Given that valve has about 350 employees that’s on the order of $5M per employee just from case openings alone. Given that they also take a cut of every transaction and trade that number is possibly orders of magnitude higher. And that’s just CS.
In conclusion, without publicly released figures it’s impossible to say with certainty and my statement obviously involves hyperbole to some degree but in all likelihood a very significant portion of valves profit comes from pushing gambling in their first party games and on the marketplace.
Side note: in my view, $2.50 earned from pushing gambling on a minor does more societal damage than $100 of predatory sales transaction cuts
Obviously given valve is private we don’t have first party numbers but estimates of case openings alone are in the multi billions. https://www.dexerto.com/counter-strike-2/valve-made-insane-amount-of-money-from-cs2-cases-just-last-month-alone-3176876/
Given that valve has about 350 employees that’s on the order of $5M per employee just from case openings alone. Given that they also take a cut of every transaction and trade that number is possibly orders of magnitude higher. And that’s just CS.
Now if you take the leaked financial slides at face value (https://www.simplymac.com/games/3-5m-per-employee-how-valve-quietly-became-the-most-profitable-gaming-company) you’re not looking at the majority of income but skins are almost entirely profit, there’s next to no overhead on generating a fake item.
In conclusion, without publicly released figures it’s impossible to say with certainty and my statement obviously involves hyperbole to some degree but in all likelihood a very significant portion of valves profit comes from pushing gambling in their first party games and on the marketplace.
Side note: in my view, $2.50 earned from pushing gambling on a minor does more societal damage than $100 of predatory sales transaction cuts