There are so many different ways to make money on the Internet - I’m talking about real ways, and not about all sorts of Forex and other trading - you can’t count them. But, as far as I remember, no one really bothered with describing how to make money on Steam. I think this omission needs to be corrected. Let's start with the simplest and least expensive method - cards. And then...we'll see;)

Yes, since this is an instruction, there are a lot of pictures under the cut.
Especially for the community - I understand that the public playing here and the information described below is already known to many, or, for one reason or another, is useless. But, if suddenly not - welcome, whatever.

Let me make a reservation right away - the method is very gentle. It requires little time to implement, the initial investment is also very modest... but the income is not very large. Yes, and withdrawing money from Steam is hemorrhoids (but possible). But it’s quite possible to earn money for new toys. So, it is recommended primarily for those who play quite actively. Yes, the described method is not the only way to make money on cards, but other methods are much more resource-intensive.

How to find what to buy

So, we assume that you have a Steam account and you know how to use the local store. Wonderful! Go to the store and click on the "Discounts" link:

Select “Sort by price, from inexpensive” in the drop-down list and get a list of the cheapest games:

Scroll through the list and get to the filters. There we set the filter "Collectible cards":

All! We've got a list of all the games that are on sale and contain trading cards. Now you need to understand what and how to buy, and where to sell.

What exactly to buy
It is worth buying those games that are included in our filter and whose cost does not exceed 7 rubles. And here's why: basically, such small games contain 3 cards, whose price rarely exceeds 2-3 rubles. Personally, I still focus on 3. That is, 9 rubles per copy. However, please note that you will be charged a 13% commission for sales on the Steam marketplace. Thus, you will receive 7.83 rubles. As much as 83 kopecks profit bgg... But sometimes strange things happen, I remember, having bought some kind of toy for 4 rubles, I received three cards, each of which for some reason cost 50+ rubles. But such cases are rare.

How do trading cards work?

If the game has cards, then it allows you to collect a collectible badge that will give you a number of additional "friend spots", a nice picture and a limited-time coupon for a specific game. As well as a special emoticon and background for the profile, applicable only on Steam. To put it simply, it’s useless slag and there’s no point in bothering with them. But, if you want to embellish your profile, don’t bother.

In order to get a card, you just need to start the game and... that's it. There is no need to play (although you can if you want). You just need to wait. You can even minimize the game with the Alt+Tab key combination and do whatever you want. Also, some games (for example, Indian crafts on Unity) show you a menu with settings before starting the game itself. To receive cards, just launch this menu. The main thing is that in your Steam library of games, the game is displayed as “Running”.

After which you will be shown the games in which you can get cards. Find the one you are interested in and see:

And then you just monitor Steam notifications about new items in your inventory. As soon as the amount you are interested in accumulates, close the game, delete it and shove it into the appropriate category in your library. I recommend creating a separate category so as not to get confused.

How and where to sell?
Now we get to the most interesting part: how to sell the received cards now? Go to your inventory:

Select the item you are interested in, click on it and look at the item menu.

We are mainly interested in the current price on the trading platform and the “Sell” button.

By clicking the "Sell" button, you will be shown a sales menu with purchase and price statistics. Based on the sales curve, you can set any price that suits you. But, I would put +/- 10% on what is indicated in the product menu. Although, if you are not in a hurry, you can bet anything - maybe someone will buy it;) Please note that both the actual price of the product and the amount of money you will receive after the sale are immediately indicated.

After accepting the terms and putting it up for sale, your card goes to the Steam marketplace. You can get to the site like this:

As you can see, all your placed lots are listed here with the ability to remove them from auction (after which you will need to put them up again) and... and whatnot!? What does it mean that a lot is awaiting confirmation?

This means that the current Steam security policy, in order to avoid the sale of any goods from your account by any attackers, requires:
A. Confirmation of the placement of the lot via the email address linked to the account.
b. Confirmation of the placement of the lot through the official Steam application linked to the account.
It doesn't seem to be a big deal, but mail is extremely inconvenient. Each lot is separately confirmed by letter. Moreover, after confirmation via mail, the lot will remain on hold for another 2 weeks. And prices change...

