A lot of people know the insanity of prices of Skins for Counter Strike: Global Offensive. For paying a couple of pounds you get a chance at a unique skin for your gun to make it look a bit prettier when you’re playing. The rarest of these, Knife varients and paintjobs, can go for upwards of £300. It can get pretty insane. 

Because of this, there’s been a number of different lottery-esque gambling sites for the games skins. They require you to deposit a certain number of skins, or of a specific value, and they put you in a prize pool to win the entire pot. This results in some insane wins at low chances and can be great to watch and take part in.

This is the biggest gain. £42.25 after Steams Cut.

This resulted in me personally winning a couple of hundred pounds worth of skins. Some of which I gambled away for chances at skins I wanted, and some just for fun because I wasn’t a fan of them. After my friends and I decided to move on from the game, they sat in my Steam Inventory for months, not being used. That was, until, I had an idea to sell them on so I could buy some new games for essentially nothing.

Now that I had a new computer, it has compelled me to try more games out on my PC, rather than sticking to my Xbox One. It means I can make all my gaming on PC in 60FPS, rather than having to switch between some Xbox games running at either 30 or 60. It can be a bit of a jarring experience, but it’s one that console gamers have had to deal with for a while.

So, with my friends playing The Division on PC, I sold some of my items, got enough money for the game, and came to the realisation that I got a full game purely by selling cosmetic items in another game that could be acquired by as little as £2 (if I was extremely lucky, of course.) Not only that, but after my most expensive item, a Knife I gained purely by playing the afore mentioned lottery, I managed to pick up another game I’ve been after for a while, Rainbow Six: Siege.

£26.09 after Steam Cut

It’s a bizarre and weird feeling knowing that I’ve gotten these games for, what is essentially, free. It’s a different feeling than review code, because that has a purpose, and it’s work related. It feels…weird, and it’s hard to describe otherwise. For someone on a bit of a tight budget in terms of games, it’s a bit of a relief. There’s not much that I can sell now, as most of the items I have are either not worth much, or I’d like to keep if I ever went back to the game, so there’s not much chance that I can continue doing it in the future.

The Steam Community Market is a strange, strange place. You can gain money for virtual Steam Trading Cards, skins in Counter Strike, items in DOTA 2, and a myriad of other games. It’s such a strange system, but it manages to be incredibly rewarding if you spend a lot of time gaming. In some ways it’s even a shame that it goes directly into your Steam wallet, rather than just back into your bank account. Maybe one day, that will change.