In all honesty, that's nothing to be proud of. If you play 316 hours in 2 weeks, you definitely belong in a rehab.
406h in 2 weeks now .. i guess he's just idling in games and not actually playing them to gain playtime?
And is there any benefit of collecting cards in huge numbers (I'm not judging or anything, I'm genuinely interested, because I see many people do it )?
You trade them for other stuff (cards, games, in game items etc), sell them on market or make badges out of them. I sell more expensive ones on market and trade cheapo for other games. If i happen to have complete badge or close one to completion i craft a badge (with higher lvl u can pimp your profile with more showcases and drop rate of booster packs with cards is higher). Basically treat them as asset, money under different form. Now its harder because new and shitty games have higher restrition on having trading cards but it used to be like this- get cheap games-> sell cards-> get games and you have a loop. Next to cards i also gather csgo, pubg cases to sell them later for more (used to do that also in kf2, dota and tf2 but its different now). Every system might be different, my is suited to spend less "real" money on games and more from steam wallet since i rly like buying a lot of games and playing them ^^ (theres also part about bundles, trading games, key shops etc) short version: sell em, trade em or craft em
Woah. Didn't knew that. Had the worry you could bend time since you played over 400h in a time frame of 336h.
I find it a little odd how Valve creates money out of thin air with this trading system. Basically, they give you these items for free, but once you put them on the market, there is a small fee on every transaction (around 0.02€), so they earn 1€ after every 50 trades.
Maybe you should start buying and selling real stuff in the real world, if you put the same amount of time and effort in buying and selling cars in real life you can earn lots of money in real life. What you are doing now, is buying and selling fake things and the only one who is winning are the shareholders of Valve.
they gain money as every other host of trading system, especially one with "closed" currency, for item to exist someone has to add funds to steam wallet and pool of money within closed circulation is rising. Items are not free, you cant gain them without spending anything, while you can create self funding system, theres always someone that has to pay for it, add funds to whole economy. Example of their earning is also wrong because there are different currencies, basically, less currency is worth, smaller the tax (which is rly nice with cheap items you buy in a bulk)
i used to spend more time on this when i was younger (i wasnt earning my own money mostly so u can imagine it was really handy!), now i dont rly care that much, few minutes a day is enough- also i use now more platforms outside steam which are harder to reach with steam wallet, there are more restrictions etc. You should see golden era when you could trade without region restrictions etc, games from russia few times cheaper etc, fun times I like your idea but im shit with person to person relations, talking etc, closest to this thing was me buying game keys and selling them on g2a, it war rly tiring and market was constantly changing, customers were stupid and annoying i prefer some relaxed work