New idling program that does it all for you, from original Enhanced Steam guy. Download.
Thanks for the heads up!
I have not messed around with trading cards in awhile outside of completing a few sets in the Summer Sale to try and nab the special rewards during that promotion. Last night I got curious as to how many games I had that still had free card drops available…turns out it’s 51 games! Apparently all those Humble Bundles, IndieGala’s, Groupees deals and BundleStars bundles added up to a crapton of games with cards in my backlog.
Not sure what, if anything, I intend to do about this yet. I’m sort of torn between burning through the drops to sell the cards and make cash for free game versus holding onto some of them where I would be close to a set so that I can make sets and reap rewards during Steam Sales. I’ve done that the past couple of Steam Sales though and have yet to receive anything that wasn’t a common $0.03 item.
The correct move is to hold on to them until the next Steam sale, craft them day 1 to get a special sale card, and then sell the sale card.
You can get a complete set of cards for ~$0.40 (either straight up buy a cheap set, or spend to complete a set for cards you already own). Day 1 steam sale special cards sold for ~$.60 the last summer sale and the last winter sale.
Presuming, of course, that trends in Steam Sales continue to hold.
Use STC Set Prices for prices (if you import your inventory, you can also sort by completion price “Price Diff”)
Pretty much that. The most valuable Steam cards are for niche games that are extremely expensive. Few people buy/play the game in the first place, and many of those who do want to keep the cards for their own use, meaning reduced supply and increased demand.
The next most valuable Steam cards are the first handful of sale cards that are produced, simply because there aren’t many in the first place and speculators will jump on them in case they end up being valuable down the line (or that guy with the 600 Steam level will buy them all to craft his level 255 badge). If you’re trying to make money on cards, then I’d look to getting those, but you’re still not going to make a whole lot of money overall.
I also wouldn’t necessarily count on Steam sale cards being as valuable in the future, what with the most recent card event being blatantly rigged and all. Interest starts to seriously fall off after they do that too much.
Gnomoria has cards as of today (I saw on Twitter), so I know what I’ll be grinding for tonight! (Although the prices look only so-so.)
…
Oh my God, I’m so sad.
I would highly advise against doing that. Valve’s TOS explicitly prohibits running any external programs.
Years ago, when TF2 started doing random weapon drops, someone made a similar program to idle for those weapon drops. Everyone wondered about it, Valve said nothing, so I assumed it was okay.
A month or so later, they dropped the hammer, and everyone who had idled lost all of their weapon drops, and got an email reminding us of the TOS.
I have enough invested in my Steam account that I wouldn’t try something like this unless Valve explicitly gives their approval.
20 cents right now for Counter Strike. If anyone is interested place a buy order of 4 cents on each card. Too bad we can only finish that badge 5 times.
Most of those bundle cards are almost worthless. Not really worth the time to do that unless you’re going to try that idling program. I’ve been in the same boat for awhile and made a steam category for all those games. I look at it whenever “I’m bored, what do I want to play?” and pick one.
Great, 52 games now… =)
Thanks for the advice gang. I do use the mega-cheap cards (Counter Strike, Defy Gravity, etc.) to make sets in the days leading up to a Steam Sale. I had half a dozen sets ready to craft on Day One of the Summer Sale this year, and spent less than $0.30 on each set (granted half were sets I already had cards for).
My problem is that I’m a sucker for the big gamble versus the sure thing. If I had been smart, I would have crafted those 6 or 7 sets on Day One of the sale, then sold the resulting Summer Sale cards for $.50 or $0.60 each and netted a nice profit of around $0.25 per set (~$1.75). I then could have continued to sell Summer Cards as I earned them, probably netting me another couple of bucks throughout the sale (prices on those hovered at around $0.25 each for a long time, and never really fell below $0.15 even at the end). All told if I simply sold everything during the sale I could have netted an easy $5, which is a free AA game during the sale.
Instead I gambled. I crafted one set per day in an effort to get the “point” for my team and the chance to win games off my wishlist. Then I used the Summer Sale cards to complete 3 full Summer Badges sets in an effort to score an uncommon or better game item that I could sell for real money in the Market. Of course in the end I won zero games off my wishlist and scored nothing but common items for a total profit of around $0.20, so I should have gone for the easy money instead. The lure of a $10+ game item was just too great.
Winter Sale I may load up on sets early, then take the easy money. It’s the smart move…
Actually this is a good move, if your team was the winner.
$0.50 to craft a badge for 1 point, and then as the winning team, get 2 sale cards (~$0.30 per sale card) to sell for a slight $0.05-$0.10 profit (not as much as a day one $0.20-$0.25 profit though).
After the midweek change in the rules, you got 3 sale cards for contributing to the winning team, and so the profit for a craft went back up (even as the price of sale cards decreased to $0.20-$0.25). If your team came in second, you broke even.