Therefore, the application is our choice. Download from Google or from the Apple Store. For Windows owners too

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. With the start of the next sale, you can often hear that someone is buying a game “just to farm cards,” or boasting 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 site 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.

September is coming to an end, very soon a series of major sales will hit users’ wallets, and Halloween events will begin even earlier. It's time to think about cards, or more precisely, about their stocks. Today's lesson will be about trading cards.
What is this? What are they needed for? Where to get them and the easiest way to raise your Steam level - all this in the second issue of Stymology.

What it is?
Trading cards (Steam Trading Cards) are digital items that can be obtained on Steam by playing games, participating in promotions and exchanging gems for them. They look like cardboard cards with a picture of something and when you click on the picture they show the whole picture.
In the United States, collecting real cardboard cards is a popular hobby and is closely associated with board games and sports, especially baseball. They are collected in special albums, and the rarest cards can sometimes cost more than one thousand dollars.
Steam cards are collected into sets in order to create a game icon. Usually an icon has 5 levels, and to raise your icon to 1 level you need 1 set of cards. In this case, the icon changes in appearance. After forging the icon, the cards disappear, and in return you are given a profile background, an emoticon and a discount coupon. If you click on the level 5 icon, you can see all the cards in the set. Art from the game is usually used as pictures for cards: portraits of characters, landscapes, weapons and other things related to the game. Sale cards (there are some) usually contain games that VALVe marketers deem worthy of purchase. More precisely, art dedicated to these games.
You can read more about cards and.

What kind of cards are there?
The cards look different, but the essence is the same for all.
There are different types of cards.

• The most common is a simple trading card. Looks like a card with blue fields.
• Metal trading card (Foil)- Rarely dropped trading card. It costs more than a regular one and is needed to create a rare metal badge. Looks like a card with beige fields.
• Mystery card (Mysterious Card)– usually appears a week before a major sale along with a section for a mystery badge. Drops when forging a regular badge instead of a discount coupon a week before the sale. When the sale starts, it turns into a sale card.
• Sale Card - a card that can be used to forge a sale icon. It can be simple or metal. You can get it in different ways - for participating in voting (there were several sales), for purchasing games for a certain amount, or even just like that. But the usual way to get this card is by forging sale icons. Only available during winter and summer sales. After its completion it disappears.

What are they needed for?
High level means big expenses. Cards are a valuable resource. They can be sold, exchanged for something or given as a gift. But their main purpose is to raise the profile level. The higher the level, the more showcases there will be in your profile. The more showcases there are in a profile, the better you can customize the appearance of the profile. Additionally, forging icons of your favorite games and displaying them in a display case is a good way for fans to express their love for games.
It is worth remembering that not only Steam, but also the game developer receives a small commission from the sale of cards on the trading platform.

Where can I get them?

There are several easy ways to collect cheap sets of cards to later forge icons and raise your level.

