Gimme! gimme!

The Wonderful World of Steam Trading Cards

Earn, Trade, Level Up

There is something inherently appealing about Steam’s new trading card system, an appeal that has only been strengthened by the platform’s Summer Sale. The cards reward community-building and game-playing while tapping into our obsessions as collectors both old and young.

Summer of ‘96

Pogs, Merlin football stickers, Pokémon cards. I don’t know about you, but I spent most of my elementary school years watching some sort of collection craze unfold. Getting “shinies”, trading “swaps” and displaying them in a book or snazzy case seems to be an almost universal experience - I see kids here in Japan collecting small toys from cup noodle packs, trading cards, and gachapon capsules all the time.

Tazos, the cheesy-stained cousin of Pogs

(via Niall Kennedy)

This is a feeling that video games have tried to capitalize on for a long time. It seems a little weird to even admit to this, but I kept a spreadsheet of costumes I had collected in Dead or Alive: Xtreme Beach Volleyball for the original Xbox. Other people max out their achievements in games like Battlefield 3 and Monster Hunter and Pokémon fans will spending hours trying to “catch ‘em all”.

Steam jumped into this with its original achievements feature back in 2007 with the release of The Orange Box followed by badges in the summer sale of 2012. Achievements reward playing your games, badges reward buying your games. Trading cards are bricks that house the two, with XP and profile levels providing the cement to strengthen the system.

Earn ‘em

Many games in Steam now come with trading cards. You earn cards in these supported games by simply playing - typically an hour per card. In order to encourage players to trade, Valve has limited the number of cards you can collect through play alone (“card drops”) to around half the set or just under. That you have no control over which cards you receive simply makes the collection even harder to complete.

Just like when you bought your packs of stickers or Kinder Eggs - you might end up with a duplicate to swap. Using your stock of swaps, you can then try and coax your friends into trading with you, a feature Valve certainly wants to encourage given how important it has become to the Team Fortress community.

Rather cunningly, Valve’s limit on the number of card drops means you will almost certainly fall short of being able to complete your sets even with trading, so it is lucky for you (and rather profitable for them) that they are also giving out cards in their sales.