Launching today in beta across a selection of popular titles, Steam Trading Cards are collectibles Steam users gather while playing their favourite games, with sets tradable for game badges, profile backgrounds, emoticons, coupons, and more. As if hunting for achievements wasn’t enough.
They’re a means of rewarding players for playing the games they love, while tormeting those of us easily susceptible to the collector mindset. Starting today, players of Don’t Starve, Dota 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Team Fortress 2, Portal 2 and Half-Life 2 will start earning trading cards, with the service expanding to more titles in the coming months.
Want to know how it works? I don’t. If I did, I’d risk getting drawn into the latest in a lifelong series of card hunts that have left my psyche a shattered ruin. You can find out more about Steam Trading Cards here.
Comments
8 responses to “Valve Launches Steam Trading Cards, So Much Better Than Achievements”
Kind of reminds me of uPlay’s Actions (or whatever they’re called). You get points from certain achievements and you can use those to unlock extra things for any ubisoft games, like costumes or wallpapers, things like that.
looks more like digimon cards (trading not dueling)
I hope its retroactive.
Ive finished HL2 and i dont REALLY want to play it again just for trading cards 😐
Unfortunately they are not retroactive, but for the lazy, like me, you can just “idle” in game without playing and the cards will drop into your inventory. Currently they are not tied to any achievements only in-game time, so it works just fine.
To take it up a notch, if you go into the launch options for Half Life 2 / Portal 2 / TF2 / Dota 2 and add “-textmode” into the box, you can then launch all of those games at once in a simple text mode that doesn’t kill you systems’ resources and rack up cards for all games at the same time.
NICE!
Thanks for that, sounds like an awesome idea 😀
I’ve never really strayed too far from getting Xbox achievements as it actually makes me feel like I’ve accomplished something whereas in Steam it doesn’t seem as fantastic. Trading cards may actually get me back to playing some PC games again 🙂
Every time I think Steam has reached the point where this is as good as it’s going to get, I’m proven wrong.
They’ll hit that bar when I finally see Half Life 3.