Last week saw the launch of Steam’s trading card game, a new system that sees cards dropped while playing through some of Valve’s catalogue. Collect a full set of cards and you can craft them into a badge for XP that levels up your player profile. Collect a set of cards again and you can craft a better badge.
The folk over at NeoGaf have collected together all the badges discovered so far.
Below, see them in all their glory.
Steam trading cards are currently in beta, and they’re really weird. An adjacent but separate system to achievements, they land silently in your Steam inventory as you play. Some are earned in-game, others through trading, and all can lead to rewards when you have a full set - Steam XP, emoticons, backgrounds, and occasional discounts.
Bar an arbitrary Friends list cap, our Tim found the new system to be fun and friendly. But that was before today’s addition to the Trading Cards FAQ, which reveals a direct correlation between cash spent in free-to-play games and cards earnt.
If you’re a regular user of Steam you may have noticed that they do free weekends from time to time. As of right now, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive is free to play until Sunday afternoon. If you don’t already have CS:GO, then we’re giving you a direct order to go play it.
I’ve just sold one of Steam’s newfangled cards. This makes no sense to me whatsoever. What makes even less sense is how quickly it went and for how much: 50p for a virtual picture of Alyx and Gordon that vanished in less than a minute.
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We were left scratching our heads last week as to what Steam Trading Cards were. They’d been spotted in the Steam database but Valve weren’t talking about their newest initiative. Well, the curtain’s been drawn back to reveal that they’re a development of Steam achievements & badges which will reward your playing of games with a deeper profile page and money off coupons.
Valve are in the process of adding gamerscore-like community ratings to Steam. Overnight, users have begun to notice personal meta-levels listed next to their account name as part of newly-rejigged profile layouts.
A reference image for something called Steam Trading Cards has been spotted in the Steam database. With no statement from Valve forthcoming it look like we need to start playing the guessing game. That, or Hungry Hungry Hippos.
“So, I have a little confession to make. I have been running a steam market arbitrage bot for the last 4 months," starts reddit user dmn002 in an Ask Me Anything, before detailing his story of how he built and deployed a bot onto the Steam Community Market that made him a fortune worth $10,000. Like every great Hollywood scam movie though, dmn002 gets caught by the authorities and condemned. Oops, sorry. Probably should have put a spoilers note before that.
Last night, the tickets for the Dota 2 International 2013 sold out in two short hours, leaving many fans disappointed. However, tickets have begun to show up on the Steam Marketplace: if you’re prepared to pay over the odds.
While the tickets have now vanished, they were listed for as much as £180.
As part of Valve’s continuing efforts to port their back catalogue over to the open source operating system Linux, escaping the clutches of Microsoft, the developer today released the beta version of Left 4 Dead 2 Linux.
Valve have also started hosting four new community-made campaigns.
Welcome once again to PCGamesN’s Spotlight on Greenlight, our regular Saturday feature where we look at the best and the most interesting Greenlight games that are hoping to make their way onto Steam. We’ve already looked at dozens of other titles in weeks past, so do take a look at our back catalogue.
It’s not many games that sink their setting to the bottom of the ocean, it’s a dark unexplored region where the most alien of creatures dwell. Luminesca has you shine a light into the nooks and crannies of this mysterious world, solving simple puzzles, and learning about a culture of sacrifice and slavery.
Who would have thought such a game would be so calming?
This week, Team Fortress 2 became one of the last games to switch over from Steam’s old content delivery system to SteamPipe. Once the switch-over’s complete, the game will boot more promptly and maps will load a little faster - but you probably won’t register the difference any more than you do the face of the man who brings your Amazon parcels to the door.
Before then, though, you’ll have to sit through a 20 to 30 minute “conversion process". But what is SteamPipe? What’s it for, and what does it mean for your games?
There’s very little documentation available around SteamPipe: just a couple of wiki posts. But talking to developers and those close to Steam, we can get a clearer idea of what SteamPipe, is, and what it means for PC gamers going forward.
Whether or not Dota 2 has overtaken League of Legends in the player number stakes (clue: it hasn’t), the question is, how big could Dota 2 be? Valve’s MOBA is massive, in a way that dwarfs every other game available on Steam. At its busiest point today, 261,609 people were playing Dota 2. Its nearest competitor, Football Manager 2013, boasted 56,981. But while we’re talking numbers, you’d better take a look at Dota’s trajectory over the past year.
Some of the world’s most talented developers have been known to crumble under the pressure of game jams, but all of Wolfire man David Rosen’s best work seems to have emerged from festivals of code, clock-watching and energy drinks. While I’ve yet to muster the requisite enthusiasm to buy into the Overgrowth alpha after six years of rabbit-rendering, Receiver succeeded in capturing the public imagination after just seven days of development. Now, less than a year later, it’s on Steam.
Welcome once again to PCGamesN’s Spotlight on Greenlight, our regular Saturday feature where we look at the best and the most interesting Greenlight games that are hoping to make their way onto Steam. We’ve already looked at dozens of other titles in weeks past, so do take a look at our back catalogue.
While Godus saw the return of Peter Molyneux to the god game genre we’ve not been entirely deprived of Populous-alikes since the release of Populous: The Beginning back in 1998. No, in fact, we’ve had an absolutely cracking return to the formula in the form of Reprisal.
Originally a free web game, the developers have expanded the beautiful tilt-shifted pixel art game into a fully-fledged release and it needs our help to get onto Steam.
People who have purchased Dead Island: Riptide in retail stores have discovered an entirely different game, Dark Souls, being added to their Steam library when they redeemed their retail codes. We still don’t know how this mix up occurred in the first place, but it seems to be at the fault of whoever printed the codes off. But with a game as troubled as Dead Island: Riptide, you have to wonder if some affected players shouldn’t treat this like a blessing in disguise.
Today Valve reveal plans for a new subscription based payment plan, to be built directly into Steam. It’s designed to “give gamers flexibility and control" of subscription based games, by allowing them to managed all in one place. Unholy Wars, will be the first to use the new system.
If all goes well with today’s Steam client beta, you’ll soon be able to control precisely how much of your internet-mana Steam downloads hog at any one time. Visit ‘Downloads’ in the ‘Settings’ tab, and there you’ll find a new rate-limiting option.
It’s always sad when a games servers get shut down, something many games run by Gamespy were the casualty of not so long ago. Relic today announced that it’s Company of Heroes servers, hosted by Quazal will be shut down on May 7th. But there’s to a crossover period where players will be able to migrate to Steam. That crossover period is now upon us.
Dota 2 is opening it’s Chinese servers on April 28th to anyone who can grab a beta key from Perfect World, the Chinese based developer and operator that acquired the licensing rights to Dota 2 back in October last year. The servers will not being using Steam, sparking worries about whether the Chinese version will be closed off from international involvement.
