Steam "Cards"

[Ingmar]

Yeah, apparently there aren't very many. It was from the preorder for Season 2 I think. They made the guns from the same package available in other ways, so those aren't valuable, but the hat is apparently desirable enough that I get 4-5 friend requests a week from random people trying to trade for it. I should probably set my inventory to private.

[Sjofn]

But then you can't rub your imaginary wealth in people's faces!

[schild]

God, I literally do not give a shit about badges, experience, and levels on Steam. What a bloated, useless, overdesigned system.

[schild]

Ingmar, sell the stupid goddamn hat.

[Samwise]

Every time I play TF2 nowadays people ask if they can trade me for the Max hat.  It's the stuff dreams are made of.

[schild]

Samwise, sell the stupid goddanm hat.

[Ingmar]

But I like being able to tell when the enemy spy is copying me the one time I play TF2 every year!

[Paelos]

 

[Sky]

Man's got a point there.

[Fordel]

Schild just wants to buy all the hats for himself! 

[Segoris]

There's enough stupid hats in tf2 that you'll know it's you even without the Max's head

[Simond]

There's never enough stupid hats! 

[calapine]

So, how do I know who has extra cards and wants to trade them...?

[rk47]

Step by step
1.Click on your badge section


2.click on an individual badge


3.now scroll down!


4.now bug your friends

[Ceryse]

I've just been selling the few dupes I got and using that money in my Steam Wallet to pick up cards I didn't have.

Kind of sad that I didn't even know the Steam Wallet existed before this.

Main reason I'm completing sets and creating badges is to get them out of my inventory and I have a perverse need to level my account for some reason I don't actually understand. Thankfully that urge is small enough I won't spend any of my own money on it.

[Kail]

Yeah, I'm actually surprised how interesting it is to me.  Part of it's the whole "gotta catch 'em all" thing and part of it's the idea that this shit is actually making (a little bit of) money.

That said, some of this is kind of ridiculous.  I mean, Kinetic Void gets cards?  Really?  It's basically an early access alpha of an engine tech demo, there's literally nothing to do in it aside from lego a non-functioning ship together.  If there's a way to turn or move I haven't found it.  I built a ship that looked kind of like Serenity covered it with turrets, and fired bullets in to space for a minute or two, and I think I've explored just about everything there is to do in the game.  Total play time required to get all the cards: one and a half hours.  WHY DO THIS.

[Rendakor]

So to actually earn the cards for the games you already own, you just have to launch them? Can you just leave them running in the background for a bit until all the cards appear?

[JWIV]

So to actually earn the cards for the games you already own, you just have to launch them? Can you just leave them running in the background for a bit until all the cards appear?

That's exactly all you do.

[Kail]

So to actually earn the cards for the games you already own, you just have to launch them? Can you just leave them running in the background for a bit until all the cards appear?

All the card drops you have for that game, yeah.  You won't get the entire set, though, you don't get enough drops for that.

[Merusk]

WHY DO THIS.

Because someone at Valve figured out how to monetize the OCD nature of their audience and they can do it without building a whole new game.

Plus adding 'steam cards' gets some of those OCD folks to buy games they wouldn't otherwise, so smaller devs are going to be keen to add them when publishing.

[satael]

Maybe it's a social/economic experiment on how to create a market (artificially) for something that seems totally worthless. You might get some interesting data on how it changes people's playing behaviour too (to get the cards from each of the games they already own and how they play the games they buy now ). 

[sickrubik]

Yes, as a reminder (mentioned on page 1), you do not have to play the game. It just has to be launched.

[Trippy]

You need to do more than just launch them. E.g. I still don't have my Civ V cards even though I've been playing BNW.

[HaemishM]

You need to do more than just launch them. E.g. I still don't have my Civ V cards even though I've been playing BNW.

This. I launched a few games just to get the cards and got no cards. I played about 2 hours of TF2 and got 2 cards. I played about 30 minutes of Saints Row 3 and got 1 card. I lauched Bastion but didn't play, got no cards.

I want more cards, simply so I can sell them to put money in my Steam Wallet - it's coupons for the Summer Sale.

[sickrubik]

Well, let's put it this way. I've gotten all of my cards aside from TF2 (which I've been playing) and never played the games.

I VPN into the home computer, launch a game, let it idle, and I get cards.

