The new highest-level Steam user in the world spent over half a million dollars to do it, has a 'Discord Kitten,' a $9,000 Counter-Strike gun with a racial slur on it, and potential beef with the guy in third place

pcgamer.com:

SteamDB revealed on August 7 that there is a new highest level Steam account in the world, supplanting the long-reigning (and somewhat controversial) champ, St4ck. On a recent broadcast, Counter-Strike streamer ohnePixel calculated that this user, stasik, needed to have spent north of $500,000 dollars to reach level 5,101, and he's since pumped that up to 5,960. Stasik also boasts multiple rare Counter-Strike skins commanding nearly $9,000 each, including ones with crude messages and slurs arranged on the side through in-game stickers.

If you're like me, you might be wondering what the hell any of this means, and why someone would pay life changing amounts of money to crank up their Steam profile level. I've had my account for a long time, play a lot of games, but barely interact with Steam as a social media platform, leaving me at a paltry level 14. The real power gamer meta is to purchase trading card boosters and seasonal badges on Steam to juice that number.

Which, it must be said, does not have an immediate practical benefit, just bragging rights for the top power-levelers tracked by SteamDB. It reminds me a lot of NFTs⁠, investing cash into a digital signifier with no tangible value, but potential entry into a strange alternate economy. While it in large part appears to be an absurd form of conspicuous consumption, maintaining a high Steam level does also seem to be a form of networking, a way of proving you're a serious customer amongst the crazy-expensive Counter-Strike skin trading set: «I won't talk business unless you're over Level 100.»

OhnePixel typically estimates the value of a profile's Steam level by calculating the cost of badge purchases required to get there. In this case, he eyeballed stasik's off what St4ck paid to reach level 5,000: $500,000-$700,000. Stasik has since raised the account's level even further than when ohnePixel checked in, making the total cost even higher⁠—and that's not even counting the value of other items and skins tied