It's Easier Than Ever To Be A Cheap Bastard

With the Steam Summer Sale over we can all go back to letting our wallets recover and actually play a few of those games we picked up. I think I did well this year, and picked up a lot of games for very cheap. Here’s my haul, for your viewing pleasure:

Games I bought:

BIT.TRIP Runner 2

Borderlands 2 Costume DLC

Dishonored + DLC

Far Cry: Bloor Dragon

FEZ

Giana Sisters: Twisted Dreams

Left 4 Dead 2

Penny Arcade’s OTRSPOD Episode 4

Puddle

Roller Coaster Tycoon 3: Platinum

Strike Suit Infinity

System Shock 2

Tomb Raider

Games I got as gifts:

Deus Ex: Human Revolution + DLC

The Last Remnant

Rogue Legacy

Strike Suit Zero

The Witcher 2

Games I gave as gifts:

Bastion

Merto: Last Light

Sonic All Stars Racing: Transformed

Superbrothers: Sword & Sworcery

XCOM: Enemy Unknown

And the grand total for all those games? A whopping $53.41. Less than the regular price of a single retail game. How did I manage this you ask? Through the magic of Steam Trading Cards of course!

Steam Trading Cards is a new system on steam that allows you to play games and earn cards. Certain games have cards, and you can earn up to half of that game’s cards by playing it, the rest you have to buy from other people or trade for. That “buy” is the key component here, because you can earn all the cards you can and just sell them through the community marketplace for Steam credit. When you collect all the cards you can use them to make badges, which earns you Steam XP and blah blah blah, what matters is that people are willing to pay money for these things, which is free money for the rest of us. I made close to $40 by selling steam cards.

It’s a brilliant move by Steam, since the badge earnings are totally cosmetic, it doesn't cost them anything in terms of lost revenue, and they take a lucrative 15% cut of all Steam marketplace transactions. They are profiting off this card thing hand over fist in a way that would make even Apple jealous, but we don’t hate them for it. We don’t hate them because even though it’s a system of superficial changes that serves to make them money, Valve isn't trying to pretend like they’re giving us some huge new service we should have to pay for. If you want to ignore the cards, you are more than welcome to do so, if you want to farm them and get money, go nuts, and if you want to actually craft badges to get wallpapers and emoticons you can do that too. It’s a totally no lose situation for us and a win win situation for them. For the low cost of building the system they can continue to support it and see profits on the level of TF2 hats with every game they support.

It’s amazing to watch other companies like Microsoft flounder with public relations while Valve continues to be everyone’s favorite gaming company. Part of it may be that Valve does comparatively little PR work of their own, and other than Gabe Newell getting up on stage and talking about how awesome everything is, most news about Steam spreads through independent news sites. Who would have thought that making business decisions that aren't anti-consumer and just generally being supportive and understanding towards your userbase could make a company successful?