> Alternatively, you can now rent a blockbuster film using money you have made while playing games. Trading cards, skin drops, crates/cases etc can all be acquired without putting money into the system but can be sold for credit on the steam marketplace.

But where you can earn enough money? The total value of all items I've earned on Steam probably doesn't even sum to 1 Euro...

> The total value of all items I've earned on Steam probably doesn't even sum to 1 Euro...

You aren't idling Bad Rats then, if you just idle the game you'll earn $0.20 cards every so often. There's a really weird underground economy in steam around cards. I don't really understand the market, it seems akin to smokes in the joint. There are farmers (people idling games), scammers (people taking more value than they're getting), there are arbitration scripts always running for the various steam and third party market places.

A lot of the value I think comes from people who want to have a really nice Steam profile. With enough cards and xp you can get a nice background and a high level. I haven't really looked into it but some people take it really serious and are willing to pay for it.

Does idling Bad Rats produce more revenue than the cost of the power consumed by doing so?

It does when you live in a dorm or your parent's house. Same as a pizza delivery driver using their parent's car. Or Uber drivers unable to do the math on their costs.

There a lots and lots of markets where the seller almost always loses. Look at art and music.

You didn't answer the parent's comment, though. The answer is that the cost of electricity is greater than running this game, even if it's run in the background.

It's irrelevant if you live in a dorm or your parent's house - you just pass on the cost to whomever is the responsible party. And you finish with a rather bizarre statement about markets where the seller loses. There are markets where a large number of sellers compete for a shrinking amount of market share with an undifferentiated product. But it's irrational for someone to sell something at a loss in the medium to long term, overall (unless they are a monopolist).

>The answer is that the cost of electricity is greater than running this game, even if it's run in the background.

There's a 3rd party application that most serious card idlers use, it uses negligible processing power, just pings the SteamWorks API to say you're playing the game. So if you have steam open in the background, I doubt this adds more visible cost than having a pinned tab in chrome.

http://www.steamidlemaster.com/

Externalizing as many of your costs as you can is business 101.

The seller doesn't realize they are losing because they are not correctly calculating their costs. With art and music and things like pizza delivery / Uber churn maintains the market as the unaccounted for costs(debt, depreciation etc) finally catch up to the current participants removing them.

My guess: nope

Well, I guess it depends on how you use steam. If I sold all my CS:GO skins, TF2 items, and trading cards, I'd have several hundred USD.

Yeah, with enough time and consistent playing you can make some money. I play CSGO pretty consistently and I've made enough to cover all the DLCs so far. Usually my strategy is: buy the DLC and play a lot right after it comes out. You're bound to get a few drops from the new set. Selling those immediately can easily make some money.

You might be surprised, when I first discovered you could sell trading cards I listing all the ones I'd collected and made ~£30.

I had a similar experience, and over the years I've bought 3-4 games using trading cards that I'd gathered.

Dota and CS go tend to be where the items at.

Oh yeah, that's a good point I hadn't considered. I supposed it remains to be seen if enough people use it that (or another) way to make it a profitable endeavor.