With the latest patch, CS:GO introduced a seven-day delay for exchanging items received from other users. During the day, prices for the game's most popular items drop on the Steam marketplace. What happened and why everyone is starting to sell skins en masse is in our material.
Previously, Valve imposed restrictions on the exchange of items if the user did not have a Steam mobile authenticator: in these cases, the trade was delayed for as much as two weeks. Skin traders benefited from using a mobile app to avoid delays. Now even this will not help make massive and quick exchanges of skins and other game items.
Most likely, the innovation is aimed against roulette sites and external trading platforms. Such sites use bots that make hundreds of exchanges a day: things quickly come from some users and go to others. Valve does not make any profit from this.
The new rule of the game will significantly slow down trading, so many users panic and start selling items: no one knows what will happen to the game next, so it’s easier to convert skins into currency or keys (third-party sites and the Steam trading platform allow this).
Let's take, for example, the most popular CS:GO lots on the Steam trading platform - AK-47 | Redline and AWP | Asiimov is in “field tested” condition. Over the past month, the price for an assault rifle has fluctuated around 460-470 rubles, and for a sniper rifle - 2,200-2,400 rubles. Within a day, prices dropped to 370 rubles. and 1,800 rub.
On the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive Trading subreddit, many fear that the patch will kill trading in CS:GO. Someone is already thinking about going to trade items in Fortnite or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.
Swedish video blogger Anomaly said that he had already sold all his skins and recommended that all his subscribers (and he has more than 2 million of them) do the same: he believes that prices for items will drop significantly.
Previously, the innovation was also criticized Nikolay device Ridtz from Astralis. In his opinion, it was the skins that helped CS:GO gain a large audience.
- In theory, Valve will actually lose some users who are actively involved in trading. And these are not just a few or even hundreds of players;
- The income of third-party marketplaces will fall, but they will definitely not stop working. Buying items there for real money will still be more profitable than on the Steam marketplace, where Valve takes a commission for each transaction;
- Skins should become significantly cheaper, but the price drop will not be permanent.
- Don't wait for the innovation to be cancelled. Valve can only lose money in the long term (if the game loses its audience), otherwise it doesn't risk anything.
The Marketplace is one of the most popular and core features of Steam. You can make good money by selling in-game items, especially if you understand the value of items and have some market trading skills. Unfortunately, the Steam market is not initially available to all users. It is not enough to simply register an account to gain access to it; for this you will need to fulfill a number of conditions.
Using the Steam Market
All players who do not have limits on their account can easily access this section through "Community" > "Marketplace".
In this case, it opens without additional difficulties and is available for selling and purchasing goods.
However, new and limited accounts do not have access to these features. The reason is always indicated in the market section itself. In the screenshot below you can see two errors at once that do not allow you to use this subsection of Steam: no purchases have been made on the account for a long time and it has certain restrictions. Chances are you've encountered some of these conditions too. Let's look at them, as well as other possible problems, in more detail.
Any blocking and restrictions are related to security: this is how Steam tries to prevent the possible theft of items, which often follows after accounts are hacked.
Limited account
Most often, restrictions are set due to the fact that the account has been registered, but not verified: to do this, you must make a purchase of $5 or simply put this money in your Steam wallet without spending it until you want. You can top up your wallet in parts - they will be added up until the total is $5. Until you do this, the account will have the status "Limited", which will significantly complicate its use. In particular, in addition to the blocked site, you will not be able to send friend requests and use many other functions. In the article at the link below, we explained how to purchase the game on Steam. You need to use exclusively Method 1, since the payment must be made through the internal system of the service.
When using another currency, the amount of purchases or deposits into the Steam wallet must be equivalent to the current dollar exchange rate. You can find it through a search engine or in the online bank/electronic payment system you use.
A beginner may notice that in the right corner there is an inscription "You don't have a Steam Wallet", however, you don’t need to create it - it will appear on its own after the first deposit of money to your wallet.
Purchase made less than 7 days and more than 1 year ago
Another problem is the infrequent use of Steam. To confirm your intention to use the market, at least once a year you must make a purchase on Steam, be it a game or the Marketplace (who previously had it unlocked) for any amount. Moreover, in our case, you will additionally need to wait 7 days after making the purchase, naturally without returning the game or demanding money back. If you do this, the restriction will resume.
Disabled Steam Guard
Steam Guard is necessary to protect your account. When it is disabled, you will not be able to use the Marketplace until you enable one of its two types. If you are not satisfied with using a mobile authenticator, use linking your account to your email. To enable it, go to "Settings". This can be done immediately through the top panel or RMB on the Steam icon in the tray.