It helped that I was red team, who had the winning streak.
So as of today, 314 games on Steam, 66 of them with Trading Cards as yet unclaimed (and another dozen with half completed sets). I need a second PC just to load Steam games and idle for cards.
I know this sounds crazy, but having all those unclaimed cards sitting out there is eating away at my gaming soul. I have very limited time for gaming right now as it is, and sometimes I sit down to play Rome 2 TW or State of Decay and think “I could load up something new and idle for cards instead”. Thank you Steam for ruining my fun time by making me obsess about digital nickels and dimes. :-p
I kinda enjoyed my week of dipping into little games I never got around to playing and giving them an hour or two (with a little idling in there at mealtime or whatever). I don’t know that under analysis it would have ended up being worth the time, exactly, but almost all the games had something in them to enjoy.
Mini-necro…
Does anyone know what the deal is with Sacks of Gems lately? For a long time after their introduction during the Steam Winter Sale they were selling in the $0.50 to $0.60 range per sack (1000 gems). But since early Feb. they have been steadily rising in cost, despite there being more of them than ever in the market. It’s counter to the basic rule of supply and demand.
When they were $0.55ish they were not a bad deal if you wanted to gamble at making a booster pack or two to try and complete a card set, but at the $0.80 average they are selling for now I just can’t figure out who is buying them and what for. It can’t be people looking to make boosters, because at that price it’s cheaper just to buy the booster straight from the market. Same thing with individual cards. It must be something in the items market, trading gems for DOTA, CSGO or TF2 items or something…
Silly thing to even notice, I know, but it makes me curious. The whole Steam meta-market thing is sort of fascinating from an economics standpoint.
It is fascinating. I picked a bunch of these with card money at the end of the christmas sale when there weren’t any other games I wanted to buy.
I just checked the trading sites. It doesn’t seem like it’s because of them. Everyone still wants keys.
I had been buying up sacks when they were ~$0.55 and turning them into boosters for a couple of in-demand games, then selling the boosters and turning a small profit. I could buy 3000 gems for $1.65, convert them to four 750 gem booster packs, then sell the four boosters for around $2.20 after Steam cut for nice a little profit of around $0.50 per run. I wasn’t getting rich or anything, but I padded my Steam Wallet with a “free” $8-$10 this way after the winter sale. Then the price shot up and eliminated any profit margin.
I can’t see any reason for the increase either. There are now almost double the amount of Sacks of Gems for sale on the market as there were a month ago, yet the price is 50% higher. I did find a few Steam Key trading sites that had people listing broken off bundle keys for trade for Sacks of Gems, but it doesn’t seem like that would cause enough market movement to drive the price up 50% in 30 days.
As usual, it’s probably some Steam Trader insider market thing happening that the rest of us have no clue about.
Probably more people found out about this (or since it seemed to happen at once, someone probably posted somewhere that got enough eyeballs). Remember price is a function of both supply and demand, and can happen in different ways, so you can definitely see both an increase in quantity and price at the same time depending on how exactly they’re shifting.
Or it could be nefarious space bat pirates doing something.
(Also, I’m surprised that was profitable. It was nowhere near so during the Winter Event, so I guess lack of eyeballs afterwards let that be profitable?)
I never understood gems to start with.
I can convert something to like… no gems. If I took everything I’ve ever gotten on Steam and converted it into gems I would get maybe 800 of them. Maybe. Or I could sell everything for a nickel each or more and get like… 100x the value of the gems.
It felt like crafting in an MMO. The mats cost more than the product as far as I could tell. Though to be fair I haven’t given a crap about Steam’s silly “games” in quite some time.
That is what I thought at first as well, that people caught on, but there had not been a correlating increase in the number of boosters for sale or the price of those boosters until this past weekend. Now the price seems to be catching up a bit, but the quantity available is still at normal levels, so I’m thinking the spike in Gems prices is unrelated, and the uptick in price for the boosters represents the few speculators like me dropping out of selling them.
As for the profitability of buying gems, converting to boosters and selling boosters, it’s only a handful of games that have the right combination of lower cost boosters (750 gems or less) combined with boosters that sell for significantly more than average but also sell fairly consistently (lots of games have boosters that sell for $1 or even more, but they may sell one booster pack a week, so good luck turning profits on them). There are only a few games whose booster packs meet these criteria, and you have to scour the market for them. I was lucky to run across one early on and mostly rode it to the dozen or more runs over the past couple of months that turned such a nice profit. Even with the uptick in booster value from the past few days though that profit has been cut in half, making it not worth the time and risk to make such small amounts of profit.
My assumption would be people stocking up expecting a big spike at the start of the next sale.