We're right off the cusp of the launch of CS2, and we're ready to launch our next feature for CSFloat Market: Float Appraiser
TL;DR
Float Appraiser uses machine learning to predict the price that your item will sell for on CSFloat Market. This price is shown beside listings to help inform your purchasing decisions.
Of note, there are various caveats to what Float Appraiser is currently able to predict – we hope to continue iterating on model performance.
Background
On most marketplaces, a listing will typically show a "reference" price that you can compare against. This allows you to quickly see which items are over or under priced.
Notably however, most marketplaces tend to show a "fake" discount that compares their listing prices against the Steam Community Market rather than other Real-Money Marketplaces. This is important to note since Steam Community Market prices are typically 25%+ more expensive.
Before the Float Appraiser, CSFloat Market would also compare against the "Steam Market" price.
So what is this?
We've built an indexing service that looks at the prices for every item in CS2 across all relevant real money marketplaces. From here, we've calculated a blended price that incorporates each marketplace together based on their popularity.
Afterwards, we trained a machine learning model on hundreds of thousands of sales at CSFloat to predict how much we think your item will sell for.
Float Appraiser currently takes the following factors into account:
- The base "reference" price of this item across multiple real-money marketplaces
- The impact of "float value" or wear on the skin's price
- For instance, the overpay that you'd get for a 0.01 vs 0.06 float value skin
- The relative popularity of this skin, and it's propensity to sell below the typical listing price on real-money marketplaces
- How much CSFloat buyers typically desire this skin
All factors outside of the base price are combined into a single "Item Factor"
Alright, so what's the catch?
Especially for high tier items, the price a buyer is willing to pay can differ heavily based on their own propensity towards that skin (in other words, how much they like it).
As of today, we do not predict the following factors:
- Fade %
- Case Hardened Tier
- Applied Sticker %
- Individual Doppler phases
- Top #X skin overpay (we do not try to overshoot estimates)
We plan to expand the scope of the appraisal system in the future to incorporate these features.
Remember, we're only providing a prediction – the item may be worth more or less than we predict.
So... how do I use it?
All listings on CSFloat Market now automatically show the Float Appraiser reference instead of the old reference prices.
We automatically annotate badges next to the price to denote whether it is "fair" or "great".
When listing new items, you'll be able to see the appraisal value to figure out how much to sell your item for.
What's Next?
We're going to continue iterating on the model to improve performance and potentially predict other factors in skin price.
Besides that, we continue to have our plates full for other features.
Til next time,
Step7750 & Perplex