How to Make Money on Steam in 2024 — $500 in 30 Days

Have you got a lot of skins in CS: GO? Or a bunch of Steam Trading Cards? You can start making money! No need to leave your computer, but it will become even more interesting. In this article, we will tell you how to make money on Steam.

Steam is the largest gaming platform that allows you to not only enjoy licensed games but also earn thousands of dollars. More than 10 million users visit Steam every day, each of which can become your potential client.

What Is Steam

Before we start talking about getting revenue, let's look in more detail at what Steam is and how to use it. So, this is a service where you can buy games, get items in them, and trade loot. If you are an experienced player, you can skip this section and move on to the next. And everyone else is recommended to sort out the main points of this platform.

Steam is both a playground and an online service. Here, gamers compete in various popular cyber disciplines, such as Dota 2 and CS: GO, and buy almost any licensed PC game and some programs.

All types of earnings in Steam can be divided into five groups:

• trade in-game items;
• trading accounts;
• betting on sweepstakes;
• trading games;
• performance of tasks.

The service is visited daily by more than 10 million people. With such an audience, you can use it not only for entertainment but also for income.

One of the advantages of this social gaming network is the availability of a special trading platform for players. Imagine a market with millions of buyers and sellers from around the world.

Only, unlike the regular market, it is not vegetables and fruits that are sold, not clothes, but a very specific product: GIFTs, collection cards, skins, capsules with stickers for CS, profile backgrounds, emoticons, gems, etc. On this, and not only — many users make money.

How and Where to Start

If you are in no way connected with Steam and computer games, you will have to invest both money and time in this service. And the latter is much more. Let's see how to register in the service.

1. We go to the official website of the gaming community.

2. Click the "Install Steam" button at the top.

3. Click "Install" on the next page.

4. A standard installation file will be downloaded to the computer. We launch it and follow the simple instructions inside.

5. Run the program. Click "Create a new account."

6. We go through registration, which also consists of several simple steps: creating a nickname and password, confirming the email address, and phone.

How much money can you earn? It all depends on how many copies of the game or how many items you sold. Let’s imagine, you sell 100 copies at a price of $1, which means you have $100. The higher the number of game copies you sell, the better for you.

We want to show you a good example of how to earn $500 on the Steam Community Market by buying and selling CS: GO skins with low floats using basic economic principles:

First Payment

Before making money you should first spend some. The service does not activate the account until $5 is credited to it. There are 2 ways to transfer money to the Steam virtual wallet: via Qiwi terminal, or through the service itself, using electronic bills or bank cards.

For transferring funds through Steam you need to click on the button with the account name in the upper right and select "About account". Then click "Top up the balance", choose one of several proposed amounts, and click "Top up balance". Decide on a payment method and transfer money to a Steam wallet.

After adding $5, you can spend them in two ways: put this amount onto a Steam wallet, or buy one or more games. It’s better to just deposit money into your wallet, you may need them later.

Important! If you have just registered in the service, you need to wait 30 days from the moment of the first purchase in order to get full access to the market.

For this, you need to buy some games so that this period begins to count down. Not all games are suitable for collecting cards. Look for those whose value is less than the total value of the cards.

You can find such games using this site: steam.tools/cards/. After that:

1. Go to the Steam store. We set the filters "Games" and "Trading Cards", as well as sorting by price increase (this is better done in the browser, not through the app).
2. Open the table of games.
3. Compare the price of the game with the approximate cost of the card (column Card Avg). Based on this, we buy the cheapest card games as expensive as possible.

To get started, it’s enough to purchase several games to spend those $5 required for activation. Note, that the total value of the cards exceeds the cost of the game.

Now, these 30 days can be spent with benefit — catching cards from games. It’s not necessary to do it on your own — or you will spend 8–10 hours for each game. For this purpose, there are many programs.

Now let's talk about how to make money with Steam in 2022.

Getting and Trading Items

Steam lets you trade items with your friends: extra copies of games, in-game items, and trading cards. But first, you need to check if your items are "tradable." Open your Inventory, click on an item — and you can see in the information panel on the right side whether it's tradeable or not.

Trading items is the most common method of earning in Steam. To send an offer from your Trade Offers page open Steam and do the following steps:

1. Hover over your persona name at the top.
2. Click on Inventory.
3. Click on Trade Offers.
4. Click on New Trade Offer.
5. Select the friend you'd like to make a trade offer to.
6. Click and drag the items you wish to trade from both inventories into the trade boxes.
7. Check the box to confirm the trade contents.
8. Click on Make Offer.

How to see and compare prices for items

 Go to Marketplace, and select the game In the menu on the right. By the way, doing these things is more convenient in the browser. You cannot open many tabs in the Steam application, and you will have to click on them often.

There are a lot of different in-game and in-service items. They can be divided into three groups: cards, skins, other collectibles.

So, let's start with the cards.

Trading Cards

Trading Cards are virtual cards earned by playing games on Steam. They can be used through Steam for credit that you can spend on buying games, or downloadable content, and in-game content.

