Valve might have earned $67k from the Team Fortress 2 economy bug

Earlier this week, a bug hit Team Fortress 2, guaranteeing that players who opened in-game chests would receive a rare cosmetic drop and tanking the game’s economy almost overnight. Valve has since disabled item trading, but while it’s working on a fix, the nature of the Steam marketplace means that it has potentially generated a passive, but handsome profit. According to one Reddit user, that might be as much as $67,122.93 (around £55,000). User InstantMuffin has posted a detailed breakdown of “Valve's profits from the market crash” on the Team Fortress 2 subreddit, and they say that “based on crate 82 and 85 alone [these] are at over $30,000.” Though they say their estimations and calculations may not be entirely accurate, they give some “ballpark numbers” about the money made by the studio from certain crates, with edits of the list ongoing. The user says “with crates 1-18, 82 and 85 and key sales (minus [a] generous amount of income they would get from normal market key sales during that time), we are at $67,122.93 income” at their time of writing. Valve’s profit stems from the ‘tax’ it earns through the marketplace, which automatically grants the company a small cut of every sale made across a number of games. You can see a breakdown of InstantMuffin’s maths in the tables they drew up.
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