Valve earns close to $700 million a year selling CS:GO cases

Here are the statistics for January 2023. Cases highlighted in blue are now actively dropped after matches, green ones drop much less often, orange ones don’t drop at all. Players have opened more than 23 million cases. Valve received almost $60 million from the keys this month alone.

Swedish YouTuber Anomaly looked at the statistics over the past few years. Developers earn an average of $667 million a year. $54 million per month. $1.8 million daily!

In 2022, developers spent $2,250,000 on Majors, approximately 0.34% of the total amount earned on cases. And it is unlikely that the rest of the amount went to the development of Source 2. Simultaneously, Valve spent $ 16.5 million on tournaments. Less than earned from cases in the last 10 days.

However, Valve still receives money from the capsules. There are no exact numbers, but in August 2022, Valve announced that it had paid teams $70 million per capsule for the year. Their profit is divided in half, meaning the company has earned the same amount.

Developers also receive 15% of each sale on the marketplace. The total amount is unknown, but it also costs millions a year. Finally, developers receive money from opening capsules with game stickers and buying new game copies. In the last month, the game has been breaking online records, which means developers are also earning large sums here.

Valve can increase the prize pool of majors by 10 times without damaging itself. But instead, they only release 2 new cases a year and occasionally introduce small innovations. But only using the amount received from the stickers for the majors, the developers could break The International's record for prize money.

However, a few years ago, Gabe already said that Valve had left eSports in CS:GO in the hands of the community and did not want to interfere in it actively. On the one hand, this gives healthy competition and the whole game is not built around one major tournament. 

On the other hand, the developers could raise the Major's prize fund to at least $10 million, so it would be somewhat different from the final Blast or Katowice and Cologne.

Recall that Valve employees have stolen CS skins for hundreds of thousands of dollars in 2022. Steam support staff has access to all the information with which you can restore your account: all purchased games and transaction dates, keys used for activation, and the first mail of the account.