Swedish YouTuber Ludwig "Anomaly" Lagerstedt tried to estimate how much Valve earns selling CS:GO keys for cases. He used recent research by a Redditor, Fjedjiik, as a basis and came up with a number of $1,1 billion for a period from May 2021 to January 2023.
Anomaly used the case item drop chances to roughly estimate how many have been opened. Based on his calculations, Valve makes $1,786 mln per just one day. These are only key sales, not including steam market revenue from every user exchange and other in-game profits. According to him, the error of this method is about 10%. Note that Anomaly didn't subtract the 25% of the key price that goes to skin makers, which would diminish the sum to $1,34 mln.
Anomaly lashed out at Valve for putting so few resources into their official competitions. Using 2022 as an example, the company invested $2,25 mln in Major prize pools out of the estimated $650 mln it earned that year (Or 75% of it, as we mentioned above. He also doesn't include Antwerp RMR that had $250k). He calculated that a single Major costs Valve half of the daily sales. He compared it to Dota's The International series with prize pools of eight figures as prize pools.
The latter is not very accurate. CS:GO participants earn a lot of money from sticker sales. In August 2022, Valve disclosed paying $70 mln of sticker money to players and organizations over the year period. Divided by two, this adds a hefty sum of $35 mln to a Major prize pool. And Valve also shares some operating costs with the assigned TOs which hold an event.