How to earn money in steam

How to Make Money on Steam: 9 Legit Ways to Earn in 2021

If you are a user of Steam, then you probably know that it is one of the biggest online video game market places out there. However, you might not realize that there’s actually a way to put money into your Steam wallet funds without spending anything.

Keep reading to find out how to make money play games on Steam.

Table of Contents

How to Earn Money on Steam Marketplace

Before getting started, it is important to note that there is no way to take the money you get on Steam out of your wallet fund. So, if you were planning on making a career out of the Steam market place, you might be out of luck.

However, there are other uses for the money you get. While you can’t take the money out of your wallet, you can still use it to buy video games or other things on the market place like trading cards or cosmetics. This is a good way to make your video game habit a lot more affordable with little effort.

By the way, if you also play games on Twitch, read this to learn how to make money streaming on Twitch.

Here’s how you can make money on Steam.

1. Trade Your Cards

Most games on Steam have trading cards you can receive for playing them. You get one to three cards the first time you play a game after playing for two hours.

Most cards you get end up only being worth a few cents. However, you might get lucky and receive a foiled card that’s worth a couple of dollars. If you want to earn more cards, try using a site like Steam Idle Master.

Additionally, about every week you have a random chance of receiving a trading card Booster pack of three cards. You can either sell the pack as is, which is usually only worth about thirty cents or open the pack for the chance of getting foiled cards.

When you try to sell a card, you’ll notice a graph will appear that shows you how much the card was worth in the past.

Here are a few tips that apply generally to all cards:

2. Sell Your Cosmetic Crates

Some games give away cosmetic crates that can be purchased with in-game currency or real money. If you get one of these crates, you should see if you can sell them for some decent cash.

Some games that let you do this are:

But, the two main games that people use to make money are Counter Strike and PUBG.

With Counter Strike, you can earn crates by:

Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds will let you get crates with battle points, which are earned whenever you kill other players and last long into the game. You can then sell the crates for twenty cents to a few dollars each.

3. Hold onto Pre-release Items

When a game is available for pre-order, you will sometimes be given an early-access cosmetic item. Hold onto that item instead of redeeming it and you might make a ton of money.

This isn’t the only game that this happens too. A general rule is that if you think a game is going to be really popular, chances are their pre-order crates will also be just as popular.

4. Don’t Buy & Open Crates

You might consider trying to buy as many crates as possible and then opening for the small chance of getting a nice item. Ultimately, this is not worth the risk.

Most rare items have as low as 0.01% chance of appearing in a crate. So, you might have to spend thousands of dollars on thousands of crates just to get the item. It’s better to save up your money and just buy the rare item outright on the market place rather than spending all that money on what is basically gambling.

5. Sell a Video Game

There’s only one way to make real money on Steam which can be redeemed. Making a video game is a long process that requires a lot of skill in coding, writing, and art, but it can be worth the effort.

It’s important to remember, however, that your game will need to be a decent quality to get good reviews and actually make sales. It also takes a lot longer to develop a game than to sell some trading cards.

Other Ways to Earn Money on Steam

Here are a few other options to get you thinking outside the box…

Final Thoughts

Hopefully, after reading this guide, you have a better picture of what it is like to earn money on Steam. It isn’t as easy as you think but it can help you save a few bucks on the next video game you buy.

Do you think it’s viable to sell Steam cards and cosmetic crates? Have you scored any major sale through the Steam platform? Let us and our readers know about your experiences below, as well as any tips you think can help others who may be trying to learn how to make money on the Steam platform.

How to make money on Steam in 2021 [6 legitimate ways]

Did you know that you can earn some pretty good money by playing your favorite games? For gamers, this more or less sounds like a dream, no?

Do you want to know how to make money on Steam?

Numerous steam games give people earning opportunities by selling their trading cards, steam items and cosmetics. Yes, these all are valuable enough to get you some extra money every month.

I’m pretty sure that this list will prove useful for you as not too many sites have covered this topic yet.

How to make money on Steam (6 legit ways)

Here are 6 ways to make money on Steam,

1. Getting items

Okay, so the first way is to get hold some super cool items that most players would love to get their hands on. Now the question is, how can you get hold of these value added steam items?

You can play games and collect dropped items and trading cards but those are usually limited. Like in Dota 2 there are constant item drops which provide you with a stream of items but same point; you need loads of luck to get the rare drops.

