Steam Trading Cards Out of Beta

Steam's trading cards, mentioned briefly in this way-too-long post about virtual trading cards in general, are out of beta today. I already had the pleasure of "collecting" some of these cards a few weeks ago, thanks to a Steam friend who sent me a beta invite, but my participation thus far (spurred by curiosity alone) has been strictly passive. I got my standard card drops for Half-Life 2 and Portal 2 by running each game for a couple of hours, but I've yet to go out of my way to collect an entire set of cards for any given game.

It hardly seems worth it, since doing so would likely require trading with strangers or giving money to strangers; one is irritating and the other is insane. Meanwhile, it seems the only material reward for obtaining a full set of cards is the possibility of a coupon alongside a bunch of virtual things that are no more useful to me than the virtual cards used to pay for them. On the other hand, all of these virtual things are worth something to someone, so more substantial material rewards — monetary rewards, in fact — might be within reach if you know how to work the system for a profit.

How It Works

For those of you not in-the-know, the newly introduced Steam trading cards are the latest in a series of secondary features added to the already-bloated Steam Community over the past year or two. (Steam Market? Steam Workshop? Greenlight? What are these "Community Hub" things and why do these discussions need to be separate from the existing Steam forums? I think I've had enough.) Unfortunately, these trading cards don't do much, and they're not part of a collectible card game like Magic: The Gathering. They're just collectibles. You can exchange a set of them to get a handful of virtual prizes, but in the end it all boils down to more collectible stuff in your inventory, more cosmetic features on your profile, and perhaps a bigger ego if you're actually proud of this.

Your first few trading cards can be earned by playing any the applicable games, and additional cards can then be received from three-card booster packs which are given out at random. However, booster packs don't seem plentiful — at least, not at this time — so getting a complete set of cards before the heat death of the universe will likely require trade of some kind.

For most games, the initial gameplay-induced card drops are based on playtime only, so you don't have to do anything in-game to get them. In fact, you don't even have to play; you can just get your cards by idling at the main menu of each game. (If I remember correctly, it only takes a couple of hours to get your maximum share of trading cards from any given game, much less than the length of a typical playthrough, so whether you're playing the game or leaving it paused for card-mining, there's no grinding involved here.) The only games with special card-dropping rules are the so-called "free-to-play" Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2, which only drop one card per $9 spent on in-game items.

Leveling Up

So what's the point of all this?

Here's a hint: Money. But I'll get into that shortly. First and foremost, these trading cards give you another reason to care about your Steam Level, an arbitrary indicator of coolness according to Valve, which appears on your Steam profile. A user's level is based on experience points which are in turn earned primarily by accumulating badges. What are badges? Well, actually, those are nothing new.

Most of the badges on my own profile are from participation in Steam's sale-related events from previous years. (Valve has a history of using the Steam community as a platform for meta-games aimed at getting its members more involved and excited about spending money, and sometimes this involves handing out specially themed achievements for the various games on sale during an event. These achievements often translate to badges and thus to experience.) Badges and experience points can also be earned for being a long-time member, participating in beta tests, and — predictably — owning lots and lots of Steam games.

The trading card thing factors into all of this because each complete set of cards associated with a given game — all eight of the Half-Life 2 cards, for example — can be exchanged for a badge. (The same badge can then be "leveled up" multiple times by collecting the same set of cards again and again.) Along with each badge comes the aforementioned handful of virtual goodies, which may or may not include a coupon, as well as a bunch of experience which raises your Steam Level. Having a higher level then increases your chance of randomly getting a booster pack of three cards.

At this early date, however, it's not exactly clear how frequently one might expect to receive a booster pack. As I mentioned above, it seems pretty rare. The trading card FAQ only shows the percentages of increased drop rates associated with each leveling milestone, and indicates that booster packs are "granted randomly to eligible users as more badges are crafted by members of the community." Without more information, I'll just have to wait and see how long it takes me to get a booster pack, if I ever get one. Frankly, however, I'm more interested in how Valve is controlling the number of cards in circulation.

Artificial Scarcity

Logging playtime will only get you half the set of cards for any given game — for example, four of the eight Half-Life 2 cards — and that might include duplicates. In the absence of booster packs, a player who doesn't trade will literally never earn a badge, and a player who only trades card-for-card will literally never be able to craft badges for all of his or her applicable games. In such a system, allowing cards to be permanently consumed in the badge crafting process would very quickly lead to a shortage. Booster packs fix this, but giving them out willy nilly would lead to an ever-increasing surplus. I can only assume that the cards being exchanged for badges are the very same cards being redistributed in booster packs. After all, that would make loads of sense, especially if we're supposed to pretend that these imaginary cards are to be treated as actual collectible objects like Magic cards or vintage stamps. If it is the case, however, the seemingly miniscule odds of receiving a booster pack would suggest that a relatively small number of users are actually crafting badges.