Cards can only be obtained in participating games. There are a lot of them, and it will not be difficult to find which you’ll like the most. To get them you just need to play. While playing, you can get only three or four cards, the remaining two or three for the badge need to be bought or exchanged. That’s where the business begins.

Why do players buy Steam Trading Cards:

1. For crafting badges. A badge is an icon on your profile that shows the trading card sets or your participation in an event. Badges give you unique Steam chat emoticons, backgrounds, and game discounts. Plus, crafted badges give you another Steam level with an expanded friend’s list and a higher drop rate for the Trading card packs.
2. For reselling them – just buying low and selling high. That’s how you can earn on Steam. Suppose you found a priceless item and you are offered to sell it for 10 keys. In this case, you check the market value of the items and make a deal. The rarer an item the more expensive it is. So, you can sell one rare item for one hundred Dollars and more!

Automatic card collection

If you want to farm steam cards using multiple steam accounts, use Archi's Steam Farm. This service doesn't require any steam client running in the background. It's meant to be run on servers or other desktop-less machines. You can use it on Windows, Linux, or OS.

You can use for this Idle Master or Idle Master Extended. 

From the game, each can fall from about three to seven cards. If the sum of the cards is more than the cost of the game, here is a profit. You are especially lucky if the Foil Card drops out. Steam Foil Trading cards can be crafted into foil badges. They can be more expensive than usual at times and fall out very rarely.

Expensive cards

Things are a little more complicated with cards that cost from $1 or more: they are worth buying on the trading floor. It is necessary to predict the moment when the price of such an item will be at a minimum level. If there are less than ten cards, their prices begin to grow very quickly. Sometimes you have to wait a couple of months to successfully sell such a card.

Buy through bots

If the 30-day period has passed, and you have access to the store, you can buy cards automatically. You can use the extension for the Steam Trader Helper browser. Using this, you just need to set what we want to buy and the purchase price. It will automatically start purchasing this in the Steam market.

How to Sell Cards

Once you have cards ready, you’ll want to make some Steam Wallet funds. The process is a little slow, but if you have a lot of cards, you can get a decent amount of money. There are three options for sale:

• Marketplace. First, check your inventory. Click the envelope icon in the upper right-hand corner and click “[X] items in your Inventory”. Click the “Steam” category to view your cards. Choose a card you want to get rid of, scroll to the bottom, and click the “Sell” button. You will see a graph of average market prices. Based on these data, you set your price. It’s better to do it just below the maximum. For example, if the price is $0.12, sell for $0.11.  Click "Put up for sale."

Note: the service takes a commission of 15% percent on each purchase.

• Exchanging. This method is more complicated. To make an exchange with a player, you must first find someone who wants to buy cards from you. This is better to do in thematic communities. Write “exchange” in the Steam Community Search, and you can find many groups where users communicate with each other.

To make an exchange, you need to add the user to friends. Then, in the chat with him, click the "Offer exchange" button. Choose from your inventory what you want to give away, and in his inventory, what you want in return. If a friend agrees, he confirms the exchange, so do you.

• Cash sale. We must say, a rare player will decide on such a dubious deal for the sake of cards. However, it's worth chatting with users in the same thematic communities. Maybe someone will agree.

Skin Trading

Steam skins are different looks of the Steam client interface. The skins changing include color options, menu, fonts, background, buttons, etc.

Selling skins on Steam Marketplace is pretty easy. All you need is a non-banned Steam account. The system allows you to either put up your items for sale or look for specific offers.

Skins also drop in games randomly. Some of them can cost more than $1 000. The highest price for skins are in CS: GO and Dota 2. In other games, prices are usually lower. You can buy various skins in the market, and then resell them when the price rises. The price does not necessarily rise: there is a chance that the item will become even cheaper if, for example, there are a lot of them in the service.

Other Collectibles

There are many more things that can also be sold and exchanged: sticker capsules and stickers, profile backgrounds, emoticons from games, gems.

Some of them cost less than a dollar and some may reach thousands of bucks. They are sold in the same form on the Steam trading platform, and their prices add up in approximately the same way.

Sticker Capsules are a type of container in CS: GO, and one of the most expensive things in Steam. Dropped sticker capsules require a corresponding sticker capsule key to be used in order to be opened. When opened, the player will receive a random sticker from the capsule's sticker series. They can be yellow, red, and blue in color.

Inside this container is a sticker that you can use on your weapon. They can be obtained at CS: GO during the competition. After that, they are immediately sold for a lot of money, and after a week the price suddenly drops again. But after a few months, the price may rise.

To successfully trade in capsules, you need to know when the competition will go. Buy them up and then wait. Sometimes you have to wait about six months, but in rare cases, you can earn more than $500, while spending $ 1–2 on a purchase.

Backgrounds and emoticons. In addition to capsules, there are rare backgrounds and emoticons, the prices of which are also sometimes very high.

Users get them for their great gaming experience and crafting (exchanging several cheap items for one expensive) badges from cards. It is difficult to guess which background will be the rarest since the system gives them to players randomly.

