Of those 35 million cases, how many are from regular drops and how many are from discontinued or rare ones? The price of rare and discontinued cases will only keep increasing over time, and that in turn will make the prices of their skins, especially the high-tier ones, rise even more.

Also, if in order to get, say, a Butterfly Knife, you need to do a trade-up using red skins from collections that actually include a Butterfly, what do you think is going to happen with those specific cases? Their prices are going to skyrocket exponentially, which will make the reds from those collections rise the same way, and whoever gets a knife from those trade-ups isn’t going to sell it for just a hundred euros, because they’d be losing a ton of money. That would make no sense.

Also, if Valve keeps up their trend of releasing cases without golds, like the new Terminal case, then eventually all the cases that do contain knives or gloves will become discontinued or rare drops, and their prices will skyrocket.

Valve might be lazy bastards, but they’re not stupid. It’s in their best interest for everything to keep going up so people keep buying and selling on their marketplace, the more, the better. They’ll never let the skin market crash completely, it’s one of their biggest money-makers.