Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2- What if crates were real?

Team Fortress 2 is notorious for hats and crates. A quick look at Team Fortress 2's Steam market page shows the hundreds of thousands of crates that Mann Co. and Valve have to digitally store.

Digital storage is nothing, but how much space would these crates take up if they were in the real world?

all the three cent offerings of the world are stored here

First off, we need to know the size of one such Mann Co. Supply Crate. There are special variations of the crates, but let's just take the basic crates and use some estimation. We can simplify this problem by modeling each crate as a simple cube.

Now let's find out the dimensions of the crate. A crate makes an appearance in TF2's Mac launch trailer. 

where is my soldier hatless, volvo

We can see that the crate comes up to about a little above Soldier's belt. We can use this to gauge the crate's height by using a class height chart. According to some handy reference material from Valve's developer community, Soldier has a view height of 68 Hammer units.

The Hammer unit (HU) is the unit of measurement used by the Source engine and 1 HU is equal to 1/16th of a foot. Let's model this and say that the distance from the Soldier's feet to his eyeballs is 68 HU, or 4.25 feet long.

With some rough estimates going, proportions tell us that a crate is about 2.83 ft tall and thus has a volume of 22.67 cubic feet. I could have made a better estimate if I actually took the time to pull up models of the crates from Source Filmmaker files and measured them there, but I'm too lazy.

it's rough but it'll do

We have the volume, now let's find out how many crates there are on the market.We'll include event crates too because they're not so different from the regular crates.

As of Monday, Feb. 17, 2014 CE, 12:37 PM, there are 3,087,297 TF2 crates listed on the Steam market.

If the crates were in the real world, they would take up 69,989,022.99 cubic feet, or about 70 million cubic feet. If we converted that to meters, that would be a little under 2 million cubic meters.

A quick search for the biggest buildings in the world shows that the Boeing Everett Factory has a usable space volume of 472 million cubic feet.

If you were to carefully arrange the crates, you would get something about 20 million cubic feet smaller than The O2, an entertainment district in London, England.

Instead, if we lined each crate up next to each other, they would form a conga line of crates 8.7 million feet long, or about 1,647 miles long.

ben only ever got pain trains from crates

Some more useless trivia:

-If we assume every crate on the market costs 3 cents, it would cost $92,618.90 to buy them all.

-If we assume every crate on the market is opened and each key costs $2.49, Gaben would be rolling in an extra $7.7 million.

-The most expensive crate is a Salvaged Mann Co. Supply (Series #30) which costs $84.68. There are currently 28 of them on the market.

But what about Dota 2 crates? 

It gets a little tricky: Dota 2 crates/containers come in all kinds of different shapes and sizes. Let's just count the ones that are the most crate shaped ones and assume that they are the same size as a Mann Co. crate. 

Examples:

-Containers with the prefix "Treasure of"

-Timeless Treasure of Claszureme

-Locked Gemstone Cache

You get the idea.

Steam stats shows us that Dota 2 has about 8.7x more players than TF2. Would it be safe to assume that there would be 8.7x more containers? If we just multiplied everything by 8.7, you would suddenly need 609 million cubic feet, easily greater than the usable space of the Boeing Everett Factory. But let's do an actual count just to be safe.

As of Monday, Feb. 17, 2014 CE, 1:50 PM, there are 3,215,256 Dota 2 "crates" listed on the Steam market. At least, the ones I got to. After several pages you hit cosmetic items and they were all under 2,000 in count by that point.

Dota 2 doesn't have as many series of crates as TF2 does and items only drop at the end of a match in Dota 2. Maybe that can explain why the crate count is low?

Anyway, if Dota 2 and TF2 crates were real, Valve would need 142,878,876.51 cubic feet of storage space to house all the orphaned crates using the assumptions we made.

It's doable: If Valve ever wanted to release real-world crates that drop randomly from drones in the sky onto your porch, they would have the means to store all the unwanted crates in the world. 

In the future, everything will come in crates.