Their infrastructure.
Two economies.
38 active third-party CS2 marketplaces, plus Steam's own. Every skin listed on any of them must move through Steam's inventory and trade API. Valve's rules prohibit commercial exploitation of that infrastructure. The roughly $1.28 billion third-party listed value exists while no public record of enforcing the rule has been located.
One infrastructure. Two economies.
Steam controls the item, the inventory, and the trade. Every skin sold on any platform below must move through Steam's trade API — a structural dependence that is directly observable. Valve's own Community Market earns a fee on its sales; whether that fee funds, or is tied to, the third-party ecosystem is not established here.
Source: PriceEmpire real-time catalogue, 20 September 2026. Listed value = sum of the rounded listed-value cards in the saved snapshot, Steam excluded. Not sales volume.
Platform register
The platforms below route their logins through Steam OpenID and their trades through Steam's Web API. Each observed openid.realm passes through Steam's login flow; the register records the observed auth routes rather than asserting that any given operator lacks Valve's permission.
| # | Platform | Listed value | Active offers | Items | Scale |
|---|
The price gap is measurable.
Steam caps Community Market listings at approximately $1,800 (the finding is re-computed at $2,000, $2,070, $2,300 and $2,500 in cs2sh-atlas.json and holds at every threshold). Items observed above that price
cannot be sold at their market price through Valve's own marketplace — but they
still depend on Steam's inventory and transfer system wherever they are sold. Banding the whole
catalogue by price shows where the wall stands: Valve's market carries
95.3% of the item categories priced below its cap and
1.9% of those above it.
Five marketplaces: items above the Steam cap
Item categories whose cheapest ask clears $1,800 on two or more marketplaces independently, holding 18,394 listed copies worth at least $78.6M. Of those, 100.0% — every single one — have no Steam listing at all.
Full exhibits: the register → · the price-ladder atlas →
Price distribution above cap
Top items — cheapest corroborated ask across five marketplaces
Asking prices are not sale prices. Licensed cs2.sh snapshot, 23 September 2026. Every row is quoted above the cap by at least two marketplaces independently; single-shelf asks and quotes more than three times an item's cheapest ask are excluded. How the grading works →
The advertised fee is 15%. Most listings pay more.
Valve takes a 5% Steam fee and a 10% CS2 publisher fee from the seller's proceeds — the familiar 15%. Both fees carry a $0.01 minimum, so no sale can ever carry less than two cents in fees. On the cheap, high-volume items that make up the bulk of the market, that floor is the binding constraint, not the percentage. We solved the fee arithmetic for every one of the 29,635 item types carrying a live Steam ask.
Fee charged, as a share of the headline 15%
Bar length is the number of live listings in each band. A band of “200%+” means the fee taken is more than twice 15% of the seller's proceeds.
A worked example
On a listing a buyer pays $0.03 for, the seller receives $0.01 and Valve takes $0.02 — the two one-cent minimums. As a share of what the buyer paid that is 67%; as a share of the seller's proceeds it is 200%.
Full dataset: cs2sh-steam-fee-census.json →
$128.1 million committed to orders that cannot be withdrawn.
A Steam buy order is pre-funded: the money leaves the buyer's wallet the moment the order is placed. Steam wallet funds cannot be withdrawn — they can only be spent inside Steam. Summing every price level of every tracked item's buy book gives a census of committed, non-exitable money.
Method: every price level of every tracked buy book, multiplied by the orders standing at that level. Full dataset: cs2sh-steam-locked-capital.json →
$30.9 million actually changed hands — on the smallest of the five shelves.
A single high sale can be a rare craft or sticker-applied variant of a cheap base item (e.g. a $30 item with a one-off $9,772 completed sale). "High" = highest completed transaction, not the item's normal price.
Every other figure on this page measures what is listed. This one measures what was sold. Skinport publishes its own completed transactions, and over the trailing 90 days they came to 1,219,143 sales worth $30,927,032, at an average of $25.37 each.
Where the turnover came from
Bar length is turnover; the figure is that tier's share of the total. 59.4% of the money moved in the $100–$1k tier, on 71,437 sales.
Above Valve's cap, sales still happen
completed sales of items priced above the Steam cap, worth $1,643,938, across 76 item types — on a marketplace that holds roughly 2% of that shelf. None of those sales could have taken place on Steam.
Full dataset: cs2sh-offsteam-90d-dynamics.json → · the realised highs →
Skinport is ONE of the third-party markets tracked here, and by listing value above the Steam cap it is the smallest of the five (about 2% of that shelf). Every total here is a floor on the off-Steam economy, not a measure of it. No Steam data is used.