Secondly, you’ll need to monitor the marketplace and stay in wait for an item‘s price to drop. This usually happens when drops increase in number as a result of a larger player base.

Furthermore, you can earn some fast cash through trading. Let’s say that you have hit the jackpot and found a priceless item in Dota 2. And then this random person comes to you and offers to pay ten keys for it. A wise gamer would double check the market values of both sides’ items and then strike a deal.

There are also a lot of gamers who are willing to pay a premium for something they really want to have!

You can regularly check the items you own by clicking on your username next to community and this will cause the inventory selection to pop up.

Also read: Free Steam codes (10 legitimate ways to get them in 2020)

2. Sell for a higher price (at the right time)

When we talk about trading cards, foils cards hold more value than the regular ones. Hence, you charge wayyy more for them!

As the natural rule goes, the rarer an item the more expensive it is in the market. You can easily charge for one hundred Dollars and more per item!

The timing matters. There are two situations where “regular” items may sell for a premium price:

You can observe this even now going on in the Community Market if you search for summer trading cards. Noticeably, the foil cards of summer sale can be seen increasing in price again.

This is valid for foil cards presently, however customary cards will turn out to be increasingly costly after some time too.

Since certain collectors need the Summer Sale identification, which they possibly get when they gather all cards and combine them into the badge.

Others may predict that the cost will go up at a higher rate more as time goes by and store cards due to this.

3. Save Up Your Trading Cards

As hinted out already, there will be a majority of games that will provide you with steam trading cards as a reward for playing them.

They usually are worth a few pennies each but you can usually get 2-3 of them per game. And if you are REALLY LUCKY, you’ll be given a card that’s worth a couple of dollars.

There is no real pattern that you can master to make sure you can get the valuable game cards.

However, there are certain rules that help out in the long run. Going through them makes the basis for you getting them in the first place.

It seems that you will get your first card after the first 15 minutes of gameplay. The second card will then drop after 2 hours of gameplay.

The best way to get cards is to not think about it. Simply enjoy playing the games that you do have, and over time your trading card collection will go up.

You usually get your first trading card just after the first 15 minutes of gameplay. The second one will arrive soon too, after 2 hours to be exact!

Personally, I believe that the best way to collect the cards is to not obsess over them. You’ll keep getting them when you passionately the game! So yeah, focus on enjoying.

If you really need the trading cards efficiently as possible, you should use Steam Idle Master to automate the process.

4. Hold Onto Pre-release Items

Sometimes, developers will drop exclusive pre-order or early access crates or items.

You may want to hold onto these items if they can be sold on the Steam market. These items can often end up being worth hundreds, if not thousands of dollars after the game goes into full release.

5. Distributing an Original Game on Steam Direct

This is the only way you can generate real cash on Steam. You can develop your own games or outsource them to some developer and then sell those games through Steam Direct. The money earned through selling these games or through in-app purchases is real money which you can withdraw.

But, this comes with a lot hard work and investment also, because developing a game of your own or getting it developed from a developer is not easy in terms of efforts and investment needed.

Guidelines and rules for distributing a game through Steam have changed recently. Steam now has stricter rules for satisfactory content.

The game you develop has to be really interesting and according to the guidelines and rules of Steam which have become very strict lately.

Nonetheless, if you think that you can make a game that people will simply love there is a possibility to earn some genuine cash!

Amidst all this, you should not forget one thing that 30% of all your earnings from the game sales goes to Steam. 30% is a lot but afterall they are letting you sell your game to huge community of gamers and at the end of the day it is one the way Steam makes money.

If you want your game release to be succesful, keep in mind some important tips,

Make sure that your game is actually interesting and fun to play.

The screenshots of the game and it’s trailer must be dope so that the people become eager and curious for the release of your game.

You can quickly analyze whether your game would be a great success or not from the first few reviews from the players, if they are good, it means the game is good and vice versa.

Try to integrate some features of Steam into your game to make it more interesting and relatable like you can add Steam trading cards or acheivements.

Other than all this, you should also remain active in the Steam community after your game is released so that you can interact with anyone needing any info.

6. Look Out For Item Drops In Your Favorite Games

A few games drop something other than exchanging cards. You can see which games drop important things by visiting the Steam Market and utilizing the “browse by game” section on the right side of the Steam program.

You’d be amazed at how many items are available to be purchased on this market.

