GoKawiilTeam Fortress 2 cases are worth pocket change. There are a few select cases that scale up to a few dollars, and even fewer with a market price in the double digits, but the vast majority of cases are worth a few pennies, no more than a Steam Trading Card. But one player, Vincent Stech, started collecting cases nearly a decade ago, racking up over 1.7 million cases across several Steam accounts. And now, he’s selling the whole collection, with an estimated value of $100,000.
Stech started collecting cases around Team Fortress 2’s last major update, in late 2017, outside of annual Halloween events that persisted through 2022. In order to accumulate so many cases, Stech largely automated the process, noting that he was careful not to upset the string-pullers at Valve as he amassed a stash of seemingly innocuous digital assets.
“That’s always been one of my biggest fears over the past decade, is one day they wake up like ‘hey, we don’t like what this guy’s doing,’” Stech told Tom's Hardware. “Because I know people with accounts with like 50,000 items that won’t load, and Valve won’t delete the items off their account, so they just can’t access Team Fortress 2 inventory ever again on their main account.”
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Before understanding Stech’s process, however, we have to start with how Team Fortress 2’s in-game economy works. Like other Valve titles, you’re able to list items you earn in-game on the Steam Community Marketplace, selling them for real dollars or spending real dollars of your own to buy other items. That’s the normal way of doing things, but this in-game economy has grown beyond the bounds of Steam. A lot of transactions happen off the platform.
(Image credit: Backpack)
Websites like backpack.tf and stntrading.eu take trading off of Steam, allowing you to use in-game crafting materials (along with keys) to buy and sell items. There are several reasons for these third-party marketplaces to exist, not the least of which is bot automation, which is against Steam’s Terms of Service. This exchange of in-game currency for items happens through trades on Steam, creating a separate marketplace where real money doesn’t change hands.
That’s not where Stech started. “Team Fortress 2 cases, they weren’t worth anything. They were… people were just giving them away because they take inventory spots,” Stech said. “People were deleting things, and so I decided to scoop them up.”
The problem Stech quickly ran into was inventory space. You can only have a few thousand items in your inventory (Stech told me 4,000 for Team Fortress 2, others say it’s around 2,000). Regardless of the number, it’s far too low a limit to amass nearly 2 million items, even with dozens of alternative accounts. Stech bypassed this issue by using the community marketplace. He listed the cases at very high prices where they were unlikely to sell. That’s because you can have tens of thousands of items on the market “before Steam gets really angry at you.” It effectively multiplies inventory space.
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