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Probably the thing most people think of when they think of making money in video games these days would be twitch streaming and donations, but like any hobby gaming attracts people with too much time to waste and too much money, meaning there's a lot of ways to make a quick buck if you're wily. Maybe you're good at a popular fighting game and you've won some tournaments? Maybe you've hosted some kind of fund raiser that had video games as a draw? Maybe you used to own a bunch of old classic games and consoles in mint condition, and off loaded them on ebay or to a pawn shop for a quick buck? Maybe you actually are one of those Twitch streamers or video game reviewers, relying on donations and ad revenue to make a living talking about and playing games? Or maybe you own ten computers that each multibox a dozen WoW clients with bots and sell the gold and characters you make to pay for an annual Caribbean vacation? Or maybe you're "the guy" who actively engages in scamming people in some online game like EVE, taking their things to sell to a third party before you get caught? Personally I have no greatly entertaining stories, although in High School I sold a Maple Story account I had wasted my summer vacation playing by selling it off to a trusted source via Paypal for 300 dollars. More recently, I've traded some of the gold I've made in WoW for other games on Steam or Paypal money a few times, but I've never had as big a haul as I did off that Maple Story account. In high school I was actually friends with one of those fighting game nerds I mentioned; he had played in amateur tournaments for everything from Halo to Street Fighter to Armored Core, even winning some prize money on occasion, but I haven't kept in touch and I have no idea if he ever went on to become some Evo master. Tell me your sordid history making money in video games, Games subforum.
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Jun 30, 2014 11:54
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 21:26 |
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poo poo, I made like $10 on steam cards this sale.
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Jun 30, 2014 11:57
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MegaGatts posted:poo poo, I made like $10 on steam cards this sale.
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Jul 1, 2014 13:27
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I got 30€ for placing 2nd in a King of Fighters XIII tournament once.
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Jul 1, 2014 13:29
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I had a friend once who bet another friend *******$16******* that he couldn't beat Crash Man in Mega Man 2 with the default gun without getting hit but of course he did accomplish this and won sixteen dollars.
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Jul 1, 2014 13:31
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I got a coke for beating the dragon in Moonstone: A Hard Days Knight. Also sexual favors for slamming a hole-in-one in Mario Golf. Doesn't really count as money, but it was still nice.
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Jul 1, 2014 13:54
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I won about $500 from winning two regional Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 tournaments a few years back. Won another $100 gift card for Best Buy doing the same thing.
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Jul 1, 2014 14:27
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Selling my Everquest, World of Warcraft, and a couple other such accounts over the years netted me probably about $2,000 in all. Minus the monthly fees and box prices and expansions, then figuring for how much time I actually played the games on those characters it probably works out to something much less than a dollar per hour. But considering I was usually unemployed when playing MMOs... Won a Halo tournament on the original Xbox once. $50 gift card to the local LAN/gaming center that went out of business a few microseconds after it opened and hosted the tournament.
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Jul 1, 2014 14:30
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I've probably won around $1200 from playing Smash Bros Melee over the years while I was into that scene. Then I realized most people who are super into it are toxic assholes. I played Peach, if anyone cares
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Jul 1, 2014 14:30
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Tiggum posted:Yeah, I don't understand why people buy those. Collect them and you get some stuff to customise your Steam profile? Who even looks at that? Valve must be making a mint off those since they get a cut of every sale, and I'm happy to take my free cash, even if it's only about 15¢ a card on average. I did absolutely nothing to earn it, so it's essentially free money. A friend of mine made $7 off of a singular team swap token during the Steam Summer Sale of 2014. Another person I saw on the Steam boards sold a booster pack for Astebreed for $32. I was selling Steam trading cards during the sale, as they seemed to fly off the shelves. Made $20 or so off of it. If you want to profit off of the Steam marketplace? Cards with anime-based artworks tend to have cards which sell for higher prices. Slur fucked around with this message at 14:46 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 14:33
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I got an unusual in TF2 and sold it for about fifty bucks.
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Jul 1, 2014 14:37
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Sold a dota 2 weapon for 200$
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Jul 1, 2014 14:42
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Back in highschool I had a lil bankroll going for smash brothers on n64. 20 bux 5 lives each matches. There was a core group of 3 of us that cleaned house for a couple of months before kids wised up and stopped betting. One of them, his brother (who I'm still friends with) used to sell Lineage 2 currency when it came out. He'd multibox 4 accounts 14hrs a day which would net him a cool hundo every week or so, decent money for a highschool kid with no job. He did that crap for years before China drove him out of business.