A fascinating example would be the things in Golf With Your Friends.

Well here is an amazing video by Anomaly that goes into depth of making money on Steam, Do watch this video!

Don’t Fall Into Buying And Opening Crates

One pitfall to avoid is actually buying and opening crates with your hard earned Steam money. Whilst the attraction of potentially getting a rare item may be appealing, just remember that it’s very hard to get the high value items.

It makes far more sense to save up the money you make from crates. Eventually, you’ll have enough money to buy a cosmetic item, or you can even buy a new game entirely.

The Right way to buy

You might need to use the browser to purchase on the community market, as it is much quicker than the Steam program. You also have the option to utilize a script like Steam Market Helper which mechanizes a portion of the procedure for you:

Despite everything you need to get yourself except if you utilize the contents auto-reload, auto-purchase and rehash alternatives (which may get you restricted from Steam as bots are not permitted).

Anyway, utilizing a program is quicker than utilizing the Steam program. It has a strong comprehension of a things cost before you begin getting it.

Other ways to make money on Steam

There are two other ways you can make money on Steam apart from the the ones mentioned above,

1. Gifted designers and coders regularly offer their services to independent game developers.

1. There are some talented graphic artists, designers and coders that regularly offer their services to the game developers who work independently on Steam.

Developers once in a while need to employ specialists to finish a great deal of the work. You can scan for these open doors by participating in chats and hanging out at the steam gatherings.

Other than developing, you may discover bad-to-the-bone gamers who are happy to commission fine art. These people are regularly ready to burn through cash on the making of unique craftsmanship for their steam profiles and in-game content.

Other than that, you can also find some hard-core gamers on Steam that have money in their pockets and are ready to pay designers to design the artwork for their Steam profiles and other content in their games.

Be Patient

Keep in mind that using the Steam market to make cash won’t make you rich in a day. Truth be told, by and large, you’ll just be pulling in pennies all over.

After some time, in any case, your Steam wallet balance will keep on going up. In the event that you continue selling things as you get given them, in the long run you’ll have enough cash to purchase another diversion.

Last Thoughts on Making Money on Steam

Lastly, i would say if you really want to make money on Steam, you should stick this thing to your mind that making money on Steam is not much profitable and it really requires a lot of work (very hard work!!)

And one of the bad things is that when you sell some stuff in the Steam market, the money that comes from that sale goes to your Steam Wallet and NOT YOUR BANK ACCOUNT! Yes! You can’t withdraw that money to your bank account! You can only use that money to buy games or other items present in the Steam market.

In this scenario the only way that you can utilize to make REAL money is to first develop a game and then sell it in the Steam community which is highly unlikely unless you are a developer yourself or you have enough money to hire one.

There are people who hire small development agencies and get their games developed to sell further on. Sometimes these games generate thousands of dollars for them but at the end there is no guarantee that you will make money.

With this comes the end of this guide on, “How to make money on Steam”.

I wish you best of luck!

Also read: How to make 1000 dollars fast without a job (12 legitimate ways)

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs)

How do you get money on steam fast?

You can get money fast on Steam by following the ways mentioned in this article.

How much money can you make on Steam?

There is no exact figure, It all depends on your efforts, expertise and luck. If you are a good game developer, you have a higher chance of making good money from Steam.

Can you make money on Steam through steam trading cards?

Yes! You can make money on Steam through Steam trading cards. You can sell these cards in the community market for Steam Wallet credit.

How to earn money in steam

Please note this guide is not in a final state, I am less than 20% done with this guide but in its current state, it is still benefitial and can start you on your marketplace journey but alot of content is missing, hell I havent even put one screenshot in the guide yet. This guide will expand and go very indepth into the marketplace and how to make the most profit, consider adding this to your bookmarks and checkback to see if I have had time to add other ways to make money with steam to the guide over the next week or two.

Making money from cards is simple: Get cards, sell them on the market, and never actually use them to craft anything. The trick is to act fast, because right now, thanks to the Steam sale, the trading card market economy is crashing so fast it makes Greece look healthy in comparison. Get your cards quickly, sell them cheaply, and get out. Don’t ever bother waiting for prices to go up, because that isn’t going to happen soon.

What’s the best way to get cards? What’s the best Steam level to reach before trading? How does one get booster packs? Here’s a simple breakdown containing the info your need to do some quick ‘n dirty Steam profiteering, and hopefully make enough to pick up a free game or two.

