The introduction of the Steam Trading card system — which allows players to earn tradeable badges, profile backgrounds, emoticons and coupons on Steam by playing games — has created a most peculiar market of digital items that people are willing to pay lots of cash for.
To wit: one of the more expensive “items” one can purchase is a weed emoticon, which players can get by collecting a set of trading cards from the game Port Royale 3. It’s a business simulator with real-time battles. Here’s a trailer.
The price of the emoticon gained from Port Royale fluctuates on a day-to-day basis, with the most recent high price reaching nearly $US40. For an emoticon.
According to Gameranx, purchasing the emoticon outright may be a smarter choice than attaining the set of cards and relying on chance to see if combining them together results in the weed emoticon. Y’know, in case you’re hankering for a weed emoticon to use on Steam chat.
Comments
10 responses to “Folks Are Paying An Absurd Amount For A Weed Emoticon On Steam”
haha nice sell, I thought I was smart because I was selling the 8bit heart emotes from castle crashers for $1 a piece when I could get the set of 6 at 20c a piece. I wonder if it’s worth buying the game just to try and get your money back like this.
Still a week away from being allowed to use the marketplace because I reset my password after 2 months of not using Steam. Good to see I’m not missing out on much, I guess…
Drugs as an incentive? I demand the ACB protect me from such filth! Wont someone please think of the man-children?
There are (obscure) games where the average price for selling the 5 card drops you get is more than the full price for the game. And no, I’m not going to say what they are.
The price of cards has gone back up since the summer sale ended, im getting 20-30c per card on average, never thought I would get more free games for playing games on steam.
I haven’t used the phrase “try-hard” since early high school.
It’s pretty apt here.
They’re the kewl kids.
Can’t believe people would pay $40 for an icon. Hell I had no idea what these cards were and was stunned when I got some in the steam sale and realised you could sell them to people for real money.
Does this mean that crappy games are going to start making things like weed and swag icons for all the tools to buy the games now?
🙁
Just realized the game-pub/dev gets a cut of marketplace transactions. Yeah. Yeah, I think we could be seeing more ‘popular’ icons soon.