• Weekly sales. Every week there are small sales on Steam. On them you can easily find games priced from 2 to 7 rubles with cards. In the CIS, these games cost a little more. When you buy a game like this, you can get half a set of cards out of it for much less than if you bought the entire set on the marketplace. It's up to you to sell them and get double the money or collect a badge. The downside of this method is that most of the games are disgusting indie games that are sometimes impossible to play.
• Buying cards for metal from TF2, exchanging them for various items. You will have to create a bunch of transactions on all sorts of trading sites. And maybe you'll get lucky. There are also people who are ready to exchange cards for scraps or backgrounds/emoticons. The downside of this method is that you need items for exchange. In addition, it would be a stretch to call such a trade honest - cards usually cost much more than metal and backgrounds. In addition, serious traders consider buying to be indecent and bordering on scam.
• Free game giveaways. Every week, various sites and developers give out game keys to everyone. Usually, to get such a key, you need to have Twitter and Facebook. By subscribing and liking the posts, you can get the game key for free and, by activating it on Steam, start knocking out cards. The downside of this method is that you need to follow promotions and have many accounts on popular social networks. In addition, most of the games are indie, which is almost impossible to play.
• Getting cards using a card set generator. Complex and expensive method. Suitable only for receiving valuable and expensive cards. In order to get a set of cards you need to spend a certain number of gems (Gems). Gems can be obtained from unwanted backgrounds and emoticons - each of them has its own price in gems. On average, a set of three of their cards costs 600-750 gems. The method is completely unsuitable for obtaining cheap cards, since the price of 1000 gems is quite high - at the time of writing - 45 rubles. The disadvantage of this method is the high cost of stones. Luck and card sets
• From time to time, Steam users receive card packs from games they own. One pack contains three random cards. The higher the level, the more sets fall. This happens completely randomly, but quite often. Some of the sets are much more profitable to complete than to sell. The disadvantage of the method is the randomness and rarity of falling sets.
• Free icons. Not really cards, but they increase the level. On Steam, in addition to game and sale icons, there are various icons dedicated to certain events or user status. Of course, not everyone gets a badge for a developer, translator, or VALVe employee, but a badge, for example, “Community Ambassador,” is quite easy to get. You can also get free badges at sales. In addition, your level increases based on the number of games on your account.

When to forge?

The set is ready, but it’s too early to forge the badge. Winter sale has not started.
One of the main mistakes many high profile hunters make is that they forge badges as soon as they have collected a full set.
It is much more profitable to forge badges during the winter or summer sales - at this time, for forging, instead of a discount coupon, you will be given a collectible sale card. You can also make an icon from this card, or sell the received cards at a good price at the beginning of the sale.
Until about the middle of the sale, their price is quite high.
Of course, there is a possibility that VALVe will change the system one day, but for now this is what is happening. It is more profitable to forge badges during sales periods.

Where is the best place to buy cards?

Steamcardexchange.net a badge collector's best friend
The clear answer is on the trading platform. You can find out which badge is the cheapest to collect on the website steamcardexchange.net. There in the section TOOLS need to choose bange pricelist and select increasing prices.
The traditional leader among cheap badges is the game Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
But I would classify the use of various sites that accept cards and give points in exchange as extremely unprofitable undertakings. Most of these bots are made to please their owners and take user cards for next to nothing. Although you can find something profitable there too.

How to sell cards correctly?

If raising the level is of little interest to you, and you decide to sell cards, it’s worth knowing a few features of the trading platform.

1. You shouldn't sell cards from a game that was just on sale right away. Usually during this period, card prices drop by a few cents. You can wait for the price to rise or “throw a float” - put the card on sale with a price a few cents/rubles higher than today’s.
2. Even if the price of the card is already high, it makes sense to price it a little more than the minimum price.
3. If you urgently need money, the easiest way is to sell cards from popular games. Especially if there are already profitable orders for them.
4. Don't be greedy when selling metal cards. If the game is not well-known and there are about 10 cards in the set, such a foil will cost very little. For more expensive games, cards sell well within 100 rubles and very poorly at prices above 200. Usually, expensive foils are bought by collectors and top traders, but there are not so many of them.
5. Cards from unpopular games are easier to use yourself than to sell. This usually applies to games where there are a lot of cards and their price is very low. For example: there are 12 cards in a set. You got 6, but two of them are the same. The price of 1 card is around 1 -1.30 rubles. If you sell the cards, you will receive an average of 6 rubles in total. If you buy 7 additional cards, you will spend about 8 rubles and get a complete set, which is much more expensive to collect from other cards. The same situation with cards of a popular game is unprofitable because the cards will cost more and you will spend money that would be enough for another set.

As for purchasing, there is only one piece of advice - place orders on the trading platform. The likelihood that someone will sell the card at your price here is very high.

The Counter-Strike:Global Offensive badge is not only cheaper than the others, but also gives an emoticon and background worth 100 gems each. What should you not do with cards?