Please note this guide primarily relies on the support of 3rd party programs and browser extensions as a ‘base’ on making a profit with trading cards. These programs and extentions are completly legal and highly reputable but I can not take any responsability if anything in this guide causes your account to be suspended or otherwise bad shizzle that shouldn’t happen but covering my ass clause because reasons..

Using the program ‘Steam Idol Master’, Idling is easily the most efficiant and effective way to farm trading cards with the least effort required, If you own games that are opted into steam trading cards, you can get around three to five cards for each game you own just by tricking steam thinking you are ‘playing’ that game. You can see which of your games support trading cards, go to the ‘Badges’ section on Steam for a list. On the top right corner of each game should be a little message saying something like «4 card drops remaining.» It’s possible to ‘play’ that game until you get all those cards and the message changes to «No card drops remaining.»

The only exception is Free to Play games, which award you drops for spending money in the game. Given that the cards typically go for a few pence, it isn’t worth buying items specifically for this reason. But if you’ve bought stuff before or if you used to own TF2 before it became free then you’ll probably have a few drops to spare.

More information on SIM in the next chapter.

Once you’ve earned all your regular drops, you become eligible for a Booster Pack. Each pack contains three random cards, including a small chance of finding a ‘foil’ card, which is worth ten times as much. Booster Packs are awarded at random, you don’t even need to play the games to get one, you just have to log into Steam once a week which is always a nice suprise. We will go into further detail about whether booster packs are worth opening or selling as a pack later in the guide.

Buying and Trading

The final way to get cards is the most obvious, you can buy them on the market, or trade them with friends. I tried buying cards cheaply and selling them at a markup, and while you can make money that way I find it simply takes way too much time and effort to be worthwhile. Trading is a better bet, because not all cards are created equal. If your friends care more about making a set than making money, you can trade cheap Team Fortress 2 cards for expensive Trine 2 cards and make a reasonable profit. Just be prepared to lose some friends if they ever find out (like say if you wrote about it on the internet).

Are you one of those people who have a lot of games in your Steam library that have card drops available but you dont enough time to play them or have no interest to? *cough* Bad Rats *cough*

How great would it be to run a program before bed and wake up to an inventory full of Trading Cards you can slap straight onto the marketplace and start earning that steam money? That’s what Idle Master does.

The reason why Idle Master is the key of farming and gaining profit is because not only you are not required to download, install or even have a single steam game open for Idle Master to collect any trading cards you can still collect from your game liberay without having to lift a finger.

So, first things first. You’ll need to download the app.

1. Download IdleMaster [www.steamidlemaster.com] from the official webpage.
2. Run the app, and click on login and enter your Steam credentials.
3. Run the Steam client.
4. IdleMaster will analyse your Steam Library and Inventory.
5. It will automatically start simulating the gameplay for any game which has card drops remaining, and unlock the cards. You don’t even need to download the games at all.
6. The cards will be added to your Steam inventory, and you can sell it on the Steam Community market.

Idle Master is open source and hence safe and secure to use. It even has a Steam community which stands as proof of the app’s legitimacy.

If you’ve been following the guide so far, you should have a fair few trading cards sitting in your inventory just waiting to be turnt into steam wallet cash.

Unfortunatly for people like myself who usually waits until I have 5-6 pages of trading cards in my inventory before I think to sell them, the standard steam interface is just not designed for mass-selling items and is a real pain that each item you go to post on the marketplace needs to have a manually entered sell price slowing down and wasting your time when you just want to always undercut the market. Luckily we have a free chrome extension called ‘Steam Inventory Helper’ this free browser extension for Google Chrome adds a big amount of new features into the Steam trade-offer system & Steam store functionality.

The extension only works in chrome so if you try to your inventory in your steam client, you are an idiot. Navigate to steamcommunity.com in chrome and log in.

If the extension is installed, you will see newly added buttons and prices below the items in your inventory displaying the average price of that item currently on the steam market.

With this extension it is now possible to mass select and sell all our farmed cards at the markets current price.

How to earn money in steam

Counter-Strike: Global Offensive

We will talk about Good sides and Bad sides of different kind of activity, and Does & Don’t about more specific ways.

