A vast amount of skins in CS:GO can already fetch thousands of dollars apiece due to their rarity, or other factors, but none come close to insane price one Chinese collector apparently paid for the StatTrak M4A4 Howl with 4 iBUYPOWER Katowice 2014 stickers.
To put things in perspective, the price for a Factory New (0.009136963) wear rating StatTrak version of the M4A4 Howl (without IBP stickers) is pegged at roughly $5,180 currently, which is chump change compared to this version.
According to prominent CS:GO economist ohnePixel on Twitter, the Chinese collector in question forked over $100,000 cash for this ultra-rare cosmetic, and has now turned around and is asking $130,000 in resale.
UPDATE: He now clarified that $130,000 is the price he would sell it for – he bought it for some less (I am assuming around $100k which still sets the record)
— ohnePixel (@ohnePixel) July 4, 2020
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Previous reports had set the sale price at $130,000 but the $100,000 that was apparently actually paid is still more than enough to set the record for the most expensive CS:GO skin ever.
For instance, in our CS.Money list of the 20 most expensive CS:GO skins, the top item was the Souvenir AWP (Dragon Lore) at $19,632.80, which doesn’t even come close to the six-digit price tag for this $100,000 StatTrak M4A4 Howl.
The reason it’s so expensive compared to other similar skins is because of the iBUYPOWER stickers from Katowice 2014, which are rare simply because, back when they came out, the player base was smaller, with fewer people to buy them. Now with the worldwide appeal of CS:GO, they’ve become some of the hottest collector items on the market.
This isn’t to say that your M4A4 Howl skin (if you have one) will eventually be worth that much, because this whole situation seems to be a result of the rare stickers that were included, and the wild world of Chinese CS:GO skin trading, which could be a whole other story in of itself.
If anything, what we can all take away from this $100,000 CS:GO skin purchase is: if you have a fairly valuable skin, and some fairly valuable stickers, it might be worth hanging on to them and seeing what you can get a little way down the road, instead of just cashing in right away.