• Exchange for cheap gaming gear. Especially for 1 scrap*/piece. It is very cheap and unprofitable. This refers to metal from the game Team Fortress 2. But all the trash from Dota 2 is also not the best choice.
• Transform into gems. Cards give very few stones; it is much more profitable to get gems from backgrounds and emoticons.

Well, the second issue of “Stymology” has ended. Leave your questions, suggestions or comments in the comments.
VT's opinion may not coincide with the author's opinion.

Have you accumulated hundreds of skins in CS:GO? Are there a ton of trading cards on Steam? You can make money with these things! To do this, you don’t have to leave your computer and be distracted from your favorite game for a long time - on the contrary, the process will become even more exciting. In this article we will look at how to make money on Steam.

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

• trade in game items;
• account trading;
• betting in sweepstakes;
• game trading;
• completing tasks.

And before we move on to analyzing each option, a little background information.

Steam is both a gaming platform 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 games and some programs.

The service is visited daily by more than 10 million people. With such a large audience, it can be used not only for entertainment, but also for earning money.

Only, unlike a regular market, they sell not tomatoes and cucumbers, not jeans and T-shirts, but very specific goods: gifts, collectible cards, skins, capsules with stickers for CS, profile backgrounds, emoticons, gems, etc. This, and more, is where many users make money.

How and where to start?

If you are not connected in any way with Steam and computer games, you will have to invest both money and time in this service. Moreover, there is much more of the latter. Let's figure out how to install the service and activate your account.

1. Go to the official website of the gaming community: http://store.steampowered.com/?l=russian

2. Click the “Download Steam” button at the top.

3. Click “Install” on the next page.

4. The standard installer will download to your computer. We launch it and follow the simple instructions inside.

5. Launch 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 your email address and phone number.

Entry threshold

So, a Steam account has been created, but that’s not all. The service does not activate the account until $5 is credited to it. This is a threshold for entry that leaves not the poor, but the scammers outside the gates.

Five bucks can be spent in two ways:

• transfer this amount to your Steam wallet;
• buy one or more games.

It’s better to just deposit money into your wallet; it will come in handy in the future. After this, the account will be activated, but some functions will still be unavailable - more on that later.

Transferring money to your Steam wallet

There are several ways to transfer money to a Steam virtual wallet:

• through Qiwi terminals;
• through the service itself, using electronic accounts or bank cards.

In the first case it is necessary:

1. find a terminal in your city,
2. found on the terminal in the Steam payments section,
3. enter your account name and transfer the required amount.

Let's also consider the method of transferring funds through Steam.

1. Launch a gaming service.

2. Click on the button with the account name at the top right and select “About account”.

3. Click “Top up balance”.

4. Select one of several proposed amounts and click “Top up balance”. $5 is, if anything, approximately 304 rubles, so 300 rubles may not be enough to activate your account.

5. Decide on the payment method and transfer the money to your Steam wallet.

In the window with options for wallet replenishment amounts, there is also a “Wallet or Gift Card Code” button.

It may be useful in the future when making money through sites with tasks.

Types of items that can be traded

Trading items is the most common method of making money on Steam. There are a lot of different in-game and in-service items here. They can be divided into three groups:

• cards,
• skins,
• other collectibles.

Cards

Trading cards on Steam are items that drop from certain games. To get them you just need to play. Cards provide experience to the user as they collect them into badges. However, there is a catch: you can only “knock out” three or four cards yourself; the remaining two or three must be purchased or exchanged for the badge. This is where business begins.

Common cards cost up to ten rubles, but there are also many rare ones whose price is over a hundred. Foil Cards stand apart - cards with a metal rim. They fall out extremely rarely, which means they usually cost higher.

Cards can only be obtained in certain games. However, there are a lot of them, and it won’t be difficult to find.

1. Click “Store”.

2. Click on the search line, do not enter anything there and press “Enter”.

3. On the side, find the “By characteristics” filter and check the “Collectible cards” box.

The search will bring up all the games through which you can get cards.

Skins are external shells for objects in games. The modified weapon will not shoot better, and the character will not run faster, but other gamers will envy the beautiful appearance. Skins also drop out randomly in games, but the conditions for their drop are more complicated and there are many more of them. But some of them can cost more than $1000.

