Kayin
@Kayin

I hate steam trading cards.

I hate them so so much. With every fiber of my being. It's not healthy to hate a minor UI inconvenience as much as I do but I do. I loathe these wretched things. I hate the implied insult that I should be excited to receive one. To collect a set. To cash them in for gems!!!?? I hate that I can't turn them off. I hate that I can't even turn the notification off. I hate that, if I google "how to turn off Steam Trading Cards" real, living, breathing motherfuckers will have the gall to be like "Why would you want do that? Hey you could just sell them. You know they make Valve a lot of money right? ;)". I fucking hate that I should, for some reason, be excited that a company is making a money while providing no meaningful value.

I HATE THAT TO SELL THEM I have to confirm every sale on a fucking awful, trash phone app, because my steam account is valuable when it really shouldn't be. I hate that some people think I should be EXCITED because valve made a fucking nickle and dime stock market for psychos. I hate the idea that I'd want to collect this shit to "unlock emotes" or "to have more friends", as if I should need to do that on a service that is ALREADY FUNDED BY ME SPENDING FUCKING MONEY

I hate them. I hate that, if given the option, I will add Cards to Brave Earth Prologue, and people will purchase my game, with real money, to get fake cards, to maybe sell for money? I hate that I will be excited for people to buy my game so they can turn it into an idler for monopoly cards. I hate the idea that I will make money, for making a game, without people actually wanting to play the game. I hate that I'm not financially secure enough to take a principled stance on this.

I hate that, after years of accepting "Yeah, when I play a new game, I'm just gonna get a bunch of dumb notifications in like the first few hours of a game", that valve decided, IN THEIR GENEROSITY to randomly give me a notification EVERY DAY, RANDOMLY for what amounts to spam because idk, it's fucking christmas?? I hate valve almost as much as I hate their fucking trading cards.

The one good thing about them -- the fact that my poor friends can get small subsidies toward purchasing games -- I also hate. I hate that my poor friends have to do the digital version of redeeming soda cans. I hate that shit in the world is so bad, that this infinitesimal way to leach money from weirdos is worth the time of my friends. I hate that it's a pain in the ass for me to even just give them all my cards, like handing a bag of cans to someone on the side of the road. I hate that, even if I do that, the thing that annoys me the most -- the random notifications an intrusive pop-ups -- still happen. I hate that I need a whole ass fucking chost cause putting all this in a twitter thread, a thousand angry little tweets, would be an act of violence toward my twitter followers that even they could not forgive and they fucking follow my dumb ass so their standards are already low.

I cannot escape. There is no reprieve from gamification. One might say "But Kay, why get so mad. This is just a papercut".

To that I would say... it is because it is a papercut, so small, so needless, so inescapabilty sharp, that I hate them so much. If it was worse I'd probably eventually go numb. But these things, these wretched little pieces of digital trash are so small, so minor, that the inconvenience of every one rattles in my brain like a fly that can't escape a room.

I HATE steam trading cards


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in reply to @Kayin's post:

To make it even worse, Steam locks you out of selling trading cards (or anything else) if you haven't bought anything on Steam in the past year or more. And after you buy something, Steam waits 30 days to unlock your ability to sell things again.

One time I sold of all my current card not cause I needed to but like... to see how painful the process is an the whole song and dance before you can even sell stuff like that suuuucked

Yeah. Even if you just want to keep your inventory empty, they make it as much of a pain as possible unless you melt them down into gems, which is still a pain, just less of a pain - and doing that seems to be just about useless, since last I checked, you get almost nothing that way, or even less nothing than selling cards for like 1 - 2 cents after steam takes their cut.

Also it used to randomly throw card packs at me, but I think it stopped doing it after I stopped having money to blow on steam games. Good if you want to keep your inventory empty, bad if you wanted to sell them to try to scrape together some steam credits. Memory is a fallible thing, though, and I haven't kept notes.

...oh hey Kayin is on cohost that's cool

lol but seriously I think whimsy is nice, so at face value I consider this really cute. it's completely thwarted by actually being monetized. I hate even more that anyone is actually buying these, if people didn't agree they were valuable they'd die off like NFTs, which these are clearly a precursor to. and getting one from Steam feels like getting reverse-pick-pocketed a couple cents. it's not actually less concerning than being pick-pocketed, it's still weirdly invasive, and I only got like two cents for it?

Yeah at first I thought they were kinda annoying but cute? But the fact they exist to not really collect, but to process into other things and stuff is like.... idk just ewwww that doesn't even feel good as a collectable anymore.

My first commercial game just had its best year, because people keep buying it for its trading cards. On one hand, the money's nice, but I wish it would've gotten for a much less ridiculous reason.

I hate them so much. I just leave the notifications unlooked-at because if I never open it up then that just becomes the norm and I can deal with it. What a fucking waste of time though, and what an annoyance that it feels like leaving money on the table to not click through the sale process for each of them.

You can actually /sorta/ bulk sell them but its per game by going to each games badge page and hitting the "sell these cards on the market" button (also hi its Saturn from Elsewhere on the internet)

I literally have no idea how the trading card system works.. when I eventually publish my game on steam, setting up the cards for it actually makes a meaningful amount of money?...

Sometimes I think of how the xbox (360?) era of games pushed achievements and how that subtly changed the paradigm of games' intrinsic and extrinsic reward structures for nearly all games to come, and how it's probably Not All That Great of a Thing. Steam trading cards are like the step up from that where instead of a subtle push downhill it's a punch to the face off a cliff. Like, trading cards are a horrible, horrible evolution of the meta-gamification stuff of the last decade and a half. It's a shame they're basically ubiquitous on Steam and accepted by players; I just hope this kind of system doesn't catch on as successfully as it has on Steam's storefront. Don't need that extra layer of slime on the already grody gamification+monetization layers on games.