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Jul 1, 2014 15:01
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I still have a monitor I bought in 2004. I paid people gold out of my EQ guild bank to join my referral chain for A FREE FLAT SCREEN MONITOR! Its so old, but it works as a decent second monitor still.
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Jul 1, 2014 15:22
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Minrad posted:Maybe you're good at a popular fighting game and you've won some tournaments? These are the two I'm guilty of. I've gone to various fighting game tournaments and got a few wins under my belt in a couple airdashers. Never anything major, I get double peaced pretty easily against folks who have more free time and an actual local scene. I also do the whole pubbie whisperer thing in EVE, it's pretty great when, just for the act of talking to some idiot for an hour, you can make enough cash to pay for your subscription for the next year. Or ransoming fools who carry too much poo poo around, and while waiting for people to log in and kill them, just say that you'll let them go for about 1/5th of their price. They always fall for it, and then you just kill them and take their poo poo anyways. I wish I were as lucky as some of those Diablo 3 item seller dudes though.
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Jul 1, 2014 15:39
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I won a $10 gift card playing Day of Defeat back in the day. My "team" settled for second place because they didn't know how to get up the hill in Avalanche. I got someone to give me like 5 million ISK in EVE, but that's not really worth much at all.
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Jul 1, 2014 15:57
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I won a scholarship for some lovely college for coming second (out of three people) in an online Warcraft 3 RoC tournament because first place didn't want it. In the end I didn't want it either. I was also supposed to win some RAM but the cheap bastards never mailed it. 
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Jul 1, 2014 16:01
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I bought a Dota 2 shirt that came with a free in-game item that sold for more than the shirt. I'll never understand the Steam item market.
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Jul 1, 2014 16:25
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I used to make good money botting / multiboxing world of warcraft accounts 1-70 or 1-60. It was about 40 to get the account going and you would have it leveled before the free first month ran out, then sell it for anywhere from 100-200 depending on the market. I probably made a few thousand dollars doing that before blizzard starting catching on to the botting scene. People would message my bot and I could send them a text back from my phone  . It was also kind of addicting seeing all the loot and poo poo the bots had accumulated that I could then ship straight to my actual account. If I could do it all over again I probably would have taken that bigtime, but it's too late now. Apple2o fucked around with this message at 17:00 on Jul 1, 2014 |
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Jul 1, 2014 16:58
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I made a Diablo 3 auction house bot when it first came out. I walked away with about $3,000 in profit by selling the items it bought for real cash, and it ran while I was at work making more money. That was probably a pretty rare opportunity though.
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Jul 1, 2014 17:00
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I was paid by a dude to ditch school and play Gauntlet with him to "beat" it. He must have put $100.00 into it, and we got to level 500 or so; there was no end in site. Same year I was paid by people to get 99 lives on Super Mario Bros. Using the turtle/back screen bug/feature. $10.00 per session. (I was in 7th grade) Now I own a small business and play d3 while others make money for me.
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Jul 1, 2014 18:01
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When I worked at Hastings I would get payed to test used consoles and games people sold us. Sit in the back for a hour drinking coke and playing games? Sure.
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Jul 1, 2014 20:28
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I got flown to Koln, Germany to play Natural Selection 2 on Twitch/German TV and won $500 (after the split between the rest of the team), plus a bunch of prizes, mostly Logitech gear. Been playing FPS' for like 17 years.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:32
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I think I sold enough D3 items when it came out to break even on buying it, never got any of the cool items that sold for cash money though. A friend who was in school part time/funemployed made about $5k doing the whole 'immortal' wizard thing before it broke out to the masses.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:36
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Won a small time local Blazblue tournament and the prize was an anime figurine of some blonde princess character with a sword that I didn't recognize with the box pretty beat up. I either gavw it away or sold it to someone for like $10. That's my story.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:41
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When I was about 17, I won a bet to name all 151 (which shows you how long ago it was) Pokemon in numerical order. I've won a few other bets, usually for beating people over the years or showing off in games since, but that's usually pocket change or food.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:54
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I never got an Unusual, but a few years back when it was still popular (and actually fun,) I made something like $400 total marketing around TF2 items. It was nice when I was an unemployed high schooler. It helped that I had a Mac when the Earbuds promotion launched, so I made like, six of them.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:58
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I got a really low number TF2 soldier's medal cosmetic thing from liking them on facebook or whatever stupid loving thing you clicked to get them from. I sold it for like 200 bucks. Hats. Some of that money went into buying Dead Island so I don't even know if I came out ahead there.