In any case, while a user who doesn't trade still does theoretically have a chance of eventually crafting a badge, the system heavily encourages trading, which is far more convenient. The only question is whether you're trading cards for cards, or paying cash. Even more convenient than finding a stranger who has what you need, and needs what you have, is looking up exactly what you need on the Steam Market and buying it. Sounds crazy? It's already happening. Thousands of cards are showing up on the Steam Market, with the rare foil cards going for a few dollars and regular cards ranging from around 40 cents to just above a dollar. This doesn't necessarily mean that just as many thousands of cards are successfully being sold, but the list of recently sold items on the market's main page does show a few cards every time I reload it.

This brings me to Valve's other motivation for getting into the virtual trading card business. Simply put, the whole thing is designed to suck more money from the wallets of those who are prone to trading card addiction. Some people, like me, are driven to obsessive completionism in video games; for other people, that completionism extends outside of video games to stuff like this. There are people out there who will not feel complete until they've collected every card. It's not inconceivable that some poor soul might actually buy one of these trading-card-enabled games on Steam for the sole purpose of getting more cards to trade. For the slightly less insane (but equally addicted) collector, the Steam Market is there with individual cards for sale, always waiting, tempting you with an easy path to your next badge.

Free Money (But Not Just For You)

For everything sold on the market, Valve takes a small transaction fee, so even though they aren't selling cards directly to users, they're still making money. In addition to these user-to-user card sales, the introduction of this trading card meta-game brings a mess of other items to the market as well, namely the emoticons and profile backgrounds that are earned with the creation of each badge. As long as the market is alive, Valve is making money just by keeping the servers turned on.

Evil, huh? But none of this is particularly bad for the user. Sellers on the market can make some extra change to put toward their next game (if they don't want their cards and don't mind viciously undercutting thousands upon thousands of other sellers), and buyers needn't worry much about the transaction fee unless they plan on turning around selling the very same items they just bought (which appears to be a losing proposition when each buyer pays more than each seller earns). Some have allegedly made a significant profit (in Steam Wallet credit) by purchasing cards and selling whatever rare items come out of badge crafting, but I can only assume this requires some cleverness and some luck. Trading card hustling and associated caveats aside, though, it's pretty nice to have an official means of selling items that you don't want to keep, even if your Steam wallet will only grow by a few cents.

So it's not all bad, but don't think Valve is doing us any favors; if you try to look at this from the developer's point of view, all of our usernames turn into dollar signs as usual. If you think you're going to get rich by selling all your cards, think again. Valve, on the other hand, has created yet another way to generate revenue by doing very little work. They've created their own little economy in which everything is heavily taxed but nobody really cares.

In other Steam-related news, this year's summer sale is due to start pretty soon. No one ever seems to know the exact starting date, but last year's summer sale started in mid-July, and in the previous year it started at the end of June and overlapped with the July 4th holiday. I probably already own most of the Steam games I'd be willing to buy this summer, and my backlog is already long enough thanks to the incessant Humble Bundle events, but I look forward to another Steam event nonetheless. (Maybe I'll get another badge.)

The Problem with Trading Card Games

Scrolls, the upcoming collectible-card-based strategy game from Minecraft developer Mojang, enters its open beta phase today. Essentially, this means you can buy the not-quite-finished game for less than its full price and start playing early while they work out the bugs and make improvements. Some part of me wants to partake in this, because the game looks pretty interesting (and because we all know how playing Minecraft quickly became the most popular thing since breathing), but the rest of me doesn't want to touch this game with a thirty-nine-and-a-half-foot pole. It looks fun, but I'm conflicted.

Collectible card games are an interesting thing. I want to love them, because I think they're so cool in theory. I wanted to love Magic: The Gathering, the original trading card game published by Wizards of the Coast back in 1993. The concept of such a card game is ingenious, both for its unique gameplay and — let's be honest — for its potential to rake in huge wads of cash for the owners.

Over the past 20 years, new sets of Magic cards have been released on a regular basis, and the total number of different cards seems to have surpassed 13,000, yet the game still remains accessible to newcomers. New rules are introduced all the time, and the balance is tweaked with each new expansion, but the earliest cards can still be used (outside of certain tournaments) together with the ones printed today. The number of possible combinations in a 60-card deck isn't even worth counting.