You do not actively have to play the games. Does playing the games increase the chances of a card drop? Maybe, I don't know.

[Segoris]

The drop time for cards is random but you don't need to do more than just launch a game. Some even launch multiple games at the same time in text mode so it's not resource taxing on your system while you're off doing other shit.

Random is random.

[Sky]

Market is tanking, cards are down to less than 20¢ each as of yesterday. Still, probably get another buck or so, but it was nice for a while there. Wonder if they'll be collectible for completionists down the line.

[rk47]

Oh cmon, the price obviously crashed cause the game are so dirt cheap that people decided to just buy the game outright and earn the cards themselves. Dupes are expected but since Valve never really created a way to facilitate card trade except with friends, you're stuck with buying from strangers.

[Sky]

Or the fact that they're flooding the market and people are realizing it's worth selling them. Or both.

[Severian]

since Valve never really created a way to facilitate card trade except with friends...

They don't get their vig from a straight trade. They get 10% cash for every sale.

It's an interesting system because the people who sell their cards are getting the buyers to pay (partly) for their games. The money goes into the seller's Steam wallet, and eventually towards a purchase. Valve created the "value" that some people are willing to pay for, to acquire the other half of the cards needed to permanently convert them into badges, and collects 10% off the top of the transactions. The other 90% of the money goes to the seller, who then spends the buyer's money on their own games.

Valve, having spent I assume a decent amount of time and resources to set this up (and to continually add new game cards in future), did not attempt to sell the cards directly, which would have gone down badly. Instead it appears as if they are giving out something new for free. Yet what they are doing with the 10% skim is not that far off, and more effective.

Straight-up trades don't involve money, so Valve can't recoup their investment / gain profit there, but they still build loyalty for anyone who engages and gets invested in this. Sure I could buy the same game at the same price from the competition, but I get free cards to trade and badge if I go with Steam instead. Especially if it becomes a thing in my group of gamer friends.

[Ingmar]

You need to do more than just launch them. E.g. I still don't have my Civ V cards even though I've been playing BNW.

I got them all at once after my first session of BNW.

[Signe]

Wait.  Hats?  I LOVE hats.  Where are the hats?

[KallDrexx]

They don't get their vig from a straight trade. They get 10% cash for every sale.

It's an interesting system because the people who sell their cards are getting the buyers to pay (partly) for their games. The money goes into the seller's Steam wallet, and eventually towards a purchase. Valve created the "value" that some people are willing to pay for, to acquire the other half of the cards needed to permanently convert them into badges, and collects 10% off the top of the transactions. The other 90% of the money goes to the seller, who then spends the buyer's money on their own games.

Valve, having spent I assume a decent amount of time and resources to set this up (and to continually add new game cards in future), did not attempt to sell the cards directly, which would have gone down badly. Instead it appears as if they are giving out something new for free. Yet what they are doing with the 10% skim is not that far off, and more effective.

Straight-up trades don't involve money, so Valve can't recoup their investment / gain profit there, but they still build loyalty for anyone who engages and gets invested in this. Sure I could buy the same game at the same price from the competition, but I get free cards to trade and badge if I go with Steam instead. Especially if it becomes a thing in my group of gamer friends.

Not only that but I'm assuming that when you craft a badge you can't sell the cards again (that would be stupid if you can) which means that if people do like the card system in the long run summer sale cards could potentially go up in price once the sale is over, since supply is limited and people have been already taking them out of circulation.

[Rokal]

I'd be more into this if cards were tied to *some* gameplay and you weren't limited in how many you could earn. I was enjoying the system when it was encouraging me to revisit arcadey games I hadn't played in a while (Binding of Isaac, Dungeons of Dredmore, Hotline Miami) but the entire thing shattered once it started asking me to play regular games. I was either doing boring shit in games I've already beaten just to kill time without idling the game (collectibles in Tomb Raider/Bioshock, etc.) or I was playing linear story-based games that I'd been meaning to check out, but feeling like I should bail on them after 2 hours because I maxed out the cards I could receive from it.

I've been playing BL2 again since some friends picked up the season pass, and we maxed out on cards within the first night. Since then I've probably played another 6 hours with them, and it's a shame that I'd have better luck letting different games idle than actually playing one that was part of the promotion.

[Rendakor]

Agreed with most of your points Rokal. They should have tied the cards to achievements or something, instead of just "launch game, wait, receive cards".