This CS:GO skin sold for over $1,000 because it supposedly looks like genitalia

What you need to know

• A CS:GO skin has sold for over $1,400 because of a...unique reason.
• Players think the skin — a 909 Kami Five-SeveN — looks like genitalia.
• While it's not unusual at all to see CS:GO skins sell for large amounts of money, other Kami variations only cost about $1, making this an absurd price markup.
• CS:GO skin prices have slowly crept up since Valve announced Counter-Strike 2, a Source 2-focused overhaul for the game coming in Summer 2023.

Most players come to Valve's Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for its sublime gameplay, as it's often thought of as one of the best PC games of all time for competitive shooter fans. but some end up staying because of the tactical shooter's incredibly lucrative weapon skin market. For a variety of reasons, certain types of skins are considered way more valuable than others by the game's community, and as a result, it's not uncommon to see these items sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars. Recently, though, one skin sold for over $1,400 for a...unique reason.

That skin is a pattern-based one for the Five-SeveN pistol called the "Kami," which can generate with 1,000 different decorative pattern variations. Several Kami patterns are well-liked by players, but one — pattern 909, to be specific — is considered uniquely special and valuable. The reason why? Fans think it looks like a certain part of the female anatomy.

A community member looking to trade several of these specific Kami skin variations called pops announced the sale on Twitter, confirming that the skin was purchased for €1,300, which is about $1,434 in USD. Notably, this specific 909 Kami Five-SeveN has an incredibly low float value of just 0.009, making it the third-most pristine variant of the skin in the world.

The individual who purchased the skin is Leafy, a passionate CS:GO "crafter," or someone that adds rare stickers to valuable skins. Leafy then proceeded to decorate the skin with four Cloud9 G2A Holo Katowice 2015 stickers, each of which typically sells for around $350. That means that overall, this craft took an investment of nearly $3,000.

While it's far from unheard of to see skins sell for this much money (some people buy them for tens or even hundreds of thousands), it's strange to watch people blow over a thousand bucks on a digital skin just because they think it looks like genitalia. To put things in perspective, the vast majority of other Kami skins sell for just a dollar, so the 909 pattern skyrocketed the price by an absurd amount.

I can't help but chuckle at this as a veteran of Team Fortress 2, another Valve game in which hardcore traders spend paycheck-sized sums on hats just because they have rare magic effects on them. The Golden Frying pan, the rarest type of TF2 item in existence, is currently selling for an eye-watering $6,750 each. Who has this kind of money to throw at virtual cosmetics?

The vast majority of skins aren't crazy expensive like this, though prices have begun to gradually rise over time ever since Valve announced Counter-Strike 2. This Source 2-focused overhaul to CS:GO is coming in Summer 2023, and will feature reworked smoke grenades, sub-tick server updates, visual upgrades, and more.