3 Dollars = Alot of money
2 Dollars = Mid amount of money
1 Dollar = Not alot of money

We will also talk about the difficulty :
3 = Hard
2 = Normal
1 = Easy

And we will talk about if the way of making money worth it or not, we will judge with the words :
-Worth it
-Meh
-Not worth it

What is good with Design, is that you can do it infinitly, there is customers, there is places to make your advertisement and there is reward.
As a little example, Graphic Designer myself, here are my TOTAL earning since I started, the 29th December of 2016 :

Well, Coding might be less popular, because we are on Steam, and not everyone needs a coder, but on Steam, you can find alot of Gamers that would need you to code things for them, here, I think about all the Minecraft players, if you code, you will encounter some 😉 One of the best way to make money, when you are a Coder, is the Level Up Bot, but we will talk about it later.

As you can see, Coding has more bad things than good.

Boost is very common nowedays, not really well seen by players, it’s still legal, at least, it’s not specified x)
Go for CS GO Boosting, if you want to make money. It is popular, and there is Demand.

Teaching may be less popular, there is still a few person (and proportionally to steam there is a lot) that will contact you.
You should go for a CS GO (as always, most popular) or Design Teaching.

Just the most popular way, without any doubt. You’ll always find someone to trade with, then it’s infinite.

It might be hard to be sucessful, and by that I talk about 1000$+ / year. This is why I put a 3 of Difficulty.

This part have been edited, due to Kryb getting thousands of adds about how to create a bot.
I think get a Level Up Bot is the best way to make money : It’s super easy to manage.
Be careful, by manage I mean : Checking it & Refunding it.

A bot is EXTREMLY Hard to create and needs a High knowledge of coding, it cannot be teached or explained on Steam, please don’t spam Kryb to know how to make one 🙂

Here is a list of Easy & Hard things about getting a bot :
-Creating
-Getting a server
-Managing a dedicated server
-Refunding
-Managing
-Advertising
-Updating

This is not something you create in one day for fun.

As you can see, there’s not alot of bad things haha.
I have the honor to ask questions about the Level Up bots, to a level up bot creator.

A : My name is Daniel and I am from Denmark. I am currently studying in Denmark.
I have a strong interest in coding and hardware. The reason is I’d like to leverage my detail-oriented mind and apply the skills and knowledge that I have attained throughout my degree courses. I see myself as a people-oriented and over-achiever person. I demonstrated this through working in various group projects, with different types of people in which I had been able to perform well.

A : I started my level up bot 23-06-17.

A : In javascript

A : You’ll need Node.js, and NPM.

A : NPM basically makes it easy for JavaScript developers to refuse code, and it makes it very easy updating the code you’re sharing.

A : You definitely need patience, and surplus.

A : My bot has currently been up a week, and I’ve made around 20 keys.

As you can see, he made 20 keys in 1 week. Imagin getting 20 keys in 1 week with a brand new bot, wich means it needs to be found and to get a reputation.

Create CS GO skins is another passive incomes, if you manage to get your skin into the get (and you have low chances), good or bad, you’ll get alot of money.
It’s still blurry how many % you get, but, no matter what, millions of people will buy it. Hope for you it is expensive.

When you’re designing a skin you’ve got to make sure that you texture the whole gun, if parts are left untextured then you’ll be reducing your chances greatly, seems obvious but I see it a lot.

And on the question «Are you able to tell us much money do you make», he responded :

I’m not sadly, its a very good amount tho

How To Make Money With Steam – 10+ Best Methods To Earn!

posted on December 2, 2021 This post may contain affiliate links. Please read our disclaimer for more information.

If you’re familiar with gaming, then you’ve certainly heard of Steam, one of the largest video game distribution platforms out there.

And while Steam is a great way to play your favorite solo or co-op games, did you know you can turn the platform into a new side hustle?

That’s right: it’s possible to make money with video games thanks to numerous Steam features and ways to make money.

So, if you want to know how to make money on Steam, you’re in the right place!

In this guide, we’re covering 10+ ways to make money with Steam so you can fund your gaming hobby or bank some extra cash.

Sounds good? Let’s dive in!

How To Make Money On Steam

Steam has over 120 million users, making it one of the largest video game distribution platforms out there.

Because of this userbase and popularity, there are plenty of ways to earn money on Steam if you get creative.

Some of these ideas even involve playing video games or creating gaming-related content, so there’s an idea for everyone!

