Who to make money from Steam

Hello guys, In this guide I'll discuss possible ways for you to make money using skins. I hope you find this guide helpful. Please feel free to point me wrong at any point, if you find this interesting please rate the guide :-)

I'll try to include everything regardless, lots of stuff might be obvious and well known to many. And please don't confuse this with a "How to get rich" guide, this should be merely a reference, and the actual money generated depends on the current market prices.

At the time of writing some of the methods may not be very effective (due to market prices). But that is not the general case.

I've also created this website[www.♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.org], which would help you guys compare prices, get inventory total worth, help with trades, and lots of other stuff. Check it out and tell me what you think

Market fluctuations (Best approach)

Basically most cs:go items don't have a definite price, but rather oscillates over a price every now and then.

Here is an example (AWP | BOOM Minimal Wear).

As you can see here, prices oscillates between 10.00$ and 13.50$ every now and then. So the point is you can keep track of some items that you have seen its price oscillates, get them (through trade or market purchase) on low prices and sell/trade them later when prices are high

But you have to be careful while buying / selling / trading because sometimes the average price of an item would tend to decrease overall. Your buying price can suddenly turn into a high price for that item.

Note that trade is always the best approach as you do not lose 15% on market.

Also note that you do want to always trade popular weapons, or else u'll get very hard time trading it out and you might end up losing (no matter how cheap you got it for)

To make things easier, you can check ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ [www.♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.org] for the market prices compared to previous day

Market irregularities (requires bots : against steam TOS)

Every now and then, you'll find a weapon entry that has a very low price compared to its average price on market. Not sure if sellers of such items do that intentionally or by mistake, but it happens.

Here is ★ Flip Knife graph, as you can see the average price of this item is about 65$. but some people have managed to buy if for around 40$


Some guys have programmed bots to automatically monitor the market prices and buy the items that fall far below the average price (like these). So basically its too hard to get lucky with those.

But as the number of bots increases, only the most aggressive bots succeed (checks steam market prices more often than others). This actually would get them noticed by steam and thus getting their account suspended.

Note that using Bots are against TOS:

STEAM® SUBSCRIBER AGREEMENT a scris:

You may not use Cheats, automation software (bots), mods, hacks, or any other unauthorized third-party software, to modify or automate any Subscription Marketplace process.

Here is a story of a guy that actually got suspended

Trade up contract

The point here is, there is be a price threshold for weapons where acquiring 10 copies of it and trading it up would guarantee more money (or atleast with high probability)

Here is a fast example

Lets buy 10 of "MAC-10 Urban DDPAT" (FT / MW): 0.11*10 = $1.10

Trade them up to get the one of the "PP-Bizon Carbon Fiber" (MW / FT), for simplicity lets choose the lowest priced : $1.34

So for this example you got about 20% more value which is about 0.24$.

Although this is not much, but that is not the general case. This appoach could be done with other high valued items were 20% is alot more.

So basically the former example had a 100% guaranteed profit because you will always end with a pp-bizon. If you want to take some risks though you can check other collections that can end up with items that have 60% profit chance or so, but make sure you do several attemps.

In my opinion, I do not recommend trading up with less than 100% profit chance, because you cannot always calculate the probability of the result weapons and weapon's paint

Anyways to successfully use this approach, you just need to monitor potential weapon and buy them when their price meets your calculated threshold, and then do tradeups. If you also mix that with your knowledge of weapons fluctuation (mentioned earlier), u'd get really nice results.

Trade up contract (new feature)

On 15 May 2014, cs:go had an update which altered the Trade-up Contract

CS:GO Official a scris:

- The Trade Up Contract no longer restricts items to a single collection. In exchange for 10 items of identical quality, the Trade Up Contract provides one item of the next highest quality, from a collection of one of the items provided.

So theoretically speaking, you can mix 9 weapons all worth $0.03 (total $0.27) and 1 weapon of some other collection worth like $1.00 .. and get some weapon worth $8 or so from that other collection (with some probability).

You can do it the other way around too, you can mix 9 weapons of high tier stuff from same collection, and 1 weapon that costs nothing from another. Then trade up and get a weapon that has more value than what you spent.

The fact is, I have no clue how Valve calculates the final result, and whether or not it is propotional to the amount of weapons for each Collection used, thats why its pretty risky until we can get some estimate probabilities.

Personally, I do not recommend this approach, I've been trying the 9/10 tradeups and It happened to give me the 1/10 unwanted result alot more often than it should (although the 9/10 was pretty much profitable, the loss was more sever). But anyways you can still try it out and tell me what you think

Mass weapon case opening

Lots of people think that opening mass cases is a total waste of money, well .. its totally true, atleast now adays as market prices are deflated

But that isn't always true, I've created a tool[www.♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.org] that simulates case opening based on current market prices, using the probabilities from this case study (which i think is accurate enough). It turns out that some "cases" are getting near to break-even point (with an average of -$0.10 per case), and others are total trash (with a lose over $1.5 per case)


So basically Mass weapon case opening could be profitable at some point, depending on the current market prices. So before attempting one, atleast make sure you are targeting the right "case" type.

There is one thing that is clear though, the more cases you open the better chance you'd get of not losing so much money (or gaining money)

Discontinued items

Ever seen what happens when Valve decides to discontinue some items ... It becomes so rare that its price gets rediculasly high.

Here is an example for a ridiculous price increase, the Glock Fade


price rises from ~11$ to 70$

This is not true for all items though, the price increase is "propotional" to the demand of such item and the quantity that already exists on the market.

You wont know which items would get discontinued before hand, and I havent even found an official source that talks about them (maybe leave a comment if you know). Only this guy here[goaggro.com]seems to be listing them. But the catch is, the prices goes up gradually for an item. So if you noticed that early enough, and you think that this skin is in high demand, you might want to make an investment.

Weapon Drops

Maybe slow, but yeah you can still get some cash out of it. According to this guide here you can get up to 8 drops per week. So if you have patience, and got multiple copies of the game. You can join idle servers (can be found in community servers) and keep the drops flowing.

But basically most weapon drops u'd get is around 0.15$~0.05$ unless you get a weapon case.b