Does Valve make $54M a month from case keys?

CS:GO skin trader and YouTuber Anomaly has apparently figured out what profit Valve makes in an average month on CS:GO case keys. According to Anomaly, Valve allegedly earns $54 million just from the keys for the CS:GO cases.

If his data is true, it’s a staggering sum that the game studio is now earning. But it’s no wonder the CS:GO cases are considered Valve’s cash cow. The studio is one of the pioneers of in-game purchases and cosmetic microtransactions that has grown into a major publisher. Whatever the reason why the YouTuber wanted to find out what Valve is making from the CS:GO cases, we look at his claim here.

25.9 million cases opened in one month

Anomaly worked on the calculations by Fjedjik, a user on the CS:GO Market Forum Subreddit. The user wanted to calculate how many cases are opened per month and looked at the database of the skin website CSGOFloat.com. Using his own mathematical formula and the database, he could apparently calculate how many cases were opened.

Fjedjik has estimated that from May 1, 2021 to June 1, 2021, a total of 25.9 million cases were opened. The keys to open the cases cost $2.50 each. Based on just the keys needed for the cases, Valve would have made $65.75 million that month alone.

Many keys will also be bought in 2023

Anomaly then decided to extend Fjedjik’s calculations to January 2023 and found that from May 2021 to January 2023, a total of 458 million crates were opened. If we break that down to 641 individual days, that’s about 714,509 cases per day.

That would mean Valve could make $1,786,271.45 per day. That’s an average of more than $54 million per month (54,355,263.16) and more than $651 million per year (651,989,078.25). Anomaly has wondered why this money isn’t being put into the Majors’ prize pools like The Internationals in Dota 2. In Dota 2, the prize pool is funded by the community through the sale of cosmetics, but that’s how it became for CS:GO never done.

 

The prize pool for both CS:GO Majors combined — $2.25 million last year — is just 0.34% of the amount Valve made from CS:GO case keys alone. Valve released cases in 2014 that were specifically designed to fund CSGO prize pools, so-called eSports cases.

But that was almost ten years ago! After the cases, they were replaced with team stickers to support players competing in the annual majors. But not everything goes into the prize pool, only a percentage goes to the teams and players.

Anomaly also pointed out that this is all just for the keys! This doesn’t even include transaction fees for the Community Market, weapon name tags, and Prime Account earnings. Not to mention the profits from Dota 2 and Steam sales.

Header: Valve