The ability of each player to create his or her own customized deck of cards, drawing from a collection unlike that of any opponent, is what makes this type of game so fun to play. Unfortunately, this makes the gameplay inherently imbalanced, unless we consider the start of the collection process to be the true beginning of any given match (and that's a stretch). Even then, a game like Magic too often requires continual monetary investment if you want to remain competitive, and this feature (while I'd like to call it a flaw) is by design. I played Magic for a brief period of time, several years ago, and my cards might have been only half-decent back then, but they're total garbage now. More powerful cards and better gameplay mechanics are created with each expansion to keep players spending their money. Of course.

There's also a certain threshold of monetary investment required in order to become competitive in the first place, and that threshold is probably going to scale in proportion to the size of your opponent's paycheck. Things might be balanced within a group if everyone involved cares enough to go on eBay to buy selectively the individual cards they need for one of a few strategies deemed viable at the expert level, but this isn't always affordable. Meanwhile, for more casual play in which most cards are obtained from random packs, the guy who wins most often is going to be the guy who spent the most money on his collection. The three pillars of succeeding in Magic: The Gathering are building a good deck, making the right in-game decisions, and (perhaps most importantly) owning better cards than the other guy (which is where the "collectible" aspect comes in).

When a video game affords even the smallest advantage to a player who spends extra money (e.g., through micro-transactions), we call it "pay-to-win" (even if this isn't literally true) and we hate it because it feels so wrong. It is wrong, because the delicate balance of the game in question is either compromised or completely destroyed. Being at a disadvantage sucks, and if you give in and buy your way to the top then the challenge is gone and the game quickly becomes pointless. (In the most extreme cases, you've essentially just paid to see the words "you win" on your screen, so congratulations on doing that.)

A lesser form of pay-to-win merely allows players to spend some extra money to skip past a seemingly endless grind, as is the case in many so-called "free-to-play" games. This doesn't necessarily destroy the game's balance of power (because the advantages being bought can also be earned through dozens of hours of play), but it does highlight the major flaws already present in the game. If a person wants to pay more money simply to get less gameplay, the game probably sucks (and the person playing it probably hasn't realized there's nothing left to do if you're not grinding).

In the video game world, all of this is positively awful, but most collectible card games are pay-to-win by nature. Sure, they're fun to play if you're up against someone whose skill level and deck quality are in the same league as yours, but if you play against a guy whose collection of cards is twice as big (and twice as expensive) then it's completely unfair.

When I first heard of Magic: The Gathering Online prior to its release in 2002, I thought it might be a little more fair (and affordable) than its tabletop equivalent. I assumed (or at least hoped) that each player would be given access to the same pool of cards, or perhaps that better cards might be unlocked by winning matches, or something. At the very least, I naively believed that players wouldn't have to buy all of their virtual cards at the same price as physical ones because... well, you know, because they're not real cards. Unfortunately, Magic: The Gathering Online is identical to the original card game except that the cards aren't made of card stock and ink.

Duels of the Planeswalkers looks like a nice alternative, even with its relatively small number of cards, until you realize that you can't even build your own deck. This is no surprise, though, since Wizards of the Coast doesn't want this game to be a viable alternative. Duels of the Planeswalkers is meant to draw in new players and get them hooked, so they become frustrated by the lack of deck-building options and graduate to buying packs of cards, be they physical or digital. The virtual cards in Magic: The Gathering Online, despite being virtual, have monetary value because Wizards of the Coast doesn't let you do whatever you want with them. Artificial scarcity makes them seem as rare as the physical cards printed in limited runs on actual paper.

Digital game distributor Steam recently unveiled its own trading card meta-game, which is still in beta, and it's proving to be a nice example of how such artificial scarcity can make something desirable even if it has no real value, no purpose, and no practical function.

Players with access to the beta test can earn virtual trading cards for their Steam Community accounts by logging play time in certain Steam games. These currently include Borderlands 2, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Don't Starve, Half-Life 2, and Portal 2, as well as the free-to-play games Dota 2 and Team Fortress 2 (but only if you spend money on them). You can get up to four cards per game just by playing, while eight cards from a single game comprise a complete set. The fact that you can only earn half of any set on your own means that trading (or buying from other players) is a necessity.

