So I've finally dug a bit into the Marketplace on steam and its pretty neat. I sold a few items that I got from Deus Ex and buying the Quake Con pack in 2011 and made like $5. The thing I'm confused about is most of the items you get aren't sell able. It seems only the "Vintage" or "Genuine" versions of most items are sell able with the exception of crates, paint etc...

So where are people getting all of these items to sell? Are they craftable or what? I'd like to participate more in the marketplace stuff because it seems potentially cool that I could fund my steam sale purchases via playing a game I already adore. I just have little clue to if people just are getting lucky with drops or if you can actually craft some of these things.

They play a lot of TF2 or they idle around and what not. And ya you can craft stuff but still you need to pay ALOT.

In TF2 you get a set number of drops every week, usually around 1 per hour and about 10 every week, this is reset on Thursday.

All these drops will be weapons or rarely hats or usable items. If you are actually playing the game you can keep all the weapons and craft your duplicates, eventually you will have enough metal to craft a random hat.

How people make money off this is by having multiple accounts idling in the game - just standing around in servers getting items. they then trade all the metal they make for keys in the game and can then resell on the market place for steam money.

Don't do this, it's dumb.

@demoskinos The people above me don't actually seem to know what they are talking about in regard to the market. Yes you can idle for drops etc, but at the moment (I believe due to being in beta), you can only sell:

Genuine (obtained from buying other games/preorders)

Vintage (Items obtained before the store was implemented, no longer attainable through normal means)

Strange Botkiller items (obtained through finishing a Tour in the co-op Mann Vs Machine mode)

Some other Strange weapons/parts (not sure how it determines which ones are sellable, obtained through Chest drops)

Misc. shop items like backpack expanders, paint, nametags, etc.

Crates (obtainable through drops, worth a grand total of 1 cent each except for a few exceptions)

So, primarily the way to obtain stuff which can be sold on the market is through actually investing money - keys to open chests, buying other steam games, etc. The only thing you can actually recieve as random drops and sell would be nametags/desc tags, and paint. (I believe free accounts do not get those as drops - though I may be wrong, haven't played in a long time).

As of now you can't sell "normal" (yellow text) items that you get normally as drops, I assume it is either an economic concern for Valve or a facet of the beta. It is worth nothing that it works the same in DOTA2 at the moment - you can't buy/sell "normal" items, though hopefully one day they will allow that.

@nyxfe: So I think I've pieced together that Genuine weapons always seem to be promotional stuff. Whats up with the "Vintage" rarity stuff?

No, you idle for items to craft into metal to trade for items in game and then sell on the market. If you are buying stuff from the Marketplace/Mann Co. store you are not going to make any money unless you get extremely lucky and can resell for a higher price. People have bots set up dedicated to automatically buying items under the average price and reselling them for profit.

Vintage items were items from before the Mann Co. store was introduced.

is there a good place to check what items are worth? I've wanted to sell my superfluous TF2 stuff for a while now (and I have something coming up I want that I could probably buy).

By going to the market and see what others are charging for it, I guess.
And then set your price like 0,01 lower than the other guys

Vintage is a tag given to all the items that players got from drops/crafting prior to the release of the real-money shop (to differentiate them from items gained through purchases and other changes made to the system later), otherwise they are no different from their normal "yellow" counterparts.

I did this (I didn't see that part when I checked) 30 minutes ago and already have 12 bucks

all for dumb virtual goods

@animasta: Jeez. How much crap did you have?!

I like buying games for the money I get by selling virtual items that I don't really ever run out of.
I remember putting a hat up for sale (vintage towering pillar of hats) for TF2. It was on there for like 3,42€ or something at one point. I just put the price to 10€ .. and someone bought it.
So thank you drunk guy out there who decided to do something weird that day and buy the more expensive one of those hats!

deus ex stuff, some weird total war stuff, and some of the trading cards.