Cosmetic crates contain a random class-specific Cosmetic. In some games, you can purchase them with in-game currency or get them by playing the game. In some cases, these crates can be worth a lot of money.

The two most popular games that drop crates currently are Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Playerunknown's Battlegrounds.

With Counter-Strike, you can get two crate drops per week just for playing the game. Just earn experience, and you'll receive a drop. Usually, drops from Counter-Strike only cost a few cents. But if a new crate appears, it can cost a few dollars during the first couple of weeks.

CS: GO launch "operations", and if you buy one, you'll get the chance to get more rewards, and some of them could be worth hundreds of dollars.

You can buy a crate with 700 Battle Points, but each time you buy a crate, the price doubles. Wait till each Monday for the crate prices to reset. PUBG crate prices are much better than CS: GO ones – you can often sell the crates for between $0.20 and $2.

How Else Can you Earn

There are some additional possibilities in CS: GO and Dota that allow you to earn more. Let’s talk about streams, operations, and other features.

Streams

During tournaments, there are live broadcasts of games. Everyone who watches this broadcast can earn a random souvenir pack. Then the item is added to the inventory in Steam. In some cases, something really valuable comes across there. For doing that you need to:

1. Connect to the stream using the Twitch service.
2. Select the "Settings" section.
3. In the "Connections" link the account to Steam.
4. Find the video you want to watch on the portal.

Now, when watching streams of matches, even in the background, you will have a chance to get some items for free and after that, it is possible to earn money in them in Steam. The chance is low and depends on how many people watch the stream. With 50,000 spectators per game, they get 1,000 boxes of items. 10–15 of them can be really valuable.

Operations

Operations are campaigns in CS: GO that must be completed online. They consist of several missions. At the end of each mission, the player can get a new skin.

Sometimes these are extremely rare skins, the cost of which is more than several thousand rubles. Each operation must be bought. They cost about $ 5, so they can’t always bring in income, although real gamers do not care much about it.

Crafting items

In CS: GO and Dota 2, you can create weapons and some other items yourself. To do this, it is also necessary to collect various things in the game and make modified skins based on them. In addition to collecting, using the workshop (Steam Workshop), you can generally make unique weapon coloring and various modifications.

Crafting CS: GO and quality weapons

In Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, weapon skins are divided into several types:

• Battle-Scarred;
• Well-Worn;
• Minimal Wear;
• Field-Tested;
• Factory New.

There is another option – smuggled one, but it is a rare thing.

The player is responsible for the craft. It may happen that you get not the weapon that you were promised, but another.

Tip: Before the start, check the cost of the received item and the total cost of items for crafting.

Account Trading

For this earning option, you just buy games at a discount and save them. After that, the account can be sold, allowing another gamer to save on the purchase of games, and earn it yourself.

This method of earning requires financial investment and time. Do not buy the cheapest games that no one will need later. It is better to make a list of good games and buy, for example, shooters, RPGs, or the entire series of GTA and its clones. Spend at least $15. The more you invest, the greater will be the benefit.

If you have money for that, keep several accounts at once. Moreover, if you accumulate a lot of games on your account, It may happen that you cannot sell them all. Buying games is better during major sales or days of discounts.

Bets

Betting is another popular method of earning in Steam. It is most suitable for those who are savvy in e-sports, or for very lucky people. Here you risk not with money, but with game equipment.

Here players make bets on matches of e-sports teams. Some sites offer something like roulette: when items are simply played between players who have made bets. Most of these online casinos are fraudulent, so you should not rely on them for big money.

This up-to-date guide lists all of the collectible items released so far and explains how to acquire and upgrade them.

How to Sell an Account

To get started, you should know how to NOT sell an account. Don’t do this in Steam communities – it is strictly prohibited by the rules of the service, and you’ll get a ban. Do not sell your account on social networks and forums — too many spammers. Use instead special platforms, for example, PlayerUp, it is safer.

Find out the price of your account. There is a very convenient calculator for this. The cost depends on these factors:

• The number of games.
• The presence or absence of VAC bans.
• Inventory. A vast amount of items, especially for popular games, can greatly increase the value of an account. Level in online games: the higher it is, the higher the price.

Conclusion

Earnings on Steam are suitable for players who have at least a little experience in this service.

In short, you can earn quickly using trading cards and improved weapons. Profitable ways to earn money are selling accounts and rare skins, capsules, and cards, crafting rare weapons.

If you don’t want to spend money, you can try to improve weapon skins in Counter-Strike, as well as bet on things from Dota 2 and CS. Sites with tasks do not require any start-up capital at all, with the help of them you can go to serious methods of earning for free. Watching streams will not bring serious income, but it also does not require any investments.

So, you can receive income on Steam, but not very large. Great competition and difficulty in finding items, selling accounts, as well as problems with low paybacks do not allow to receive a normal income. It depends on the time and effort that you are willing to spend, as well as on your luck level. Steam is rather for gamers who prefer to spend earned money on the same platform since withdrawing money is a rather expensive procedure.