Crafted the Sale Badge...

add me and you can have it

I got most of them through voting and crafting my tf2 badge up to level 4 (I traded for the cards). I had some leftover steam wallet money which I used to buy the last 2 cards. So it cost me only 40 cents basically. Still, it was a huge waste of time.

May be not, all depends on total ammount of them.

smartest way to go

Well the sale cards move FAST. You can see for yourself if you sit there tapping F5 on the listing for any of the cards. They're only making about 2 cents per sale but I'd guess about 30-40 of them sell per minute, and that's just for ONE particular card out of the 10 total sale cards.

On the low end, I estimate they make about 360 dollars per hour on the sale cards or 8,640 dollars a day, but it's probably way higher on average because I only have checked during early morning hours when things are typically slow. Plus the cards started out way more expensive than they are now, so steam's cut was bigger initially.

Anyway, 8,640 dollars a day is really small for a behemoth like valve. There are rural stores that do more business than that in one day selling groceries. But still that's only an estimate for the sale cards by themselves, which do move much much faster than anything else on the community market that I have ever seen.

So I dunno. My guess is that they are definitely making more than enough to pay for the server costs, but that the real function of the market isn't to bring in tons and tons of profit; the purpose is to facilitate safe cash trading so that people will buy more games and keep the trade economy going as well.

I still don't understand how valve "makes" money. It's their own virtual currency, shouldn't they have unlimited amounts of it?

+1

But I do get it. They craft it, so we can sell the cards for a loads of cash /well, not that lot of cash now, but was amazing when each was above .50-.60 €/

+1
First thing I wanted to know was if I could just sale everything... and yes, I could. :D

For some its for show

Not entirely accurate. The higher your level is, the more friends you are allowed to have on your friends list. So each time you level up, you're increasing the cap on your friends list. The badges are what grant the exp points you need to increase your level. You also get other perks like the ability to showcase things on your profile page, such as items you have up for trade for example. It can also be things like achievements or screenshots, etc. You get to pick. You also get more showcases as you level up higher.

tl;dr, there's some real functionality tied to it

I definitely did NOT do it for profit. I wanted the exp, badge, and a chance at getting one of the TF2 items or maybe something I could trade for one of the TF2 items (to keep for myself, not to trade).

Still it's a valid point. One shouldn't do this expecting to profit.

No.

too bad people abuse it to the end.

If you mean by crafting badges i think they do but its only a chance not a curtain.

this time the cards don't stay like before on Summer Sale! read the description

Same.

If the game you want is on sale for $10 and you use your 80% off coupon you get it for like 2 bucks. Not that bad of a deal even if it is on sale.