For those who did not get the reference, Valve paid out 400K$ in the first week of 2014 [1] to item creators for Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, which are purely cosmetic video game items ("hats") [2].

[1] http://steamdb.info/blog/43/

[2] http://ca.ign.com/articles/2013/04/16/how-to-make-a-living-s...