Once you get a complete set, those eight cards can be turned into a badge and some other items. The badge is good for nothing at all, while the other goodies that come with it are mostly vanity items, like emoticons and points to "level up" your Steam Community account. (There's also a chance of getting a coupon, but my experience with Steam coupons is that the discounts they offer are less impressive than the ones you see during a typical sale.) The whole thing seems pretty dumb, but you can already see cards for sale on the Steam marketplace, and that doesn't usually happen unless people are buying. There's also a demand for those vanity items. Apparently, some users even made a profit by buying lots of cards and then selling the goodies that come with each badge.

In general, things that were specifically made to be collected usually don't have a lot of real value to collectors. However, if you turn that collection process into a game — even if it's a stupid one — people go nuts. If people are willing to spend real money on virtual trading cards just so they can earn virtual badges and virtual emoticons and level up their Steam accounts for virtual bragging rights, it should be no surprise if the same people are willing to spend money on virtual trading cards that give them an actual advantage in an online game. I can't really blame Wizards of the Coast for taking advantage of this kind of behavior. But when the game is a competitive one, I just don't like the idea of buying victories, even if it's done in an indirect and convoluted way.

A true trading card game, even if its entirely virtual, is going to have some level of imbalance. If each player draws cards from a unique collection, it's never going to be completely fair. All of this might be okay, however, if everything were unlockable through in-game actions and accomplishments. Naturally, I was hopeful when I first saw Scrolls; the official website tells us items at the in-game store can be bought with the gold earned by playing matches, and this presumably includes new cards (called "scrolls" because it sounds so much cooler). However, a "small selection" of items can also be bought with "shards" — a so-called "secondary currency" which you can buy with your real-life credit card.

So how significant is this "small selection" of in-game items? How much of an advantage can you gain by immediately purchasing everything that shards can buy? I can only assume the advantage is pretty significant; otherwise there would be no point. The real question is of whether a person who paid $10 more than you (and doesn't deserve the advantage) is distinguishable from someone who played 20 hours longer than you (and earned the advantage). As long as it's possible to unlock everything that matters through gameplay alone, and as long as doing so is feasible (i.e., not a 500-hour grind), there's some hope for this game.

Mojang has claimed that Scrolls won't become a pay-to-win game despite its purchasable items, but developers say a lot of things before their games are released. The only reason to believe them is that the game does in fact have an initial cost — in other words, it's not "free-to-play" so the developers don't need to rely on in-game purchases to turn a profit.

The cost of access to the open beta is $20, which isn't so bad when you consider the average cost of a modern video game, which tends to be around $50 or $60 regardless of quality. (While this high cost applies mostly to console games, high-profile PC releases tend to follow the same model with some notable exceptions. Runic Games, for example, earned some praise for selling Torchlight II at $20, which gave the action role-playing game a significant advantage over its controversial $60 competitor Diablo III.) Assuming that Scrolls turns out to be a decent game, this discounted price for early access is a pretty good deal.

Unfortunately for Mojang, I've been trained by Steam sales and Humble Bundle events to refrain from buying anything unless or until it's dirt cheap. With some patience and good timing, I could buy a handful of older games for the same $20 and I'd be sure to enjoy at least one of them. It doesn't take long for the price of a game to drop, and this is especially true of PC games now that developers are realizing they need to compete with piracy instead of trying in vain to stamp it out. As a result, people who play PC games — or the "PC gaming community" for those of you who can say such a thing with a straight face — have come to expect their games to be inexpensive. $20 is a good deal, but it's not great.

I certainly don't mean to imply, of course, that we should all wait a few years to pick up Mojang's new release. After all, we don't even know if it will ever be subjected to such brutal price-slashing. Furthermore, Scrolls is a multiplayer game which might only be fun for as long as the number of players remains high, so the time to buy is now, if you want it. The problem is that the game is a risky investment and my spending limit for such a risk is so low.

That limit — the point below which a risky investment becomes a risk worth taking and any potential buyer's remorse becomes bearable — is different for everyone. For me, it's about $5. That might seem like a ridiculously small figure, but it's what I paid for BioShock a few years ago. It's what I paid for S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl. It's also what I paid for the first two Max Payne games combined. I almost bought Metro 2033 for $5, but I waited and got it for even less. I got Killing Floor for $5, a few years ago, and I've put more hours into that game than anything else I can remember. None of these games were new when I bought them, but I still enjoyed each of them at least as much as any $20 game I ever bought.

None of this is really a complaint about Scrolls or the open beta price tag in particular. But I might be more willing to spend four times what I paid for Killing Floor if I actually knew Scrolls would be a worthwhile purchase. Isn't there some way of trying out a game before its release without paying $20 for access to a beta version? Oh, yes, a free demo certainly would be nice. Maybe we'll get one of those later on... but we probably won't.