The Low-down
It's always nice to see Steam trying new things, but it's been a little hit and miss. The attempt at social media with the introduction of the activity feed was bit of a flop, but the Community features were well received. Greenlight and Big Picture, in my opinion, were huge steps forward in regards to reaching a different kind of player and developer base. Now Steam has dialled back the progress train with collectable trading cards.
These cards are accrued through playing your favourite games that support the feature. Most games don't even need to update, as the whole process seems to be handled through Steam. As you clock up time playing the game, you have a random chance of receiving a Trading Card (or a rare Foil Card). For Free-to-Play games, you can receive additional card drops each time you spend $9 on in-game purchases (currently only for TF2 and Dota2). The game will drop up to half the set, the rest can be accrued though trade or bought on the Community Market. When you have a full set, you craft them together to receive various items in your inventory and XP, which I'll talk about later.
The Good
The whole thing is a novelty, and if you don't care about this sort of thing, you can easily ignore it, or better yet, make some money by selling the cards you earn to those who do care. If you do care, then it's a little something extra for you to do, to pass the time, if you really need to.
In conjunction with the Beta, Steam Profiles have been revamped. Now with unlockable backgrounds, profile features, badges and emoticons, you can earn these bad boys by crafting sets of cards. Each time you do, you earn a profile background, badge and custom emoticon that relates to the game you crafted the cards for. You'll also receive a random Steam coupon, and a Steam discount is always nice. The new Steam profile page is much snazzier, but if you don't like it then too bad, you're stuck with it.
The Bad
Steam now has a Level system, like a RPG. Unlike an RPG, it's mostly useless, and the only benefit you get from gaining Steam levels is the extension of your Steam Friend's List cap. For every level, you may have an additional five friends on your list. For some, this may be a big thing, but I personally don't agree (says the guy with only 51 friends).
Once Trading Cards are out of Beta, I expect the value of cards significantly drop to the point of worthlessness. Foil cards will retain some value, but like Mann Co Storage Crates which now sell for .03c, they will most likely end up as junk in your inventory, and you can't get rid of them so easily.
The UglySteam doesn't do this without a pinching a little money off the side. As with all things on the community market, Steam takes 15% of the sale, 5% for itself and 10% to the game developer. Since selling cards is the best way to get rid of them, Steam is making a nice profit for this. Not particularly a bad thing, but unless you get an awesome coupon, the whole process will cost you money.
The sad thing is you don't actually need to 'play' the game, rather, you can just open it and have it idle in the background. Similar to the whole TF2 debacle (I proudly wear my Cheater's Lament, thankyou), it doesn't promote playing the game, which I believe misses one of the most beneficial points of the whole system. Encouraging players to buy Independent games is one thing, actually playing them however, is just as important.
In conclusion, it's mostly a money making gimmick, but it does provide some degree of novelty. It's a different take on Xbox's Gamer Score system, but I just wish the cards were more than a disposable inventory item. As a lover of various trading card games, I love owning cards as much as I love playing them. Overall, the update has been reasonably well received, but it is still in Beta, so we should see some changes as time goes on.
Watch the Steam Trading Card Group page for more updates.
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