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TF2 Item Farming: profitable?

rivethead

rivethead

Platinum Member
Hi all,

My 14 year old insists that you can make a profit (ignoring the time requirement) by buying the cheapest item in TF2 (which apparently enables you to then receive marketable items) and then farming your 8 items/week (or was it 10?) that TF2 will drop. He says you can join an idle server and just do nothing until your items drop.

My simple question: can you really make a profit doing that? If yes, then why isn't everyone doing it (maybe they are?) Call me suspicious.

This all started when I saw all this TF2 stuff on the Steam Market once I start selling my card drops and I asked him what all that stuff was.....


Thanks!
 
Your kid is right. It wont amount to much $$ unless you get sometime good, but after doing it for a few weeks you probably would have enough to get some game(s) on sale. For a young kid that is pretty good imo.
 
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Thanks for the reply KaOTik!

LOL, I thought he was full of crap. Despite my "too good to be true" warning, I'm sure he's been doing it. I'll have to check it out.
 
rivethead said:
Thanks for the reply KaOTik!

LOL, I thought he was full of crap. Despite my "too good to be true" warning, I'm sure he's been doing it. I'll have to check it out.
Click to expand...

NP. It will require some work on his part to sell some items or trade them. But like I said, for a kid or someone that has lots of free time that can do it idly, it can add up a little bit.
 
I suppose you can make revenue. Though the items that drop are aren't terribly valuable, so if you factor in electricity, it may not be worth anyone's while for pure monetary purposes.

You CAN make a sizeable profit through two other ways:

1) Spending money on keys ($2.50) for a rare chance to win a rare item with $100s or $1000s. This is a straight gamble that can cost you lots of money.

2) A form of day trading. Just go around and ask for trades and see if anyone will give you something for less than the "going" price. Caveat is this is very time consuming.
 
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I've only played TF2 a couple of times but I ended up with some hat that was apparently worth something. A guy messaged me out of the blue and offered to trade a game for it.
 
Clinkster said:
I suppose you can make revenue. Though the items that drop are aren't terribly valuable, so if you factor in electricity, it may not be worth anyone's while for pure monetary purposes.

You CAN make a sizeable profit through two other ways:

1) Spending money on keys ($2.50) for a rare chance to win a rare item with $100s or $1000s. This is a straight gamble that can cost you lots of time.
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What does that mean?

KT
 
in order to trade properly you need a premium acct. so minimum purchase is 50cent item from store, but the smallest amount you can bill to credit card is $5. so the initial cost per account is $5.

drops per week ~8 = ~.5 refined.
1 refined not worth anything on market.
5.55 refined = 1key
1key ~$2 on market
so 11weeks to earn 5.5ref/$2

now if the acct is lucky and gets rarer free drops like salvaged crate($8), high 5 taunt(1key/$2), rare hat; then the profitability can go up.

if he is a real wheeler and dealer, he can do a lot of trading on small items and make a decent profit.

Mind you all this is for steam store credit. so he can earn enough to buy a newish game on a major sale.

the real money is in unusual hats, but that typically requires opening crates with keys which is the same as tossing $2.50 into a slot machine.

the only other way to make money reliably is to have like 50 accts, but that takes a big initial outlay of cash or years of drops to trade for an upgrade to premium tool.

you need to weigh the time he wastes hanging around in trade servers hustling vs time not spent studying. if you intend to send him to college, have him study. if you want him to become a car salesman, let him trade. while you can learn a few things about arbitrage in tf2, mostly you are learning how to talk other people into taking a bad deal.
 
KeithTalent said:
What does that mean?

KT
Click to expand...

opening a crate with a key can yield a strange weapon, hat, or tool. less than 1% of the time it will yield an unusual hat with a visual effect attached. a good hat with a desired effect is very valuable. the most desired unusual can be sold for cash/paypal on certain black markets for 100$ to 1000$.
 
gorobei said:
opening a crate with a key can yield a strange weapon, hat, or tool. less than 1% of the time it will yield an unusual hat with a visual effect attached. a good hat with a desired effect is very valuable. the most desired unusual can be sold for cash/paypal on certain black markets for 100$ to 1000$.
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Wow, had no idea, thanks for the info. Crazy.

KT
 
haha 8 or 10 drops per week usually result in bunch of worthless weapons. Since there are hundreds if not thousands of items at this point, very large % of them are not worth anything.
 
KeithTalent said:
What does that mean?

KT
Click to expand...

Sorry buddy, I meant it can cost a lot of MONEY. It's $2.50 key for each opportunity for a rare item that will net you larger profit. But you can open up hundreds of crates and end up in the red.

I've edited my other post.
 
Clinkster said:
Sorry buddy, I meant it can cost a lot of MONEY. It's $2.50 key for each opportunity for a rare item that will net you larger profit. But you can open up hundreds of crates and end up in the red.

I've edited my other post.
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Too late KT has dumped his life savings into his Steam wallet 😀
 
Ya know, when I made my original post, I was thinking "profit" in terms of cents.....maybe a few dollars at most.

Not $100's to $1000's. You've got to have a serious illness, IMHO, to value a "virtual" item in the $1000's.

Damn.
 
If you get lucky and get one of the valuable hats (or 'strange' weapons) they can be worth some dollaz, but otherwise you're basically dealing in items worth pennies (or not even that much).
 
rivethead said:
Hi all,

My 14 year old insists that you can make a profit (ignoring the time requirement)!
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Your 14 year old needs to learn that time is money. It's the one thing in life that you don't get more of. The time requirement is the most important factor. 😛
 
My son used to be huge into tf2 trading and crap. I always viewed it as an incredible waste of time. He'd spend countless hours trading items and be all happy that he made a "1 key profit". Which costs $2.50, but you could buy keys for half of that in cash. I'd try to tell him that he just spent a few hours to make a $1 profit, and if he wanted a dollar that badly I could give him plenty of chores to do where he could earn a lot more profit than that, but he didn't care, lol. I'm glad he finally got out of it, as it was driving me nuts.
 
I actually have an unusual fedora (spy hat) with the ghost effect. I always get random offers every now and then, but never did sell/trade it. I think it's worth anywhere from $50-$100 in real money, but I don't trust doing business through Paypal.
 
14 year old he should be learning a trade.

Money is relative though, its not REAL money, its steam wallet money for more games.
 
imaheadcase said:
14 year old he should be learning a trade.

Money is relative though, its not REAL money, its steam wallet money for more games.
Click to expand...

As a parent, it's hard for me to complain about him. He studies hard, gets excellent grades despite taking HS-level classes in middle school. His high school offers elective courses in Video Game development, Mobile App Development, and programming and he's worked himself into a good position to take two out of the three - he's pretty passionate about technology. So I think he's effectively learning a trade (in a modern-day sort of way).

My concern about all this was the initial investment - if you can truly buy the cheapest thing for $0.40 and then get 8 drops/week for a value of $.10/week (just a swag), then after a month he's break even. I don't lose sleep over that!
 
Not to piss all over your kid's ambitions, but I'm betting he would make more money for less time invested mowing lawns than farming TF2. Granted everything in Austin could be xeriscaped and there's nothing to mow.
 
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