On the tab "Account" click the button "Manage Steam Guard Settings...".
From the proposed options, choose the first or second depending on your needs. Linking Steam Guard to your email requires you to log in to your account again, don't forget this.
Important! After enabling, you will need to wait 15 days - after which the Marketplace will be unlocked and become available. Removing and re-enabling will reset the day counter. After deleting the mobile authenticator and switching to confirmation by mail, the market will be blocked for 15 days.
Everyone knows that Steam Marketplace is an exchange where price dynamics directly depend on any resonance, what do I mean by this? - sales, the release of new things in Dota 2 (or discounts on them), possibly in CS: GO, the release of some cool game like GTA 5, in general, everything that makes people sell their things to buy something... In this time prices for things fall, and sometimes it’s not bad, people sell all things in order to quickly buy a game, etc., we’ll play on this
And so are the advantages of this method.
1) Minimum amount of your time spent.
2) Good income!
3) When using a bot, work can be minimized!
Minuses :
1) You need initial capital. at least 500 rub. on Steam
2) Maximum Steam balance is 14,000 rubles.
3) It takes time to implement.
4) You must understand Steam things.
I want to say right away that probably many have already heard and even knew something like this, this is essentially an ordinary resale, this is practiced not only on Steam (if you know what I mean), but I hope you enjoy this topic!
And so, our time is sales, we will make a test purchase! and these will not be gifts, as many thought... We are waiting for the middle of the sale by day, or for example, as soon as CS: GO appears with a 75% discount, everyone usually wastes their money at this time and sells their things for pennies. There are many moments in the year when you can buy things well 4 sales on Steam. Or for example when Valve release lassos or compendium"s - prices are falling. Why won’t we buy Gifts? - The answer is simple, they need to be sold, and even in recent times, if you take a lot of Gifts, then you can be sanctioned. So, as soon as prices decline, we buy a thing, I usually take mythical from 5 rubles onwards Legendary, immortal I take everything up to 300 rubles! As soon as you buy it, you can safely put it on the trading platform for + 30% and + 100% depending on the item. You shouldn’t take one thing many times, it’s better to take a little of everything - a little bit. Maybe someone will think for a long time, etc. I’ll say this, if you do this at least at 2 sales, then the money will soon flow to you.
Statistics by day: I started keeping my statistics every day, just for fun.
Almost every day I get money on Steam without doing anything at all. Yes, I've already missed out on a lot of sales. But why are you worse?) You can earn no worse than me. Or +100 rubles a day is not enough. I will say this, I can not notice them for 2 weeks then hop 1400 I already have some change, but it’s nice. Then you can withdraw them in a cunning way without losing %; alternatively, you can buy them during sales in Dota 2 Legendary sets, there the exhaust will be 30-50 rubles per set very easily. There was a sale in Dota lasso for line, I bought 4 pieces for 600, after 2 weeks they went for 1000 rubles. and that’s 1600 rubles +++. In general, you should start and you will understand what you need to buy! So why am I soon in March and this will be the spring sales of Steam and a new event in Dota!
That's all, essentially all you need is regular resale, nothing more, here are some small examples:
Immortal strongbox chests:
Here's how much I got them for:
Things that are waiting for their owners:
P.S. I would like a small insert about compendiums do it in Dota 2!
As everyone already knows, compendiums in Dota 2 are introduced before the start of TI, and when they are introduced, their price in the store is 300 rubles, but as soon as they disappear from the store (this happens in the latest international games), they immediately become more expensive, for example, a compendium from 2013 now costs more than 4 k, 2014 - 1300, although it was several times cheaper, now the 2015 will be on sale, I advise everyone to buy it, but don’t take too much!
We study popular ways to make money on cards and farming items on Steam.
To bookmarks
Everyone who uses Steam has at least once heard about “cards” and the sale of in-game items. When the next sale starts, you can often hear that someone is buying a game “just to farm cards,” or bragging about how they made money by selling some item from the game. We decided to figure out how this system works, and at the same time conduct an experiment to find out whether it is possible to make money on the Valve trading platform.
How cards work
First, a few words about how to receive cards for those who are not registered on Steam or have never been interested in the process. Thematic cards appear in your Steam inventory after you spend a couple of hours in the game. Their number varies from 5 to 10, but the player will receive only half of this number. To get the rest, you will have to trade with other players, or go to the Steam Market and buy there.
The user sets the price for the card based on the last price posted on the trading platform. For example, another user’s price is 5 rubles, yours is 4 rubles 95 kopecks. The proceeds go to the internal Steam wallet, but it is impossible to withdraw money from it.
