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Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 item makers earn average of $15,000 each

Dota 2 Valve
Julian Benson

Published:

Team Fortress 2 

If you’re looking for a lucrative line of work you could do worse than designing items for Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2. During Valve’s Steam Dev Day event the studio revealed that their the communities’ designers are earning an average of $15,000 a year.

There’s a load of other stats on offer, too.

For instance, 17 million Team Fortress 2 accounts own items. These aren’t all bought items, a lot of them will have been picked up. We know this because Valve also revealed that there are 500 million items owned across the game and the Team Fortress 2 community as a whole had earned $10 million last June; if all 500 million items had been bought then the designers would have earned a lot more than $10 million.

There are only 661 creators who are taking advantage of this opportunity, though, which means a big payout for each of them:

A staggering 90% of Team Fortress 2’s items are made by the community. Valve have hardly been stingy with the hats and items they’ve been pumping out so that shows the staggering amount of content fans are producing.

Valve are encouraging more designers to get involved with events like Robotic Boogaloo.

Thanks go to The Verge on this one.

Former deputy editor Julian loves strategy games like Into the Breach, and cruel management games like Frostpunk, which thankfully isn't reflective of his management style.