Your portfolio is worse than you think

Your inventory has two values. There is the number Steam shows you, and there is the amount of real money you would end up with if you sold everything and moved it to your bank account. Those two numbers used to be close. They are not close any more.

This post walks through the evidence for that, why it is happening, how far it is likely to go, and what I’m going to do because of it.

The value of Steam dollars is dropping

By treating Steam dollars and CSFloat dollars as two different currencies, you can measure the exchange rate between them. You can measure it directly by dividing the Steam price of an item by its CSFloat price. It is exactly the same as a currency conversion, as it is pricing in the Steam fee, the CSFloat seller fee and other withdrawal fees. But since those are fixed over the period we are looking at, I ignored them.

Obviously tracking a single skin or a single item would be prone to noise and volatility. So here are two different indexes: one which tracks all cases, and one which tracks a fixed basket of 673 liquid skins (the ones present in at least 90 percent of months out of the top 1,000).

In early 2023 the rate was about 1.13, and it even dipped through parity for a moment. Today it takes 1.42 Steam dollars to buy a skin that costs 1.00 real dollars on CSFloat, which means a Steam dollar is now worth about 71 cents.

Cases are worse at 1.62. Cases are the cleanest way to move money out of Steam, because they are all identical, they are all liquid, and there is no float or pattern to argue about. Money pools where it is easiest to move, so the premium is highest there.

The trend is steady rather than sudden. Fitting a line to the skin series gives 6.7 percent per year, and it is about as statistically solid as this kind of thing gets (p below 3e-8, R squared 0.54). This means if you have been holding skins and valuing them in Steam dollars, you have been losing roughly 7% to the Steam equivalent of inflation and debasement.

I checked what the value of the debasement would be before the trade-up update. Still, you were losing roughly 5.5% a year over 2.7 years (R² 0.33, p = 5e-4). However, cases in that window are only 3.4%/yr and are not a solid fit (R² 0.12, p = 0.07).

I checked the cases to see which ones devalued in terms of Steam dollars and which ones increased. Every single one moved the same direction; Steam dollars down. Therefore it is not a few outliers moving the index, it is actually the index shifting as a whole.

Why are CSFloat and Steam prices drifting apart?

There are a couple of main mechanisms which will affect the exchange rate between CSFloat and Steam.

• Steam dollar demand changes
• Steam dollar supply changes
• CSFloat dollar demand changes
• CSFloat dollar supply changes

And to give you a crash course in basic common sense:

• Supply up, price down.
• Demand up, price up. And vice versa.

As the price of Steam dollars went down, we are looking for a situation which would have either caused:

• Steam supply to rise
• Steam demand to go down
• CSFloat demand to rise
• CSFloat supply to go down

A supply side shock?

• We should see this in cases, where people are trying to get out of the Steam system.

Trade-ups?

I am into trade-ups and have been tracking them for a while. Because trade-up margins have been compressed (for reasons which are interesting and I might make a post about later), trade-up outputs are best sold through CSFloat to avoid ~13% in sales tax.

• This would drive up demand for CSFloat
• We should see some sort of change in the CSFloat skin volume
• People might be buying inputs on Steam and selling them on CSFloat, which means Steam volumes might not drop — but we should see CSFloat volumes increase at least a little.
• If it were only this, we should see only skins being depreciated in price

People are just using CSFloat and third-party markets more

I think this is the most likely cause. A multi-year venue shift is occurring. We already have evidence for this:

• Case traded volume rising
• Skin share of sales on the cash market going from basically 0% in 2023 to about 22% now

Cases are the cleanest way out, so they migrated first, then stopped. CSFloat market share of case sales has sat near 9% for five straight quarters. Conversion volume has been flat since mid-2025.

What this is telling me is that people are just accepting the fact that to move money out of Steam they will pay more.

What this does to your portfolio

Skins were the best spot over the past 2 years. $1,000 of cash in January 2023, allocated three ways:

Held in skins, that $1,000 is about $2,190 in cash today. Left in a Steam wallet it is about $800. Skin holders made money. Wallet holders lost it to the exchange rate.

