Brian Haugh, 20, has spent the last six years in purchasing Thousands of :steam2016: emoticonsthat Valve created to promote the Steam Summer Sale 2016 and looks like like a hot dog with little shoes. On Steam, you can buy emoticons from other users on the community marketplace or create them by playing games which generate Steam collectibles. You can use them when chatting on Steam to spice up your profile description or create Super Mario art. Steam emoticons are typically $0.10 oddities with limited practical use and aesthetic value, but they mean a lot more to Haugh.
“I will never stop looking for or for sausages,” he told me. “I will think of Wiener until I die.”
Haugh has made it his mission to buy every :steam2016: hot dog emoticon available on the community marketplace and has done so since the day he turned 16 in 2016 on June 30th, he has 2,525 of them in his collection, which cost him over $250. He tracks those numbers in a sophisticated spreadsheet that includes all of Wiener’s transaction history and visualizes data in a chart called Wieners Purchased Over Time.
The sausages were a joke at first. “I used to be part of a small gaming group that got together to play Mount and Blade: Napoleonic Wars‘ Hagh said. “In the summer of 2016, the Steam wiener emoji was released and for some reason I was blown away by it. I kept spamming and our leader got fed up with other people starting to join me. So he banned the use and smothered my rights to use the sausage emoji.”
In response, Haugh and his friends began plotting plans for a “Vienna Resistance,” which consisted of several people spamming :steam2016: until they were kicked off the server. Shortly after, he began buying the emoticon in bulk to celebrate the successful trolling, he says. Do you remember what it’s like to be 16?
But if you look past the teenage boy shenanigans, Haugh’s attention to detail can’t be overstated. He devotes himself to his craft, which is collecting sausages. He’s so devoted that he still performs routine checks on Steam’s load of sausages, even after feeling like he’s already made his “last purchase” which bought up all available :steam2016: emoticons at the time (save one for 400 U.S. dollar).
“It has become a religion for me,” he said. “That’s always in the back of my mind.” And it changed his understanding of what real hot dogs are like forever — Haugh says it “sounds weird, but occasionally I see one, and that whole experience is going to come to mind and I.” will laugh.”
In addition to motivating schema shifts, his bulk purchases of sausages could also affect the Steam market. They’re probably the only determinants of :steam2016: emoticons’ prices, and using Steam’s spreadsheet and data visualizers, Haugh has proof that his bulk purchases often result in price spikes.
It checks out. “For example, if I bought every single emoji worth $0.03-$0.10 on a given day, the next day is the only one [emoticons] It would cost $0.11 to sell,” he said. “The average value would have gone up and other people would start selling their own sausages for $0.11, which could be considered the average trading price for that day on the Steam market.”
“Steam’s marketplace is similar to that of an exchange,” he said. “You can’t buy things unless someone else is selling,” which is why he kept the $400 sausages alive.
Our world seems to be growing darker and full of monkeypox every day, but at least one man’s loyalty to Sausages remains good and strong.
“I never intend to quit,” Haugh said. “There’s always going to be some poor fool who will put a sausage on the market for pennies, and when he does I’ll be there to buy it.”
