What are best practices for making Steam trading cards? This feels like one of those things where if I push the wrong button I'll get a dozen nerds mad at me forever

What are best practices for making Steam trading cards? This feels like one of those things where if I push the wrong button I'll get a dozen nerds mad at me forever
Ok this ones definitely not the BEST practice but its such a funny practice I might have to do it one day
ooh. uhhh, I don't know how many knobs there are to twiddle, or how many badge levels there can be, but fill it with absolute batshit badge titles for people to affix to their profile
They certainly are JPGs only given value by a perverse marketplace, but they are also literally fungible, unlike NFTs (or physical trading cards). My copy of "Lutece Twins (Trading Card)" is exchangeable for any other copy of the same card.
wouldn't that be true of duplicate NFTs as well? i can't imagine why anyone would care about the precise identity of a particular token, even if it's technically traceable, short of maybe the occasional "oh this is the one [some famous guy] had once"
Yeah, that's the lie of NFTs; you can mint one that's identical in every way except its provenance. Apparently folks do care, or pretend to care, about the fact that NFTs have a cryptographically-enforced history, and Steam trading cards have no such history (at least, not publicly viewable). It's very silly, like everything about NFTs.
We just kinda made trading cards out of images from our games and haven't heard any complaints: https://www.steamcardexchange.net/index.php?showcase-filter-publisher-1069
Hell yeah, thank you! Did you do anything in particular when determining their drop rate?
It's been a while, but I think we estimated the games' playtimes and aimed to have a full set of cards drop over the course of a full play. The Majesty of Colors is set to 5 minutes, and Ossuary is set to a half-hour.
They still get traded even if they're just in game screenshots.
The really annoying bits are the badge rewards, where you have to make 6 increasingly differentiated badges for handing in a full set of trading cards repeatedly (and then the last one for handing in a foil set of cards) and Valve gets weirdly picky about making sure they all look both similar enough and different enough from each other. It's the only time Valve has ever dinged us on aesthetic criteria and I'm still confused about what they want because it's not documented as far as I can find.
imo best practice is: don't
I feel legitimately annoyed by any game that shoves those things in my notifications and makes me have to pay attention to the horrible steam inventory ui
honestly fair. my reasoning for including it is kind of a long game strat, though unless it turns out Turbo Successful i'll very likely opt against it in the future