Maintained by the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED is a leading resource for macroeconomic data, including interest rates, GDP, employment, and inflation. It is widely used by economists, researchers, and policymakers for trusted, high-quality financial data.
Pricempire is a third-party market aggregator for digital items across platforms like Steam. It tracks real-time item prices, trends, and volume data, making it a useful tool for understanding the supply and demand of CS2 skins across marketplaces.
Created by Blake Porter, this index tracks the price movements of a weighted set of CS2 skins, similar to a stock index. It’s an academically grounded attempt to model the game’s virtual economy using traditional financial tools and concepts.
The Counter-Strike economy has evolved into a sophisticated digital marketplace. Unlike most in-game economies, CS2 skins have real monetary value, high liquidity, and market-driven pricing, with some rare items selling for thousands of dollars. Because of this scale and transparency, a surprisingly rich body of market data exists — including price history, item volume, volatility, and even user behavior around purchases.
We chose to compare the CS2 economy to:
The S&P 500: as a benchmark of global investor confidence and economic trends
COVID-19 case rates: to analyze how the pandemic impacted digital economies
These comparisons allow us to ask important questions about digital economic behavior: How reactive are gamers to global events? Do virtual markets mirror real-world patterns, or do they diverge? And what does all of this say about the future of online value systems?