1: Trading Cards, Badges, and the Community Market

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Kenneth Cummings

Dwarvenhobble 1

SpielerDad 1

Kenneth Cummings 1

Horrorsadistic 1

Let's not beat around the bush here: Steam is great. It's a fantastic platform full of great features. Though I'm primarily a PC gamer, I do occasionally like to play on consoles as well. When I do though, I find a myriad of annoyances in comparison. Whenever I go over to my PlayStation 3, I find that, aside from the ridiculous level of difficulty presented in simply trying to navigate the store and find my own games, my biggest complaint is just how bare-bones it all feels. Though its features aren't always perfect, Steam is at least making an effort to move forward and make their platform better, which is a lot more than I can say about my five or six years owning a PS3. As a disclaimer, let me mention now that I've never owned a Microsoft console, so most of the comparisons I make here are from PlayStation 3.After achievements were introduced, everyone followed suit. So why hasn't this caught on? Personally, I feel that trading cards and badges are a lot more fun to collect than achievements most of the time, since you can't make any money off of them. For the uninitiated, trading cards on Steam are doled out randomly as you play games, with the additional chance of getting a booster pack every week. The best part about this is, if you don't care about them, you can only really benefit from having them. Don't want trading cards? Sell them on the market. You won't get huge piles of cash from it, but considering the vast amount of titles you can buy on Steam for just a couple of dollars, selling a digital trading card for ten cents doesn't seem so bad.