The greatest demand and highest price for skins are in CS: GO and Dota 2. Therefore, most sellers specialize in these two games. In others, prices are usually lower.

You can view and compare prices for items as follows.

1. Place the cursor on the “Community” drop-down menu and select “Marketplace”.

2. In the menu on the right, select the game that interests us.

Note: it is more convenient to do these things in the browser. In the Steam application, you cannot open many tabs, and you will have to navigate through them frequently.

Other

There are many more collectible items that can also be sold and exchanged:

• capsules with stickers for CS: GO and the stickers themselves;
• profile backgrounds;
• emoticons from games;
• gems.

Among them all there are those that cost less than a dollar, and those whose cost reaches thousands of bucks.

Let's figure out how to trade these sets of pixels.

Trading cards. Step one: acquisition

Cheap cards

Let's start on the condition that we have just registered in the service. This means that before you make your first money on the Steam trading platform, you need to wait 30 days. This amount of time must pass from the moment of the first purchase to gain full access to the market.

First, we buy games so that this period begins to count down. However, you need to know what to buy. Not all toys are suitable for collecting cards. We need those whose cost is less than the total cost of the cards. For example, a game costs 20 rubles, and several dropped cards can be sold for 30 or 40 rubles.

You can find such games using this site: steam.tools/cards/. The algorithm is as follows:

1. Go to the Steam store. We set the “Games” and “Trading Cards” filters, as well as sorting by ascending price (it’s better to do this in the browser, not through the application).

2. Open a website with a table of games.

3. We compare the price of the game with the approximate cost of the card (Card Avg column in the table). Based on this, we buy the cheapest games with cards as expensive as possible.

To get started, just purchase a few games to spend the $5 required for activation. The main thing is that the total cost of the cards exceeds the cost of the game.

Now these 30 days can be spent usefully - knocking out cards from games. It is not at all necessary to knock them out yourself - then you will have to spend 8–10 hours playing each game. Many programs have been created for this purpose, the most convenient and proven: Idle Master.

Automatic card collection

1. We go to the office. utility website: steamidlemaster.com. Click the “Download now” button.

2. The archive that we are unpacking will be downloaded.

3. Launch IdleMaster.exe. The program will require you to log into your Steam account to continue working - click “Sign in”.

5. In the settings, select “Run each game separately.”

6. Let's launch. We wait while the utility checks each game in turn.

Approximately three to seven cards can fall out of the game. Through simple mathematical calculations we get: the sum of the cards is greater than the cost of the game - we are in the black. You will be especially lucky if you get a Foil Card.

They can cost several times more than regular ones and come out very rarely. However, if you constantly farm like this (to farm is to perform actions in games to obtain benefits: increase the level, earn money, points, items), then you will definitely be lucky - the probability increases.

Expensive cards

Things are more complicated with cards that cost 50 rubles or more: you have to buy them on the trading platform. It is necessary to guess the moment when the price of such an item will be at a minimum level. If there are fewer than ten cards, their prices begin to rise very quickly. Everything here is like on the stock exchange - sometimes you have to wait a couple of months to successfully sell such a card.

Conditions that ensure a successful purchase of a rare card on the market:

• no more than ten such cards;
• the price is now in a period of decline (this can be viewed using a special chart by clicking on the icon with the item);

• demand for it is also falling.

Purchasing through bots

If the 30-day period has passed and you have access to the store, you can buy cards automatically. Steam Trader Helper will help with this. The utility is a browser extension. In it we just need to set what we want to buy and the purchase price. She will automatically start purchasing it on the Steam market.

Installation

2. Select the “Settings” section.

3. In the “Connections” section, link your account to Steam.

4. Find the required video on the portal.

Now, when watching match streams, even in the background, you will have a chance to get some free items and then possibly earn money on them on Steam. The chance is low and depends on how many people are watching the stream. With 50,000 viewers, about 1,000 item chests drop per game. Of these, 10–15 are really valuable. On forums, players sometimes boast about receiving a souvenir worth 2,000 rubles.

