Our Research Methodology

Where does the price data actually come from?

We check live listing pages on active third-party marketplaces, sorted by price, rather than relying on old articles or forum claims. Our primary sources per game:

Minecraft is the exception: rare-username sales are documented through community reporting rather than a single marketplace, since that niche trades informally.

What's the "confirmed repeat" rule, and why does it matter?

We only publish a specific item, skin, or character as a genuine value driver if it appears in two or more independent top-price listings. A single mention doesn't make the cut — it gets flagged internally as unconfirmed and left out of anything we state as fact. This is why, for example, our Fortnite page names IKONIK specifically (it repeated across 4 of the top 10 listings we checked) while other skins we saw only once are not named as value drivers.

What do you do when you can't find any repeats at all?

We state plainly that value is driven by stats rather than naming a "top skins" list we'd have to guess. For Brawl Stars, Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and Free Fire specifically, our top-10-by-price research found zero named-skin repeats — no single skin or cosmetic showed up twice across the highest-priced listings we checked. So those four pages point to trophies, Town Hall/King Tower level, and rank as the real value drivers instead.

How often is this data refreshed, and what does the freshness badge mean?

The badge under each page's headline states the date that page's data was last checked against live listings. It is not a permanent guarantee — marketplace prices move — but it tells you exactly how old the numbers you're reading are, rather than leaving you to guess whether a "top accounts" claim is from this month or three years ago (the Fortnite comparison on our cross-game comparison page shows exactly why that distinction matters).

What don't you do, even though it would be easier?

We don't extrapolate a game's typical price range from a handful of high-end listings, don't reuse a price found for one region as if it applies globally without a regional cross-check, and don't carry forward a number from an earlier version of this site without re-verifying it against a current listing first.

How do you treat third-party "account value calculator" tools found during research?

Differently from a real marketplace listing. A calculator site's per-item dollar weight is that tool's own internal assumption, not a confirmed sale or a live asking price — so we don't publish those figures as fact unless we can independently verify them another way, such as against an item's actual official in-game currency cost. When a calculator's number can't be verified that way, we leave it out rather than present an unconfirmed weight as if it were researched.

Do you ever rely on a single source for a published figure?

Not for anything stated as a confirmed fact. Every price range on this site is checked against at least one live marketplace directly. Where a figure is a genuine outlier — a record sale, a self-reported lifetime spending total, a single platform's example listing — we label it explicitly as its own category (see, for instance, the reported-holdings note on the Roblox page) rather than blending it into the regular market range.