Sparkles is a well-known Counter-Strike: Global Offensive YouTuber, and he has just done what many thought was impossible. Thankfully, he had an ace up his sleeves to bring his goal within reach: a whole lot of money. Sparkles just spent an estimated $15,000 on the game in an effort to get one single weapons skin, a StatTrak AK47 Fire Serpent in Factory New.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive offers players a couple of ways to get weapon skins, but Sparkles opted to use the trade-up method. By the end of his insane endeavor, he estimates that he spent about 15 grand on the skin, and there was a chance he could have walked away empty-handed.
Essentially, if a player obtains 10 weapons from one collection, they can exchange all 10 of them for a better-graded weapon skin from the same collection. This is obviously an expensive and risky method of getting Counter-Strike skins, as the player doesn't even have any guarantee of getting the weapon skin they want after the trade.
To make matters worse for Sparkles, the skin he wants is not only extremely rare, but also requires incredibly low float values to get in the factory new condition. In order to make this work, he had to purchase specific skins within the collection of incredibly high value online until he could trade them up to get this one, and a truly expensive endeavor. The worst part of this is that in the end, when Sparkles finally trades up his final ten items, there is a 50% chance that he could have gotten the wrong skin entirely.
To the average reader, spending this amount of money on something which is completely cosmetic sounds absolutely insane, and in reality, it is. That said, Sparkles makes money off of Counter-Strike and his YouTube channel, so if doing something as crazy as this generates more views and therefore revenue, it likely didn't cost nearly as much as it seems. Unfortunately for the content creator, CS.MONEY marks the average price of the skin he was after at about half of what he ended up paying for it.
Thankfully, Sparkles' fans are on board the crazy train with him, and everyone seems absolutely thrilled to see him finally get his dream skin. It seems as though he is showing no signs of stopping chasing down expensive CS:GO skins anytime soon, either, as the description of his video says "30,000 likes for blue gem st fn attempts," and the video currently has 38,000 likes.
Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is available now.
Source: Dexerto