It’s only being mentioned on the TF2 blog and in the patch notes for Steam right now, but the most recent client update features actual game trading. If you have unwanted gifts or in-game items, you can trade them with other users.
We’re working now with other game developers to incorporate both Trading and Inventories. Portal 2 should be reasonably soon and we hope to have several third-party games in the next few months.
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What restrictions are there on trading Steam Gifts?
Trading a Steam Gift is very similar to sending a gift to someone; just that once it is traded that user can then either trade it again, or open it for themselves. There are no restrictions on territory.
You can already access other people’s inventory and see the games they have, regardless of whether they’ve participated. Simply go to the Community pages and click “View Inventory” on the right.
It would be cool if it counted a game that you have never installed as a gift, but that would lead to some ridiculous meta-gaming of the big game packs.
If you have lots of steam games been never tried TF2, time to install and it log on. See what you have in your backpack. Depending on what promos you have (particularly if you have a little bunny head) you can probably get a few free games from them. People have always traded tf2 items for money/steam games in the past, but it was always a dodgy business. Guess Valve saw that a lot of virtual hat money was diverted to paypal when they could be funneled back to steam games instead.
@soondifferent;
Yea. I fired up TF2 the other day and I had a lot of items in my bags. Then I went on a 32 player(?) server and fired up my old engineer, trying to keep the battle going. The game was pretty much as I left it – a lot of grenades being spammed towards our side, until finally they make a push and win.
I suppose the maps aren’t really intended for 32 players though, so that was probably why. Still, its quite fun and nice art style. Not sure what I shall use all the items in my bags for though, but there they are.
Oh and I noticed there are ~400 achievements for TF2… yikes. Thats almost as many as some of those JRPG’s I had on my PS2.
It will be interesting to say the least to see what unfolds when people trade stolen or questionable gifts. As it stands, both accounts get locked until the matter is sorted. Now, Steam makes it legit to trade gifts between accounts? Oh boy…
BE CAREFUL!
By stolen gifts, I mean stolen or doggy methods of payment to purchase the gift to begin with.
Huh. I wonder if this is a step towards doing real money exchanges between players for drops, a la the Diablo 3 auction house. Imagine if a bunch of games signed up to participate, and you could use funds in your Steam wallet to buy or trade items across all those games. They’re already laying that kind of infrastructure down with their free to play partners.
I can’t wait to start getting messaged by random people who want to buy my TF2 items. The first time that happens, my profile is going to “friends only” again.
It’s bad enough going onto public TF2 servers. Whenever I do so, some person messages me a variant of “wil u plz traed me <insert item here>?‘’?? plz”. It’s like these people have alarms go off as soon as I join.
