Analyst Paul Manwaring has done quite a lot of calculating and counting, and has come up with the conclusion that the value of the Hat trading economy in Team Fortress 2 is worth about $50 million.
Unfortunately, it’s not real money. It’s a theoretical amount that you could make, if you had every single hat in existence, and sold them all at their current values.
Hats and unique items are found by unlocking crates, crates are unlocked with keys, and keys can be acquired for free, basically at the equivalence of 18 dropped weapons to one key. (They may also be bought for actual money, too.) This is a valuation, nothing more.
This isn’t counting all the hats money made from direct hat purchases from the official store either.
This just goes to show, the virtual economies are sometimes an accurate representation of real ones.
Source: The Online Society
