I’m not disputing the fact that they’re making money, Telefrog. I just don’t like some of the directions the service has swiveled into during the last couple of years.
Invites are 70 cents right now on the Steam Marketplace if anyone is that curious. I’ll be playing a lot of DOTA2 in the next few months - They’re selling doubled cosmetic item drop rate for 3 months for $3. sigh Coupled with this I could see myself having a real problem. It’s a good thing there’s no actual rewards for it… but I’m really curious how being able to sell your cards will turn out in the Steam community.
edit:
You purchased this Steam Trading Card Beta. View it in your inventory.
I really need to work on my self control!
There are actual rewards. They include special Steam background themes, chat emoticons, and discount coupons.
Just like TF2 hats, I imagine there will be quite the secondary market for “trading” cards.
Edit: For example - Steam Community Market :: Listings for SCOUT (Foil)
Ah yes. I completely skipped over that part. :)
It’s pretty buggy right now. I would recommend people wait a bit instead of buying an invite if you wanna fully enjoy it. I got my first card by leaving a game open for a couple hours on the main menu screen. No notification other than that green envelope in Steam’s title bar. Sold it on the market for double what I paid for the invite, but those are $2 now.
One of the things you’re required to do for a badge is trade with someone. If anyone else is using this and needs help with that, feel free to add me on Steam and I’ll give you a crate or something. Same name, with a green thingy sitting on a box as the avatar. Be in the QT3 group on there so I know to accept you. :)
So you earn game cards, which you use to craft badges, which can be leveled up and… and…
Shit, I just want to double click in an icon and play a game. Thank god all this can be ignored.
And now get off my lawn!
Sometimes, I prefer to let others speak for me.
I was thinking of avoiding this new time slurp this until I saw they were offering coupons. I’m a sucker for discounts.
This reminds me of one of their previous holiday sales (the summer sale from two years ago, I think), where you got tickets for getting achievements for specified games, and then you could turn those in for some rewards such as DLC. That motivated me to play a lot of games in my library, and I actually bought one game to help me get the last ticket that I needed. Definitely a good way to get people to be more active on Steam and also buy more stuff.
They clarified that you will only be able to get half of the cards for a specific game once, maybe with a few duplicates. There will be no further cards you can acquire on your own after this for this specific game.
So to complete a deck, you have two options. Trading by finding someone who is willing to give up on his own deck for the specific game and the more obvious way, Steam marketplace, aka money. And with the non resetting cards, this looks like the planned way to complete a deck, let alone a second or third for the same game.
The cash crab in this one feels out of proportion.
If only they made a game out of that.
I had invitations, if anyone wanted one they should have sent me a PM. Usual caveats, don’t be a leech or a douche or someone I don’t like.
All gone. Good luck to everyone.
We need to go deeper.
Everyone is getting into this now if you join the Beta group.
Y’all should consider it if you couldn’t care less & own participating games. Leaving games open alt-tabbed and selling the cards on their market thing will net you an easy $10.
Actually making sets of cards is not recommended. You get a badge for your profile and a roulette of backgrounds & emoticons. You can buy most of those on the market for 50 cents if one really interests you. The cards themselves are ~$1 each. I assumed that was solely due to speculators but the people buying mine actually finished their badges…
Ran some numbers super quick with a calculator and so far valve has made over $15,000 from these.
I have a couple of beta invites to give away. PM me if you would like one.
Don’t know if anyone still cares, but I have three invites for this if anyone wants. PM me and let me know your Steam name.
edit: All claimed!
This seems a simple way to make some pocket change money. Like 10$ or 20$, by having computers idle, but probably the cost of electricity will make for the money you receive? its a bit weird.
I suppose the hat-economy will not survive forever, so Steam had to invent this thing to have a economy forever. I heard one card was valued $3000, I have notwhere to confirm it, somewhat I doubt it. Steam is a really crazy place :D
Made $40 through this by selling everything I got from games, didn’t really spend any ‘time’ or ‘money’ doing it either as I have been playing games while doing it (which is fun), and so any GPU electricity would have been incurred anyway. Valve has also made posting cards/boosters/whatever on the market really easy as well.
I’ve made a bit over $10 with the whole thing. Idling in TF2 right now to get the last few. It’s definitely gotten me to play stuff I either hadn’t gotten to yet or forgot about.
It’s out of beta as of tomorrow, so let’s see what happens when they add more people.
Great, so now instead of having random weirdos trying to con me into giving or selling them some TF2 hat I accidentally got, now I’ll have them asking for this stuff?
Set your account to private.
That’ll work better than doing so to get away from the TF2 hat traders, at least. Those inventory sites are forever.
I’ve made about $30 from selling cards now.