Heads up to those who played CS:GO years ago and like money. I was a pretty active player from 2012 to 2014.
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.
Likewise for Dota 2 players. Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price. A friend of mine I used to play with had a $500 item. Getting rid of them may fund your game purchases for a bit.
There are plenty of sites out there that can give you a value of your inventory. Just make sure your privacy settings for your inventory are set to "public": https://steamcommunity.com/my/edit/settings (though I'd recommend changing it back to private after you use one of the tools, since scammers will try and target you if you have public high value items).
> Some of those old / early cosmetics have shot up in price
"Back in my day" you brought your own skins, maps, and mods to your clan's Quake 2 server and they'd be automatically copied-into other players' q2base profile directories when they connected: free and fast. Making skins in a cracked copy of Photoshop 5.5 or PaintShopPro (don't forget to save to PCX!) was trivial and because nothing really mattered no-one could possibly get angry at anything.
...but now you're telling me that if I want to add custom skins to CounterStrike I have to pay other people hugely inflated sums for the privilege of something that was still free and open to all only yesteryear? And we're surprised at how toxic the "gamer" community has become over the past 15 years since tradable lootboxes, cosmetics, and microtransactions became the norm?
However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.
I have two tips:
Sell hardware and then you can get real cash. For example, use the Steam Wallet balance to buy Steam Deck Docks which you ship directly from Steam to your customer on eBay.
Personally, I used my Steam Wallet money to purchase several of the most popular skins on a third-party site and resold them there. I probably took about a 15% hit but who can complain for $400 in profit?
> However, if I reflect on how much time I spent in the game in order to receive that much money it's laughable as it was easily 2 thousand hours of game play.
but, you weren't playing the game as a job to make money, you were playing to have fun (hopefully?) so arguably the extra surprise money is a bonus.
for me, playing a game in order to make real world money would turn it into an awful grind and sap all the joy out of it
Coming from UT/CS and a bunch of other games where skins were simple mods I hate that skins cost so much real world money and so I refuse to spend a cent in protest.
Game with cool mechanics and a universe to play it in, that is worth $$$. Making your shirt green is not worth $... it is worth a colour-wheel implementation.
Back then I got dozens of crates that I didn't open, now worth as high as 31$CAD each. I looked it up last week and it's worth over a thousand dollars in Steam. I cashed in on almost half of it and now I have some cash to buy games for my family and friends.