The Katowice 2014 stickers were the first team stickers ever sold for a Counter-Strike Major, and they cost about a dollar a capsule. A short sale window, a small player base and two team scandals turned the rarest of them into some of the most valuable items in the game. Here is how that happened and what it means if you are looking to buy one.
The tournament
EMS One Katowice 2014 ran from March 13 to 16, 2014 at the Spodek Arena in Katowice, Poland. It was organised by ESL with Valve's backing and was the second CS:GO Major, after DreamHack Winter 2013. Sixteen teams played for a $250,000 prize pool that Valve described as community funded.
Valve's own recap describes more than 10,000 fans in the arena watching the local favourites, Virtus.pro, beat Ninjas in Pyjamas 2-0 in the final. HLTV's report gives the maps as Mirage and Inferno. The Polish side took $100,000.
Two capsules, sold for a limited time
Stickers had only existed for a month when, on March 6, 2014, Valve added two lockless capsules to the in-game store. "Lockless" meant no key was needed to open them. Valve's post split the field in two:
- Legends: the eight teams returning from DreamHack Winter 2013 (compLexity, Dignitas, Fnatic, HellRaisers, LDLC, LGB eSports, Ninjas in Pyjamas and Titan), plus a rare ESL Skull foil.
- Challengers: the eight invited and qualified teams (3DMAX, Clan-Mystik, iBUYPOWER, mousesports, Natus Vincere, Reason Gaming, Virtus.pro and Vox Eminor), plus a rare ESL Wolf foil.
Each team sticker came in a paper version and a rarer holo. Valve said the capsules were on sale "for a limited time", with part of the proceeds going to the teams in each capsule. They were never sold again, so every Katowice 2014 capsule and sticker in circulation today comes from that one window.
There is a third version of each team logo that never came from a capsule. According to the Counter-Strike Wiki, foil team stickers from this event exist only on Souvenir weapons dropped during the tournament, alongside gold versions of the ESL Wolf and Skull.
What the stickers earned at the time
In August 2014 HLTV reported that each capsule cost $1 and that, according to its sources, Valve kept around two thirds of the initial sale price, with the rest split among the teams in each capsule. Valve's own 2015 announcement for the Cologne Major said that half of team sticker proceeds had gone to the organisations "just like all previous team stickers", so the exact Katowice split is disputed. HLTV's sources put the payout at roughly $17,500 per Legends team and about $7,500 per Challengers team, before tax.
For some smaller teams that money mattered. HLTV reported that Vox Eminor used its sticker share, just under $10,000, to cover the cost of travelling from Australia. The same article described how unclear contracts over sticker money contributed to compLexity's players leaving that organisation.
Why they became so valuable
Several things stacked up.
Fixed supply. No Katowice 2014 sticker has been created since the capsules left the store. Every unopened capsule that gets opened, and every sticker that gets applied to a gun, shrinks the pool of loose stickers for good.
Cheap at the time. At a dollar a capsule, players opened them freely and stuck the results on their weapons without a second thought. Every sticker applied that way left the unapplied supply for good, long before anyone thought of them as collectibles.
First of their kind. These were the first Major team stickers. Collectors value being first, and that alone keeps the whole set in demand.
The iBUYPOWER story. The American team exited Katowice in the group stage. In January 2015 Valve published "Integrity and Fair Play", confirming that items won by betting on a CEVO match between iBUYPOWER and NetCodeGuides.com had been transferred to iBUYPOWER players. Valve told event partners to bar seven people from its events, including four iBUYPOWER players. The sticker became a relic of a lineup that would never appear at a Valve event again.
The Titan story. In November 2014 Titan was kept out of the DreamHack Winter Major after its player KQLY received a VAC ban, as HLTV reported at the time. KQLY had played Katowice for LDLC, not Titan, but the episode still attached itself to the Titan name.
Crafts. The holos are the centrepiece of the most famous crafts. When a StatTrak AK-47 | Case Hardened with four Titan Holos was reported sold for about $400,000 in April 2023, PC Gamer put each of those stickers at around $60,000. Our guide to sticker crafts covers how that kind of premium works.
Buying one today
- Read the full name. Katowice hosted later Majors too, including ESL One Katowice 2015 and IEM Katowice 2019, and their stickers are priced very differently. The item name must end in "Katowice 2014".
- Know which version you are buying. Paper, holo and foil versions of the same team differ hugely in value, and a foil team sticker can only ever be on a Souvenir weapon from the event.
- Check the scrape. On an applied sticker, inspect it in game. Scrape level only goes up, and a worn holo is worth much less than a clean one.
- Budget for trade protection. CS2 trades are reversible for seven days, and items you receive can't be modified or traded on during that time. Plan a high-value purchase with that window in mind; our guide to Steam trade protection explains the details.
- Find guns that carry them. The sticker filter on Buy lets you search listings for a specific Katowice 2014 sticker, and you can narrow it by slot.