Steam users earned more than $ 57 million selling virtual hats and cards

Business selling various kinds of artifacts and “gear” in multiplayer games can be very profitable - in principle, this has been known for a long time. But how much do such merchants earn by virtual goods? Thanks to the information provided by Steam , you can now understand the income level of such sellers. Thus, since the launch of Steam Workshop in 2011, creators of virtual goods have earned more than 57 million US dollars. According to the company, 1,500 virtual merchants from 75 countries earned the money.

If you try to calculate how much falls on one person, then it turns out 38 thousand per person. It is clear that the real distribution of income, no one knows, except the sellers themselves. Most likely, the averaging here is akin to “Vasya eats cabbage, Vitalik - meat, and on average they both eat cabbage rolls”. In other words, the lion’s share of revenue in the Steam Workshop probably belongs to a small proportion of users.


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It seems that the trade in hats in Team Fortress is not such a stupid thing. It is not necessary to quit a job for the sake of such a change of activity, but as a backup option, we now know where to earn money. In addition to hats, maps of game levels (for example, in Dota 2), skins for game characters and other things are used. “When we launched Workshop in 2011, we expected the market to grow, but we didn’t expect it to grow at such a fast rate,” Valve said.

Now the company plans to open stores with virtual goods for games not from Valve, where users can earn money by selling items for Dungeon Defenders: Eternity and Chivalry: Medieval Warfare. Apparently, such a market will expand in the future, and users selling goods will be able to receive even more real, non-virtual money.