If you have been valuing your items via Steam credit: I’m sorry. Right now is the largest discrepancy in history. The blue line is the total value of a broad basket of skins at Steam prices. The orange line is the same basket converted into what it would actually fetch via CSFloat.

The shaded area between them is roughly 20 percent of your stated portfolio value. And if you haven’t accounted for that yet, your loss in value over the past 2–3 months is going to look a whole lot worse.

What does the future hold?

The divide between third-party marketplaces does have ceilings and floors. You can buy games on Steam, plus Steam Machines and Steam Decks. These offer a small safety valve on a runaway Steam debasement.

However, the Steam Deck has been on open sale since 2022. If wallet to hardware to cash were a workable conversion at scale, arbitrageurs would have pinned the rate near 1.18 (assuming they resell ~85% value) for the last four years. Instead the rate climbed from 1.13 to 1.42 over exactly that period. It moved away from the supposed floor, not toward it. It is unclear where the floor is, but it has to be there. Steam hardware and games are currently the only mechanism preventing Steam credits from hyperinflating.

Steam has a strong incentive to prevent this type of arbitrage. They see almost none of the profits, and take most of the loss.

• Third-party marketplaces take a 2% deposit (real money)
• Steam makes ~1k in Steam credits
  • (They also pay taxes on those sales, up to like 5% GST in some countries!)
• But their hardware, which they have spent years creating, is devalued by pretty much the exact amount that the currency premium to third-party marketplaces is running. Which is like 30%!

But at the same time, if Valve continues to pursue and prevent arbitrageurs from reselling Steam hardware — their only current mechanism pinning Steam credit prices — they will encourage a larger price deficit between Steam credits and third-party marketplaces.

Thus, ironically, encouraging more people to run the gauntlet of reselling hardware as the exchange rate continues to divide.

Allow hardware arbitrageurs: lose money on a product. Don’t allow them: postpone the problem and the problem gets bigger.

However, Steam holds all the cards. And if it becomes a problem they won’t let it affect their bottom line. They can:

• Ban all or some third-party marketplaces (easy to do)
  • Collapses value of items
• Make life hard for third-party marketplaces
  • 7-day trade hold → 14-day trade hold
  • Changes in APIs
• Allow withdrawals from Steam
  • Would need a lot of legal work, but possible
  • This effectively pegs the Steam currency to world currencies and USD, minus their fee.
• Reduce the Steam market fee
  • Would bring people back to the Steam market
  • Temporary fix, because money will eventually seek a way out
• A million other things: this is Steam’s market.

My predictions

Bar interventions from Steam, I am not confident that the market will return to 2025-era exchange rates. The existing mechanisms (games, hardware) didn’t work previously, so they won’t work now.

But I am slightly more confident Steam dollars will continue to debase. Steam has consistently debased 5% per annum if not more. The current system just favours third-party marketplaces. They are gaining share of the market and nothing seems to be preventing them from growing. They let you withdraw, Steam doesn’t. They charge 2–5%, Steam charges 13%.

My two cents, no one else’s.

Please roast me. I’d love to hear counter opinions, especially if they come with data.

Method and caveats

• Skin prices come from the top 1,000 liquid skins with both Steam and CSFloat history, filtered to the 673 present in at least 90 percent of months (364 weapons, 309 knives and gloves). Steam monthly prices come from their public endpoint and CSFloat’s data from their pricing history endpoint.
• Case prices come from 40 weapon case histories with both books, 38 to 39 of which qualify for the fixed basket depending on the window.
• Currency conversion. Steam prices in this dataset are AUD and CSFloat is USD, so everything is converted through daily AUD/USD. AUD/USD moved 20.8 percent across the window, but I corrected for that using historical AUD/USD pricing.
• Fees are Steam 0.8696 and CSFloat 0.98 on the seller side.
• Incomplete months are dropped from every chart, so no partial period reads as a decline.

Data snapshot 20260813T013830Z, covering 2023-01 to 2026-07.