If you want one number: the median Steam account on our shelf sells for
$34.69. The range runs from
$1.44 to $1,344.16
across 3 650 listings, with the middle half
between $14.78 and $68.39.
It is the deepest shelf we have and one of the most evenly filled:
16% sells under $10,
32,9% under $20,
16,9% clears $100 and only
5,1% clears $200. No barbell, no
vanishing middle — a real distribution, which is what makes the next part
surprising.
| what is on the account | tracks price | listings measured |
|---|
| CS2 profile rank | 0,573 | 2 850 |
| Steam level | 0,487 | 3 137 |
| Friends | 0,395 | 2 850 |
| Games in the library | 0,168 | 2 850 |
| Inventory value | 0,135 | 2 850 |
Read the middle column as "does more of this mean a dearer account". The order
is close to the reverse of how Steam listings are written. The two things
sellers lead with — the size of the library and the value of the inventory —
finish last.
| games in the library | listings | median |
|---|
| under 5 | 977 | $37.06 |
| 5 – 19 | 1 372 | $38.22 |
| 20 – 49 | 401 | $51.59 |
| 50 or more | 100 | $108.92 |
| not stated | 800 | $12.66 |
An account with nineteen games is worth about the same as one with four. The
ladder does not start climbing until twenty, and it only gets interesting past
fifty — which is a small corner of the shelf.
The reason is arithmetic a buyer does in about four seconds: most Steam
libraries are made of games that are cheap now. Twenty titles bought over ten
years of sales are worth less together than one account someone actually wants,
and the buyer knows what those twenty are worth because the store prices them
publicly. A long library is a long list, not a large number.
| inventory value | listings | median |
|---|
| under $1 | 1 078 | $39.14 |
| $1 – $49 | 684 | $32.95 |
| $50 – $499 | 852 | $41.79 |
| $500 or more | 236 | $87.70 |
| not stated | 800 | $12.66 |
This is the flattest table on the page and it is the one that surprises people
most. An account with a fifty-dollar inventory sells for about what an empty one
does. Only past five hundred dollars does the inventory start to lift the price
— and even then, by much less than the inventory is worth.
There is a good reason: a Steam inventory is tradeable, and a Steam account is
not. A buyer who wants the skins can buy the skins, on an open market, with a
public price and no account handover at all. Paying for someone's inventory by
buying their account is the expensive way to get it. What cannot be traded away
is the account itself — and that is what the shelf pays for.
| CS2 profile rank | listings | median |
|---|
| no CS2 profile | 948 | $15.60 |
| 1 – 9 | 763 | $46.92 |
| 10 – 24 | 600 | $58.95 |
| 25 or more | 539 | $55.06 |
| not stated | 800 | $12.66 |
The strongest signal on the shelf, and it is worth reading exactly. This is not
a ladder — it is one step. Going from no CS2 profile to any CS2 profile
roughly triples the median. After that the rank number adds very little, and the
top band is not dearer than the one below it.
So the honest version of "CS2 rank tracks price at 0.61" is: having played CS2
on this account tracks price. The rank itself is almost incidental. A Steam
account with a CS2 history is a different product from a Steam account without
one, and the market prices the category, not the tier.
Level is the cleaner ladder of the two — four bands, four steps, and roughly
twelve times between the ends. Level is bought and ground rather than played, so
it is not a measure of the account's contents; what it measures is that somebody
invested in this account on purpose, which correlates with everything else being
real. Note the bottom row again: listings that state no level are the cheapest
group on the shelf.
Look at the first two rows: accounts with no friends sell for well above
what accounts with one to nine sell for. A friend count is not a thing anyone
buys, and this table is the reminder that a correlation of 0.4 can still contain
a bump that runs the wrong way.
What the top band is really telling you is age. An account with fifty friends
has existed for years and been used by a person, and that is the thing being
priced — the same thing level measures, arriving by a different route.
A Steam account's store region decides what it pays for games, and it is one of
the few fields on the card that cannot be changed on a whim. Read this table as
market structure rather than as a lever: the regions at the top of it are also
where the fuller accounts happen to come from, so the region is telling you
about the rest of the account as much as about the store.
If a cheap store region is what you are shopping for, the region slices —
Germany, Poland,
Brazil, Kazakhstan — carry their own live
medians.
- Say whether the account has CS2 history. It is the single biggest step on
this shelf, and it is one line.
- State the level. It is the cleanest ladder here and leaving it blank puts
you in the cheapest group.
- Name the two or three games a buyer would actually want instead of the
total. "336 games" is a number; "Rust, Elden Ring, Arma 3" is a reason.
- Do not price off the inventory. The shelf does not, and a buyer who wants
those skins will buy them on the market instead.
- Name the store region and the registration year. Both are permanent, and
both are things a buyer checks before anything else.
Decide whether you want the account or its contents. If you want skins, buy
skins. If you want a game, check the Steam accounts with that
game before paying for a library that happens to contain it.
Then check the three permanent things: the store region, the registration date
and the ban history. Everything else about a Steam account can be changed by
whoever holds the email — those three cannot, and they are what you are really
buying. Steam profiles are public, so a profile link lets you confirm the level,
the game count, the bans and the CS2 history before paying rather than after.
The Steam shelf carries live medians on each slice —
20+ games, 50+ games,
100+ games, level 10+,
old accounts — and when you are ready to list,
sell your Steam account: escrow holds the payment until the buyer
confirms the login works.
Every figure on this page is read from our live catalogue when the page loads,
not written into the text — the shelf moves, and so do the numbers. Correlations
are Spearman coefficients, computed on ranks rather than raw prices, because the
dearest Steam account on the shelf is worth hundreds of times the cheapest and a
raw-price coefficient would mostly measure the few at the top. Level, library
size, inventory value, friends and the CS2 profile are read from the accounts
themselves and are present on part of the shelf, which is why every table prints
its own listing count next to the median and keeps a row for the listings that
state nothing.