Counter-Strike 2 has been out for, let's see, less than 24 hours, and already streamers are claiming their own 'world firsts' in nabbing various ridiculously rare and lucrative skins. Take, for example, xQc, who miraculously managed to net himself multiple fantastically unlikely skins worth tens of thousands of dollars on the first day of the game's release.
As spotted by Dexerto, xQc first picked up a Karambit Doppler with a wear rating of 0.06 (placing it, just about, in the rarest "factory new" quality category) from an ordinary case. That's a knife you can currently pick up on trading sites for, oh, around $1,100. The streamer's response to the drop was about as calm and restrained as you'd expect:
It's very unlikely that this is truly "the first knife" of its kind in CS2 history, a game which is already the most-played game on Steam after its launch yesterday. But it sure is valuable. Anyway, xQc didn't stop there. What do you get the man who has everything and also $100 million from his deal with Kick? More vanishingly rare and valuable skins, of course. A while later, the streamer decided to try his luck, trading in rare skins in batches of 10 in the hopes of getting a single, hyper-rare skin in return. (Like CS:GO, CS2 allows players to convert 10 items of one quality level for 1 of the next highest quality level, which is called a "Trade Up Contract.")
He succeeded. In spite of a few duds, some trades that resulted in skins you couldn't base the economy of a small country around, he still had one of the wildest streaks of luck I've ever seen. Across three separate trade-ins, xQc picked up an AK-47 Fire Serpent, an AWP Gungir, and an AWP Dragon Lore, one of the long-standing 'grails' of Counter-Strike skins.
Those are all rare, desirable skins in pretty much any condition, but all of them dropped for xQc in factory new quality. Heck, the Fire Serpent was even a StatTrak version, meaning it tracks various statistics as you use it. According to CSGOSkins, those versions of the Fire Serpent, Gungir, and Dragon Lore are valued at around $5,000, $12,500, and $12,000 respectively. Or more, maybe: The ridiculously low 0.005 wear rating on the Dragon Lore could push its price even further up.
So that's around $30,000 dollars in skins for xQc in under a single day of CS2's existence as a real game, which really makes you reconsider some things about life, don't it? You can check out xQc's run of rare drops in the videos below:
xQc isn't the only streamer picking up incredibly valuable CS2 skins in videos with titles dubiously claiming to be world firsts right now, either. Elsewhere, streamers like Dr Disrespect and TimTheTatMan have also been livestreaming themselves picking up exceedingly rare and lucrative "red" drops in the first few hours of CS2's existence. But remember, folks, you and I don't have the kind of streamer money you need to roll the dice on these things infinitely. We should probably leave this stuff to the pros.
