Keenly aware that people’s Steam accounts are filling up with garbage – like cards and emoticons – Valve is giving people a chance to pulp them and turn them into what are essentially Steam Bucks. And then use them to bid on real games.
It’s called the Steam Holiday Auction, and works like this:
This holiday season, Valve is introducing a new event that gives gamers the chance to recycle Community items in their Steam Inventory for new games. From now through next Thursday, gamers may recycle unused items – such as Trading Cards, backgrounds, and emoticons – and exchange them for “Steam Gems.” Then gamers may use those Gems to bid on nearly 200,000 new games. The bidding begins now, with new Auction Rounds happening every 45 minutes, Monday through Thursday morning.
If you’re outbid on a “free” game, the only way to increase your betting pool is to buy more games that have cards. So you can destroy them to get more gems to bid on more games. For reference, most cards seem to be worth around 20 gems, while the games are going for thousands, of not tens of thousands of gems.
Seems messy, and geared exclusively towards selling loads of copies of cheap games that are offering the very things Valve is running an auction on because people want to get rid of them.
Not sure if cunning or ridiculous.
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30 responses to “Steam Auctions Let You Destroy Useless Crap, Maaaybe Win Stuff”
Sort of related. Does anyone know what came from the ACCC recommendations go Valve about steam? Can us, Australians get refunds easily yet ?
I would like to know this too. This whole thing left me missing money and my entire steam inventory. I’d like to know if refunds are an option.
I really want to buy these Sack of Gems. Whenever I try buy it, it says that the item lsiting is gone… I know it’s not though
The only one smellier than @miketarno is @greenius
bunch of stinkers all round
Heh, that reminds me of when you chose the all-around board in Snowbow Kids , the child like voice would enthusiastically announce: “All-around!”
God I loved that game
“Come again!”
Seriously under appreciated gem.
i won it from a radio competition. I was on the fence about a playstation or a 64. This put me over the line on the 64. Zero regrets.
I was literally playing that game last night.
I smell nice :'(
STINK nice 😉
I’d rather just give them money for games in a normal sale.
Yeah same. I’ve had a brief look at how this auction and trade inventory items thing works, it seems like it’s way too time consuming and too much work to get a game.
Right? Just reading the damn explanation of how to get the gems was exhausting.
I think I’ll just stick to selling my cards for 10-20 cents.
This. Someone always buys them eventually
I really hop they still have a normal sale
Word on the street (apparently leaked by PayPal Japan) is that they are having one on the 18th.
I would imagine it’s geared to adjusting the trading-card-related economy right before a massive influx of new items with the holiday sale, as opposed to just selling games. Remove a whole swath of items and change the value of what’s left. Specifically to massively reduce the user-manipulation of whatever sale activity will happen this year, where people in previous years were buying bulk cheap cards to advance.
Makes sense. A lot of cards you could buy for a couple cents just to get badge-created freebies that you could sell for several times as much. If you had infinite patience and considered your time less valuable than minimum wage, you probably could’ve done pretty well out of that.
I kind of remember when Valve used to make games…
Does Valve remember?
As of writing The Forest is going for in excess of 208,000 gems. I have a few backgrounds worth 80-100 gems, so there’s no way in hell I will be getting ANY games in this auction.
You’re most likely better off selling your cards and things to people participating then using the money towards a game than trying to generate enough gems to bid.
I was wondering why all my 1c listed items got sold this morning!
Prob made 20c! Can’t wait to check my now fat steam wallet
You were so slow to the news that they took the entire event down before you even got the article up. Steam’s news popup told me about the event pretty much as it went live (coincidental time to leave a game) and I was trying to figure out the thing pretty much from the start.
What you missed was that someone hacked or exploited the gems and flooded the marketplace with them. Because of that, the price plummeted to 3 cents per sack of 1,000 gems. Then because so many people were buying so many gems for such a cheap price, the bids on the games were ridiculously high so the entire thing no longer worked. The hackers/exploiters and lucky few who actually managed to buy from the market (it was giving errors left and right, I only bought 3 sacks after about 3hrs of trying to place buy orders) were the only ones who could actually win any bids and everyone going legit with their own crafted gems could do nothing but watch from the distance.
Because of this, people were banned from the community and the entire event has gone down. I’m sure official word from Valve will clear up everything soon enough, but for now that’s my account of what went down.
Well this event was a huge fuck-up. Valve took down the event after finding out people were duplicating the gems.
Was going so say….. Saw my emoticons could be converted for 100gems, saw game bids in the millions, said screw this and exit steam, lol.
Eh I had a look when it started, but some games had bids of 6 million + gems on them and I couldn’t fathom how you would get that many gems without a massive amount of effort (or I guess, cheating as the case seems to be), so I decided it wasn’t worth the hassle.
I’ve just been selling cards all this time, which seems like the better option. Though one thing always bugged me.
Who the hell are buying these cards??