On October 22, 2025, Valve released a Counter-Strike 2 update announced under the title "Re-Retakes". The announcement was about the return of the Retakes mode, but the line that mattered most to collectors sat in the release notes under Contracts: five Covert skins could now be traded up into a knife or a pair of gloves. Within a day, knife prices had dropped and certain Covert skins had jumped in price.
What the update added
| Area | Change |
|---|---|
| Contracts | Five Covert items can be exchanged for a knife or gloves |
| Game modes | Retakes added as an official mode on Valve's matchmaking servers |
| Maps | Golden, Palacio and Rooftop updated to their latest Workshop versions; Inferno visibility tweaks |
| Gameplay | Fixed Molotov and smoke interaction when several smokes are active |
| Misc | Performance work on the main menu and inspect screen; fix for blurry or missing inventory icons |
The new trade-up rule
Until this patch, a knife or gloves came from opening a case and getting lucky, or from buying one. The trade-up contract topped out at Covert: ten Classified skins in, one Covert out. Valve's notes extended it in two ways:
- StatTrak: "5 StatTrak™ Covert items can be exchanged for one StatTrak™ Knife from a collection of one of the items provided".
- Normal: "5 regular Covert items can be exchanged for one regular Knife item or one regular Gloves item from a collection of one of the items provided".
In practice that means:
- Five inputs, not ten. Every other contract still takes ten skins.
- StatTrak returns only knives. Gloves have no StatTrak versions, so a StatTrak contract can only produce a StatTrak knife. As with other contracts, StatTrak and normal skins can't be mixed.
- The pool comes from the inputs. The knife or gloves on offer are the rare special items of the case each Covert belongs to. A Kilowatt Case Covert puts you in line for the Kukri Knife; a Fever Case Covert for the Nomad, Paracord, Skeleton and Survival knives in Chroma finishes.
- Nothing is guaranteed. The finish and the pattern of the result are random, so you can't aim for a particular Doppler phase or a blue gem.
- No pool, no knife. Coverts from collections without knives or gloves, such as map collections, have nothing to trade up into.
Valve doesn't publish how the result is picked when inputs come from different collections. The community-tested odds and the float formula are explained in our trade-up contracts guide.
How the market reacted
The reaction was immediate, and the clearest numbers come from Ars Technica's report on October 23, 2025, the day after the patch:
- One rare knife that had sold for over $14,000 less than 24 hours earlier had seen its minimum price fall by more than half.
- The median Steam Market sale price of the P90 | Asiimov, a Covert, went from $10 on the day of the update to well over $100.
- A third-party price tracker cited in the report estimated that the total value of all CS2 items fell by more than 30 percent overnight, from an all-time high of just over $6 billion to just under $4.3 billion.
PC Gamer, also on October 23, noted that reported losses ranged from $1 billion to $2 billion and that Bloomberg had put the figure at $1.75 billion. It urged caution over all of these sums, because the estimates lead back to third-party skin platforms and traders, and because high-end prices are entangled with crypto and other speculative assets.
What the numbers agree on is the direction. Knives and gloves gained a new source of supply, so their prices fell. Covert skins from cases with knives or gloves gained a new use as trade-up inputs, and certain ones rose sharply. Nothing about the items themselves changed. For how rule changes like this one fit alongside new containers, see how new cases move skin prices and how CS2 skin prices work.
Retakes returns
Valve called it "the return of retakes". Each round drops you into a 4v3 scenario after the bomb has been planted. You pick a loadout card at the start of the round, coordinate on the map and try to defuse or defend the bomb. At launch it ran on official servers with the maps of the Defusal Group Alpha and Defusal Group Delta map groups.
Follow-up patches tuned it quickly:
- October 23: parties of up to four players, a fix for players who joined during freeze time spawning in the wrong place, and bots now make room for humans by kicking dead or uncontrolled bots first.
- October 29: CT loadout cards randomly offer the M4A1-S or M4A4 if you have both equipped; body armour was added to the 4v3, 4 Bad Guys Left and Blind Fire cards; the T Blind Fire card got Dual Berettas; and the CT Enemy Loadout card swapped its flashbang for an HE grenade.
Retakes has stayed in the game since. Map guides became loadable in Retakes on January 21, 2026, limited map guides arrived in Competitive and Retakes on March 18, 2026, and Cache joined the Retakes rotation on April 28, 2026.
Where it stands now
The Covert rule is still in place. In May 2026 Valve widened trade-ups again, letting Souvenir skins be used as inputs once their Souvenir attributes are stripped; our trade-up guide covers that change. Knife and glove types themselves are covered in our guides to knife types and gloves.
The previous update was the October 1 charms, stickers and community maps update; the next one covered here added Sticker Slabs in November 2025.
Sources
- Counter-Strike 2 Update, October 22, 2025 — Counter-Strike 2 news
- Re-Retakes — Counter-Strike 2 news
- Counter-Strike 2 patches/October 22, 2025 — Counter-Strike Wiki
- CS2 item market loses nearly $2B in value overnight due to "trade up" update — Ars Technica
- Latest CS2 patch has skin collectors in meltdown over a supposed $2bn in losses — PC Gamer
- Knife trade-ups and return of retakes headline CS2 update — HLTV
- Knife CS2 Trade-Up Guide: Which Skins Give Which Knives — Hotspawn