Page with collected cards
After collecting all the cards, the player presses a special button, after which a beautiful icon is “forged” from the cards. Icons have a level: the more icons we create, the higher it is. There is also another way to get cards: instead of selling game items, you can turn them into gems, and from them you can make a set of cards.
Creating badges increases the player's personal level in the Steam profile, which in turn affects the frequency of card packs and additional slots for new friends. At level 40, packs with cards dropped out to me once every two weeks, sometimes more often. What game will the pack be for? This is hard to predict since it all depends on the popularity of the game and the number of badges created by the community. Most often, card sets dropped from little-known indie games, visual novels, and games that had recently appeared on Steam, from which I had already pinned an icon.
No one is safe from identical cards after unpacking the set
After forging the badge, the player will receive an additional background for their profile, a discount coupon (usually only for niche indie games), and an emoticon for chat. Backgrounds and emoticons can also be sold, and they are divided into three categories: common, uncommon and rare. Items marked "rare" often cost a couple of hundred rubles, which in some cases will pay for the full cost of the game. It all depends on how popular the game is, because in popular games prices for items are quickly reduced to a minimum.
This is how the icons change as you level up. The last icon is “metal”
In addition to standard cards, there are “metal” cards (very rare). Most of them cost up to 400 rubles apiece, and the price depends on the popularity of the game. A special “metal” badge is created from these cards.
These 12 metal badges are valued at several thousand dollars
Why is all this needed? To some extent - because it's exciting. Comparable to the feeling from childhood when you were bought a Kinder Surprise and you don’t know what toy will be inside. Here, instead of toys, rare emoticons and backgrounds drop out that can be used or simply sold.
CityScape is my favorite background from the game Terra Incognita ~ Chapter One: The Descendant. The developers took it from the game Streets of Rage. The approximate price at the time of writing is 12 rubles
How does selling items and cards work on Steam?
Selling a card on the Steam marketplace is almost no different from selling an item from a game. It's all about the nuances. To begin, the user goes to his inventory, selects the desired item and looks at the very bottom line, which says, for example, this: “From 2.65 rubles. Sold: 4 in the last 24 hours." 2 rubles 65 kopecks - the price of a sale request based on the last lot. At this price, the item can be bought from you on a first-come, first-served basis, but if you lower the price, for example, by 40 kopecks, the item will be bought faster.
There may not be a line with a price. Items from newly forged badges cannot be sold instantly, so instead of a sell button, it will be written about when (on what date) sale and exchange will be possible. Also, if you want to sell an item instantly, you should pay attention to the separate “Purchase Requests” column on the trading platform. In it, users set their own price at which they would like to buy this or that item.
After selling an item, the money goes to the user's Steam wallet. The funds can be used as a small discount when purchasing a game or used to buy other cards. If you don’t want to spend money, then it’s easy to change items. Any game on Steam has its own forum and “Exchange” section, where users leave their requests for exchanging items. For example, if you really want an inexpensive rifle from Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, but there are no other items for exchange from CS: GO, then the user can offer 10 rare cards or several inexpensive items from Dota 2 for this rifle.
Attempts to make money
In four years, my level on Steam has risen to 97, but I wouldn’t say that I get any significant income from the cards. Some players spend thousands of rubles to “boost” their accounts: it’s reminiscent of the old version of the social network VKontakte, when people spent crazy amounts of money to increase their reputation level under their avatar.
Of all the icons, I hung the most informative one - the number of years since registration on Steam
On average, I spend from 100 to 150 rubles on cards every four months. I deposited money from a credit card, forged 5-6 badges and later sold items from them for 200 rubles. With this money I bought other cards, made a badge again, and so on - a constant circulation of money for a couple of months.
Expensive metal cards in the game “Petka and Vasily Ivanovich 2: Judgment Day”
Sometimes you can make a profit and use the proceeds to buy a good game at a discount. But these are isolated cases. Often you get back the same amount you invested, or 50% of it. Some chained badge items are so expensive that it is almost impossible to sell them at the recommended price. The price of an emoticon from some indie game has to be reduced by half, otherwise no one will buy it. Well, or wait a few months until you find someone who doesn’t mind spending a couple of hundred rubles on a picture with a resolution of 80 by 80 pixels.
Badges and cards have become an integral part of Steam for me. Sometimes I even get the feeling that I don’t consider completing a game complete if I haven’t pinned down an icon in it.
For the sake of experimentation, I tried several methods with which you can make money. Passionate people also know other little-known methods: someone creates additional accounts for profit, but I only used a personal profile and 50 rubles in my wallet.
The traditional and correct way to get cards is to play yourself. Some, however, try to bypass this need and use third-party ones that imitate the game and farm cards without user interaction.
