was inspired by a desire to play games like Sacrifice and Disciples II on top of the existing dxvk framework.

Despite some known issues with certain D3D7 titles, WinterSnowfall writes that recent tuning means “things are now anywhere between decent to stellar in most of the supported games.” Still, the project author warns that the project will likely never reach full compatibility since “D3D7 is a land of highly cursed API interoperability.”

Don’t expect this project to expand to include support for even older DirectX APIs, either, WinterSnowfall warns. “D3D7 is enough of a challenge and a mess as it is,” the author writes. “The further we stray from D3D9, the further we stray from the divine.”

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CS2 item market loses nearly $2B in value overnight due to “trade up” update

counter-strike 2, CS@, CS2, gaming, items, Marketplace, trading, valve / 9u50fv / October 23, 2025

Valve benefits from any panicked trading in the short term, with every Steam Marketplace sale carrying a 5 percent “Steam Transaction Fee” on top of a 10 percent “Counter-Strike 2 fee… that is determined and collected by the game publisher” (read: Valve). In the long term, though, making some of the rarest items in the game easier to obtain will likely depress overall spending among the whales that dominate the market.

Wild CS2 update tonight. I’ve spent the last few hours digging through market data and built this projection chart to show how I think things play out.

Knives and gloves drop fast (40–50%) as the new trade-up path floods supply, while Covert skins surge short-term as everyone… pic.twitter.com/8NOMIBPZ1F

— SAC (@SAC_IG) October 23, 2025

Using marketplace data, Irish Guys esports team owner SAC ran some projections estimating that, over the next few months, “the market settles about 5–10% lower overall, not a crash, just a correction.” But there are also more bullish and bearish possibilities, depending on how overall item demand and market liquidity develops in the near future.

Market tracker CSFloat also crunched some numbers to determine that the overall supply of knives and gloves could roughly double if every common item were traded up under the new update. In practice, though, the supply increase will likely be “far less.”

Massive monetary shifts aside, this latest update seems set to make it easier for new CS2 players to access some once-rare in-game items without breaking the bank. “I got burned a little [by the update]… but honestly, this is the way to go for the long term health of the game,” Redditor chbotong wrote. “[It’s] given me faith that Valve is actually steering in a direction that favors the average player than a market whale.”

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