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Jul 16, 2014 20:59
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I managed to sell all of my WoW gold for about £200 which in turn set me up my Hearthstone collection, or a good part of it.
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Jul 16, 2014 21:00
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I've made close to $2,500 from selling dota items. Thanks nerds!
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Jul 16, 2014 21:01
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I just got a Risen 3 preorder out of 3 TF2 items. Sure I could have gotten possibly $80 from two of them, but I was able to instal a free game because someone desperately needs to be a scammy hat baron. Also, the Market place would likely have never given me the prices it listed because everyone's out to undercut everyone.
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Jul 16, 2014 21:02
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Got $400 for my ff11 account in high school. Sold my WoW account for $800 a couple years later.
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Jul 16, 2014 21:07
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My roommate opened his first case in counter strike go and got a rare gun he sold for 75 bucks. He didn't even know how to put it on the marketplace. Lucky man.
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Jul 17, 2014 16:52
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When WoW characters sold for a lot of money I sold a few for way too much. Also I sold a DOTA2 item(Pudge dragonhook) for a lot more than anyone should ever buy a cosmetic video game item ever.
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Jul 17, 2014 16:58
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When TF2 unusual hats were hot poo poo, I had an extremely popular unusual for the Soldier. Daily I would get 6 or 7 steam friend requests asking to buy my hat for 300 USD in paypal. I was told most of them were Russian scammers and instead I should look into finding a "hat broker" who could get me the best deal. I ended up with $250 and some TF2 virtual earbuds, which I traded for $90 of steam games. I won a gamestop Super Smash Bros Brawl launch tournament, got some ugly rear end trophy and a $30 gift card. I also won state regionals and another $50 gift card. If I wanted to drive 150 miles I could have had a chance of winning a $100 gift card!
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Jul 17, 2014 17:10
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I've made money from selling my accounts and various nicknacks in games for a few bucks. My most recent notable example would be playing Diablo 3's normal and real money auction houses off of one another to a decent profit in lulls between more important endeavors. I've also unrepentantly ran a decently sized YouTube channel for a number of years that provides for a nice amount of fun money, or if I'm so inclined, all of my rent and bills if I cut back a little. All of these things were definitely below minimum wage when you consider the number of hours involved, except for the YouTube stuff, which while immediately under minimum wage if you hold yourself to any reasonable level of standards, goes above and beyond minimum wage over time by nature of people still watching your videos from years ago for some reason that I've yet to fully figure out. If you create a video that is popular on YouTube — which you have no real control over, though you can increase your chances by creating "relatable," easily digestible videos akin those Oatmeal or XKCD web comics, or you can just yell a lot and purposefully get into drama — you can make stupid amounts of money; despite more than half of everyone on YouTube running AdBlock, you not being paid for any ads skipped after five seconds, Google taking half of everything, any network you may be a part of taking a cut that you'll see little to no benefit or return from giving them these days but you're in a contract and must continue to do so until it expires, and advertisers paying less for ads now as opposed to a few years ago. Big YouTube channels occasionally make short, terrible videos that become wildly popular and generate enough revenue to live off of for a year or more, and unknown numbers of mouth-breathing me-toos poo poo out terrible, unedited, smelly "let's play" poops multiple times daily, where you can hear them licking their lips and farting in the background because they just don't care, all of which bored thirteen year olds looking for something to identify with and define themselves by eat up like pigs at a trough. Some channels actually do put effort into their videos, and the big channels only became big because of that effort, be that effort lie in their personality, video production skills, or an ability to market themselves, though usually a combination of all three. The majority of smaller YouTube channels, however, are run by one-take wunderkinds who will candidly tell you how they find video editing draining, despite that being part of their job by any stretch of imagination. Your fellow YouTubers are the closest things to coworkers you'll have, though, so you've gotta put up with some of it, and you can't really begrudge them for (hopefully) enjoying themselves, getting a piece of the pie, and doing what makes them happy (but some of those people are not happy and will vlog about how unhappy they are being a YouTuber). What a time to be alive.
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Jul 17, 2014 18:24
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there was a star fox kiosk in a wal-mart some time in probably 1995 or whenever that game came out. i guess they had like 4 people play at once on different screens and whoever did the best before dying got a t-shirt. i got the t-shirt but it was XL and i was 9 it's really weird that there were promotions for star fox in wal-mart in a small town in arkansas
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Jul 17, 2014 19:10
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 21:26 |
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I made about $15 on Steam Cards, does that count? 
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Jul 17, 2014 19:24
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