CS2 Armory Revenue Breakdown — How Much Does Valve Make?

You can watch three things endlessly: fire burning, water flowing, and Gabe Newell’s bank account growing. Today, the CS.MONEY Blog dives into the Armory and just how much money this relatively recent addition is making for Valve.

One of the main features of the Armory is the sheer amount of randomness. But if you don’t feel like testing your luck and just want to enjoy a cool skin at a low price — head over to our site. Click the banner and grab your perfect skin!

How Much Has Valve Made From the Armory? Reddit Weighs In

Not long ago, a Reddit user tried to estimate how much money Valve made from Armory Passes alone. They broke down the rewards by market value and calculated how many known items are stored in CS2 players’ inventories.

For example, it turned out that the Fever Case has already brought Valve over 9 million dollars. According to the CS2 Case Tracker, players opened over 11 million cases with AWP Printstream last month. If we estimate the “value” of a single case at $0.80, the numbers roughly add up — any discrepancies can be attributed to outdated data.

Additionally, according to the thread, the most profitable rewards for Valve are the Overpass and Sport & Field collections. That’s no surprise, considering these collections include some of the most popular skins among players — like the M4A1-S Fade and AK-47 B The Monster. Overall, Valve has reportedly made over $124 million.

What’s Wrong With These Calculations?

Even though the Redditor deserves credit for using open data, their estimate is only partially correct. That $124.5 million figure should be seen as the lower bound. In reality, Valve has most likely earned much more.

There are at least three major factors that simply can’t be measured:

• Not all players spent their stars right away.

If you bought five passes but only used 10 stars, the Reddit count would log just $4 instead of the full $85. That’s a massive gap.

• Case rentals aren’t included.

If you rent a case, the skins from it don’t show up in any public databases. So we may know that 11 million Fever cases were opened, but how many were rented? That number is invisible — and the money from those rentals goes straight to Valve.

• Skins used in trade-ups aren’t counted.

A lot of lower-tier skins likely ended up in trade-ups immediately. And because of Steam’s trade locks, those skins don’t show up in inventory scans. Since it takes 10 lesser skins to create one better one, that means a large number of skins are being left out of the data.

So, How Much Has Valve Made From the Armory? The Honest Answer

In short: we don’t know. There isn’t enough data, and Valve isn’t in a hurry to share any. On top of that, since Valve is a private company, it doesn’t have to publish financial statements. Only through rare documents have we learned, for instance, that Valve supposedly made over $2 billion from Steam in 2021.

There’s no official Armory-specific breakdown available yet. So you can only imagine how much money Valve is raking in from Armory skins. One thing’s clear — it’s a number with at least eight zeroes.