1. Make Money On The Steam Market

One feature gamers love about Steam is its reward system, which can award you with various in-game items when you play your favorite games.

Rare Steam items usually come in the form of skins, camos, and specialty weapons within various games.

There are also several ways to obtain rare items on Steam:

Once you obtain items, you can actually sell them on the Steam players for real cash.

The most common place to sell them is in the Community Market. To get there, hover over “Community” in the Steam application, then select “Market”.

You can filter items by price, rarity, game, and a ton of other options. Generally, the more rare an item is and the more popular a game is, the higher the potential price tag.

Granted, a lot of Steam drops are very cheap, common items. However, rare ones can sell for hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

Some popular video games than have a lot of rare items on Steam include:

2. Offer Video Game Coaching Services

Are you exceptionally talented at a certain video game on Steam?

Well, if that’s the case, one of the more creative ways to make money on Steam is to offer coaching services to players who want to get better.

An advantage of this Steam side hustle is that there are also lots of competitive games where players are willing to pay for coaching.

Some of the most popular games where people pay for coaches include:

Most gamers will take advice from other gamers in the highest ranks of whatever game they play.

For example, a League of Legends player will only be willing to listen to anyone who is Diamond or higher.

You can also look on other websites besides Fiverr, like GamerSensei for an example, to start selling your skills online.

3. Sell Steam Trading Cards

Steam Trading Cards are virtual cards that you earn by playing games on Steam.

This is similar to earning in-game items, except Steam cards are more like collectible cards and don’t really have in-game utility.

However, you can turn Steam cards into game badges and tradeable community items that range in value, so it’s another way to make money with Steam.

Here are a few participating games that give trading cards:

Here’s how you can use Steam trading cards to earn money on Steam.

Crafting badges with your cards give you items like profile backgrounds, DLCs, game coupons, emoticons, and more.

This process also gives you XP to level up your Steam profile. All of these items can be extremely valuable to game lovers on Steam.

At the very least, you can earn coupons for other games that you might find interesting or were going to purchase anyway.

4. Get Free Steam Codes

Another way to make money with Steam is to find ways to get free Steam codes.

Steam Codes are basically activation codes you can use to purchase different games on the platform. Some codes also add to your Steam wallet credit so you can purchase anything you want.

In other words, Steam codes are like gift cards for Steam that you can put towards in-app purchases.

Some of the best methods to get free Steam codes include using different get-paid-to websites and apps to earn rewards:

It’s worth noting that these apps and websites let you redeem a variety of gift cards, not just Steam codes.

Many of them also offer PayPal money as a reward option, so you can also redeem points for PayPal cash and skip the whole Steam part entirely.

Just keep in mind that points can take a while to rack up. However, if you’re already a fan of mobile games, it won’t feel like much of a chore!

5. Sell Pre-Released Gaming Content

In some cases, pre-ordering a Steam game unlocks certain exclusive content, skins, or in-game items that are in limited supply.

So, if you can get your hands on some exclusive cosmetic item or skin, there’s a chance other players are willing to buy it from you.

This is even more true if the game you have pre-released items for becomes very popular.

All you have to do is obtain these items, wait for them to hopefully appreciate in value, and then list them on the Steam Community Market for sale.

This idea is usually better if you’re already going to be playing these pre-release games and happen to earn rare items.

Otherwise, it will be hard to open a ton of games and hope for something nice to land in your inventory.

6. Sell Cosmetic Crates

Cosmetic crates (or drops) are small packages that contain valuable skins and add-ons that can be placed on weapons, characters, or profiles.

You can obtain these crates by playing different Steam games or by purchasing them with in-game currency.

The most popular games with crates include:

If you play any of these games often, you probably already own a ton of crates (or items from these crates).

But, one quick way to make money on Steam is to sell these crates right as they drop rather than opening them yourself.

7. Release A Game On Steam Direct (Steamworks)

If you know how to program and have some game design talent, you can always try selling your own game on Steam Direct.

This is also one of the ways to make money on Steam with the highest earning potential, although it obviously requires knowing how to code.

Here’s how to list your developed game on Steam Direct:

After approval, anyone on the Steam platform can buy your game, resulting in more money in your pocket.

Keep in mind that there is no guarantee that your game will sell, but it is one of the highest paying ways to earn money on Steam when it does sell.

This idea is not for everyone, but it’s extremely valuable for those who have video game developing experience.