This is how ArchiSteamFarm works
Method number 1: just sell
For example, a player bought The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, spent a lot of time with it, and after some time discovered cards in his inventory. He didn’t understand why he needed to spend money on some badges, so he sold all the cards that fell out on the trading platform. There are still plenty of players on Steam who have a huge collection of games but a low profile. They don't want to spend money on cards and sell everything they get. And the proceeds help you save on future purchases.
Method number 2: making money on indie games
Go to the “Games under 150 rubles” section and sort them by price. Indie games are cheap, and bad indie games cost pennies. Every week they are given big discounts, often the price drops to 15 rubles. At the time of writing, the cheapest game on Steam was Grind Zones.
4 rubles 90 kopecks is not money. In two hours you can get all the cards and sell them for 12 rubles. That is, if you have five accounts on Steam, then you can get about 60 rubles from selling cards from Grind Zones. This method of earning money is real, but inconvenient: a lot of time would have to be spent just transferring cards from account to account. Theoretically, in a couple of months of active card farming you can earn money for an AAA game.
Method number 3: return the game
One of the most popular, but also dangerous ways to make money on cards. For example, I learned about it after purchasing the remaster of Worms: World Party at a summer sale. The game refused to launch due to incorrect operation on monitors with resolutions higher than Full HD. You can solve this problem by lowering the resolution in Windows settings. Such manipulations did not suit me: I bought the product, it does not work, now I want to return the money for it. The money was returned within a week.
The most interesting thing is that during unsuccessful attempts to revive the game, two cards fell out, and after returning the game no one took them away.
Farmers indicate “Frequently crashes” in the reasons for return.
Some Steam users specifically buy games with expensive cards (15-20 rubles and more), knock them out using the ASF program and submit a request for a refund. Steam, as a rule, always returns money if the user played for less than two hours, and 14 days have not passed since the date of purchase. It is better not to abuse this method, because sometimes accounts are temporarily blocked due to frequent refunds. There are no fools at Valve, so I didn’t take any further risks.
Method number 4: buy cheaper, sell more expensive
More myth than reality. During sales for many games, the price of cards drops as they try to sell them cheaper. There is an opinion that if you buy cards during a sale, then after it ends they can easily be sold at a higher price. I tried this with several games, but only managed to earn 8 rubles. Indie Game Bundles. The main problem is that with free games you can hardly get more than 100 rubles a month, even taking into account several accounts.
Farming items
Some players make good money by reselling game items. The method is doubly effective if you work with rare items from popular games: for example, buy a knife for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for 3,200 rubles, and then sell it on another site for 3,250 or 3,330.
It is important to clarify the situation with third-party sites here. You cannot withdraw money from Steam; you can only spend it on buying something in the store itself. This is how Valve tries to maintain control over the platform and prices. So users have to resort to the services of third-party sites, but no one there is safe from scammers. It often happened that players were deceived and they lost money. Valve is mostly neutral towards third-party services, intervening only in cases of outright fraud.
Hello "citizens" of our site. In this article I will introduce you to a certain way to increase your capital on the Internet in the resource Steam. The whole method is based on Community Marketplace and it is with her help that we will increase our savings. We'll do the classic resale, only we will do it with wisdom and intelligence.
As we all know, the price of skins/items/cards, etc. constantly rise and fall and (except for some). We will need to buy things when they reach their minimum and sell them at a higher price when they rise in price again.
So:
To begin with, we need a certain amount on steam (the more, the better). And the ability to look at and analyze the sales history of any item.
I will show everything using the example of AWP weapons | African mesh (Field tested). As we can see in the chart, the price increased very sharply on January 24. By as much as 0.20. And today, January 25 at 12:24 she is small again. You can make money from this.
1) We need to buy this skin before the price drops to 0.3.
2) And now feel free to set it for 0.35-0.4+. Don't worry, your skins will be bought. Although not immediately, later in the evening.
Total: with 1 operation we perform, we spend 0.30, and get 0.40 = 0.10, with one operation, we go to “+”. (personally, I raised $28 from $4 in 2 weeks, spending 2-3 minutes a day)
A little hint: you will probably say that this is all long, tedious and it takes a lot more time... But I hasten to please you, because there are a huge number of programs/applications/extensions that will do this work for you. I use this one myself (Steam Market Bot). And all I have to do is add this skin to the application, indicate the price at which I will buy/sell it and press the “start” button. And I can forget about it for the whole day, and when I return, I will have +2-3$ (depending on the initial funds).
That's all, I hope you liked this method. And remember, the method is not only about the awp skin. You will have to look for things yourself and look at their sales history. I just gave you a little hint.