Great answer, @YQMaoski…I would love to give you more coins but since I bought a game in the coin store, I only have 54 coins left…So…Hearts it is…
I sign up for all the game sites emails/newsletters…Ialso follow a lot of the game bundle sites on Steam and sometimes you can get keys faster before they are gone. And I follow this site/get the newsletters for Epic
They list almost all the sites.
Dang, destroying Rebellion harder than Bagman in the Quartz Zone
feelsbadman
No one mentioned trading: I used to be heavily involved in the Steam Trading Community, building up an inventory of cards, sets, foils, in-game items, eventually even games. I was getting so big I have emails from Valve asking me to confirm I wasn’t a bot or using 3rd party programs. Then Valve cracked down on the Wild West frontier world by forcing smartphone verification and slowing down the process massively. Then Valve disabled game buying for inventories (no delayed gifting). That and I got bored. You’d be amazed what some people will trade!
I swapped 5 card sets of Borderlands 2 for Planetary Annihilation: TITANS (a great RTS game actually worth playing), an entire foil set I’d managed to cobble together from trades I swapped for Batman: Arkham Knight GOTY, and various batches of cheap trading card games (all those $1 trash from bundle sites) that people realized weren’t worth much I’d build up a nice collection of about 10, then trade that batch of 10 for 1 game on sale that some kid would willingly buy. I even dabbled in items for games I’ve never owned much less played (like Counterstrike and PUBG).
IRL I quit my job to become a private investor, equity and arbitrage trader so my life is finding the value of things in a market and figuring out if they’re currently priced appropriately. It carries over into the way I game, heavily. Played 8 years of WoW before I realized there was other stuff to do besides the Auction House (slight exaggeration…but not much).
you know that “phrase” that can be found around the internet “cool story bro” /sarcasm ? 
well this is an actual cool story, (bro?) Shalandir 
so you were one of those ruining it for the rest of us when we juuust wanted to put our trash mats, found while questing/going from a-b(without farming), on AH for a reasonable “regular” price, -but you’ve just shorted the silk cloth market to gain an edge earlier? 
Nice I never even thought about steam trading 
Oh yes. I definitely cornered entire markets for certain items or commodities on servers. It’s amazing how much power anyone has on an unregulated market that allows for all sorts of morally questionable and legally ambiguous trading. When there truly is only 1 seller, the price is what the market will bear! But that never happens for long. At least until players stop caving on the prices I set and begrudgingly actually went out and farmed the resources themself. So you can’t set the prices too high, it’s self defeating, drives away the customers. But yes, it always amazed me how many gamers would lazily pay a premium for stuff that was so easy to get or had just been cheaper but they weren’t willing to wait for price competition: instant gratification was my primary customer for millions and millions of WoW gold back then.
I went one entire expansion (Mists of Pandaria) without leaving the city. Realized at that point I wasn’t really playing the game or seeing the new content, kinda felt pointless to sit on mountains of gold so I backed off. Then I heard they released the WoW Tokens, woulda been insane to cash out at 30k/token if I’d still been playing. I heard there was a cap, like max 36 tokens a year or some such back then that you could buy…I dunno. Not really interested in doing it for the money (or gold). It was to be the market maker, it made me feel like it was the 1920s in the early days of the stock exchanges and Wall Street and I got to relive the rush of finding a deal, being a shrewd trader, analyzing hundreds of items on dozens of servers, and crushing it. Just being good at something is satisfaction and purpose for anyone, so it felt great.
Plus, it was a service. People might forget that there were others I had to overbid to buy stuff, or underbid to sell…to be a market maker means you’re the cheapest seller and the most generous buyer - you just eke out the price differences of thousands of items constantly flowing into and out of your inventories. Plus Blizzard has always taken a cut and all they did was provide the interface for the Auction House, I had to do all the work just to share in the arbitrage profit. So it was real work and effort that other players could do, they just chose not to. That’s fine. We all enjoyed our Blizzard Market Simulator (aka WoW) in unique ways. 
I am Persistant and I am a bundle addict…Yes,