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 receive a skin.

Sometimes these are extremely rare skins, the cost of which is more than several thousand rubles. Each operation must be purchased. They cost about 400 rubles, so they don’t always “pay off”, although real gamers don’t care much about this.

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

Crafting in CS: GO and weapon quality

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

• Battle-Scarred;
• well-worn;
• slightly worn (Minimal Wear);
• after field testing (Field-Tested);
• from the factory (Factory New);
• the best level is smuggling, but few people encounter it.

No, your AK-47 will not shoot any better or worse because it is battle-hardened or freshly fired. Only the cosmetic component undergoes changes. However, such differences in skins also lead to differences in prices, and the different condition of the gun affects crafting recipes.

Crafting in Contra is the combination of several types of weapons to obtain one, rarer one. Rarity is determined by the color of the inscription, here they are all in ascending order:

• white,
• light blue,
• Navy blue,
• violet,
• pinkish purple,
• red.

Accordingly, we use white trunks for crafting - we get light blue ones. The opportunity to craft something appears in the game's inventory after ten guns of the same rarity level have been collected. The opportunity will come in the form of an exchange contract - a separate item in unlimited quantity.

1. Open an exchange contract.

2. Select ten types of weapons.

3. Click the “Exchange” button.

4. Leave your autograph.

5. Click “Submit”.

After this, instead of ten, you will receive one new weapon.

Crafting blindly is not very profitable. Fortunately, many sites have recipes for successful crafting that allow you to get truly rare things. But the authors of the posts warn: the player himself is responsible for crafting. The probability of getting the barrel promised in the recipe is 60–70%. In other cases, you can be left with a much less rare weapon. Here are a couple of pages with recipes:

• forum for Na’Vi, a famous team: http://forum.navi-gaming.com/cs_go_oruzie/kontrakt_-kraft-_oruziya_counter-strike_global_offensi/
• website dedicated to CS: GO: https://csgo.gs/recepty-oruzhij-i-krafta-ks-go/

Advice: first check the cost of the item you receive and the total cost of items for crafting, so as not to take risks for the sake of going into the red.

Weapons can be improved by 1.5, 2, 5, 10 times. Accordingly, the price will increase by the same amount. This is done on a special website: https://upgrade.gg/.

The controls are extremely simple (don't forget to log in to Steam):

• move the cheaper item from the inventory (it’s at the bottom) to the left window;
• select the improvement factor;
• Click Upgrade Skin.

After this, you will either receive a new, more expensive weapon, or be left without the one you wanted to improve. The way to earn money is quite good and allows you to increase their value several times with a large number of cheap items. The main thing is a certain amount of luck.

This method can be very profitable. At the same time, it’s easier to understand than selling cards and other items. The whole point comes down to the fact that the user simply purchases games at discounts. When a large number of games have accumulated, the account can be sold, allowing another gamer to save on buying games, and making money himself.

This method of earning money requires financial investment and time. There is little point in buying games for 15 rubles that no one will need later. It’s better to make a list of good games and, following it, buy, for example, shooters, RPGs or the entire GTA series and its clones. You will have to spend at least 1000 rubles. The more you invest, the greater the benefit. There are players who received from 1000 rubles to 5000-6000.

If finances allow, it is convenient to maintain several such accounts at once in order to grow the amount two to three times more in one period. Moreover, if you accumulate a lot of games on your account, not everyone will be able to buy it later.

Sales

It is better to buy toys during major sales. These take place in mid-summer, autumn and before the New Year. At this time, in addition to the general price reduction, various promotions may be carried out, for example, a strong discount for just one day. You need to seize the moment.

Keys

At first glance, this method of filling your account with games is the most profitable. Keys are sets of characters, after entering which in Steam (shown in the picture above) the game is obtained. They are cheaper than the games themselves if you buy them through the service. However, there are many scammers among merchants: they can slip in a key that does not work or gives access to the wrong game. Therefore, looking for a good site with keys is always a risk.