My pet conspiracy theory: The vast majority of the CS:GO economy is a massive money laundering operation for the Russian government. You have skins for an AK47 selling for $40,000. Does anyone seriously think that's legit?
But who would ever do such a nefarious things /sarcasm
Source: am YouTuber, talk to lots of other YouTubers.
Yes. Supply/Demand. Price discovery. Visibility. And critical mass. They all can make ridiculous valuations.
But back to money laundering: If you consider tax evasion as money laundering too. Then the legit economy is a subset of the money laundering economy.
Tax evasion is huge. Very huge. In the Trillions. Then you have drugs, arms, illegal stuff, governments, international corporations, etc... This huge flow of money will certainly pump to everywhere money runs (App Stores, Games with virtual cash, Crypto, Digital Goods, etc...)
This misconception is also shared among many russian folks who use term ‘laundering’ when actually they speak about tax theft or just theft through fake middleware companies who convert it to cash and that’s it.
For example, this gun https://opskins.com/?loc=shop_view_item&item=498470571 sold 7 times yesterday for $200/pop. That's one item on one site.
It seems the $40,000 one was an outlier, but still $4000+ is common. Total market volume is in the billions.
I imagine a taxonomy of motivations, like the one Larry Harris has in _Trading & Exchanges_. Presumably some people get entertainment value (because surely there is a kick in seeing a game's world modified beyond its normal rules of state mutation); some speculate on price trends (hence the price graph on opskins.com; what are time series graphs for if not to spark idle dreams of avarice), and others getting some sort of utility (i.e., money laundering).
This feeds into the supply and demand component quite heavily, as you can imagine. All secondary effects follow this initial relationship.
https://www.theverge.com/2018/5/24/17390004/fortnite-battle-...
The 10% cut of transactions figure ($21m) is based on how much money they'd make if all the items on csgobackpack.net were sold at market value. But the actual fraction of those items which changed hands would be much smaller.
Valve is rolling in money from its cut of transactions but these numbers are misguided.
Trade volume, or market cap? This is an important distinction. You can't multiply the number of items for sale by the market rate for those items. What you're saying is that people are spending billions on CS:GO items and I don't think that's correct; I think what you mean is that buying all the items at their current market prices would require billions.