8. Sell Steam Mods

Like selling your own game, you can also earn money on Steam by selling game mods to other players.

Mods (or modifications) can be sold in the Steam Workshop for money.

Mods are essentially designs that look different than they normally would in a game. For example, if an iron sword is usually just grey, a mod can make it look blue.

Some mods are more in-depth and add new game content, storylines, and overall improvements to enhance gameplay.

A few examples of Steam mod categories include:

Creating mods requires a bit of digging to find the game engine and to download the mod tool kit for any specific game.

A lot of mods are only sold for a couple of dollars, but if a lot of people purchase them, it can add up over time into some nice passive income.

9. Sell Steam-Related Artwork

If you’re a bit of an artist, then this way to make money on Steam is definitely for you.

Gamers are generally massive fans of what they play. Some are such fans that they would love art related to the games they play to hang up on a wall or put into a frame.

So, if you understand video game culture and are a good artist, your next big side hustle could be selling Steam-related artwork.

For example, you can post video game gigs on marketplaces like Fiverr to pitch your services.

Here’s a few examples of what gaming artwork gigs you could offer:

There are a ton of ways you can turn Steam games into art. Get creative, learn from what others are doing, and test out your art skills before pitching!

10. Sell Steam Games To Other Players

One of the easiest ways to make money on Steam is by selling your old Steam Games.

You probably have games that you don’t play anymore and wouldn’t mind making some of that money back.

Unfortunately, Steam doesn’t have a marketplace for you to sell the games themselves.

However, websites like Gameflip let you sell discounted video games to users who want to pay less.

It’s win win scenario. You make a bit of money back for your game and new players get the game at a lower price!

You upload a small description and title for your game, offer a steam key after purchase, and everything else is handled within the website.

Keep in mind that Gameflip takes an 8% commission (+2% for digital items) for selling a game through their platform.

11. Stream Steam Games On Twitch.TV

If you enjoy entertaining an audience and want to show off your gaming skills, you can always consider streaming games on Twitch.

Twitch.tv is one of the largest streaming platforms out there, and people stream anything from competitive games like League of Legends to casual games or simple chat rooms.

Now, you can’t make money on Twitch right out of the gate.

However, if you become a Twitch partner, you can earn a percentage of revenue from the people who subscribe to your channel. You can also make money by showing ads on your channel.

Furthermore, the Twitch community is quite generous, and streamers often get donations from loyal fans who enjoy tuning in to watch their gameplay and banter.

Building a Twitch following is similar to making money on YouTube in that it takes time to grow your subscriber base and brand.

However, if you diligently stream and provide value or entertainment to people, you can make money online by streaming Steam games on Twitch.

Extra Reading – Do Twitch Mods Get Paid?

Frequently Asked Questions

What’s The Best Way To Make Money On Steam?

This depends on what your skills are and what activities you enjoy on Steam. For example, if you’re an incredibly skilled player, offering coaching services is probably your best bet. Similarly, if you can design video games, you can always try selling games on Steam to make money.

The easiest methods involve selling in-game items on the Steam Marketplace or selling trading cards.

How Much Money Can You Make?

Most methods of making money on Steam won’t make you rich. This is because unless you get an incredibly rare item, most things only sell for a few dollars at most on the Steam Marketplace.

But, you can potentially make thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars with very rare items. Plus, if you sell a Steam game, the sky is the limit for earning potential.

At the end of the day, this is more of a fun side hustle than serious money-maker. If you really need to make fast cash, you can always turn to gig apps like driving for DoorDash or becoming an Instacart Shopper instead.

Final Thoughts

At the end of the day, there are a lot of ways to make money on Steam.

Some make more but take longer while others make less but are super fast options.

If you want to make enough to afford new games on Steam, then definitely go with free steam codes. They’re fun, easy, and allow you to try new games.

If you’re already good at the video games that have been mentioned throughout the post, then flipping crates, selling cards, and getting rare items are your best bet.

Hopefully you’ve gathered something useful that you can start to implement on Steam in the near future.

Good luck gamer!

Looking for more ways to make extra money? Checkout:

Daniel is a 22 year old blogger from Los Angeles with a huge love for everything entrepreneurship, finance, and investing. When he’s not blogging at Modern Teen, you can catch him playing volleyball, shooting archery, or finding new ways to make money.