Valve Unveils Steam Trade Offers

[Andy Chalk]

Valve Unveils Steam Trade Offers

"Trade Offers" will allow Steam users to propose inventory item trades to friends, even if they're not online.

You've got a problem. You have a ton of useless crapola building up in your Steam inventory that you have absolutely zero use for, and you can never seem to get together with your Steam friends to set up trades because they're not really your friends at all, and they're always out doing stuff without you. Jerks.

Or maybe they live in a weird time zone or something. Whatever - it doesn't matter anymore, thanks to the magic of Trade Offers! It works like this: Instead of having to be online at the same time as your prospective trading partner, you can put together both sides of a potential trade - what you want, what you're willing to give - and ship it off to be perused later. Trade offers can also be sent and received through a web browser, rather than requiring the Steam client.

You can send and request more than one item at a time, but may currently only make offers to people in your friend list. Users who have their Steam inventory set to "private" cannot receive trade offers, so if you want to play, you'll have to open up a bit. Trade offers that go unanswered will automatically expire after two weeks, but may be canceled at any time.

It may not be the biggest Steam news ever but given the popularity of trading cards and the way some of this bric-a-brac tends to build up (anyone need Half-Life 2 Deathmatch?) it'll probably be a hugely popular feature. Steam trade offers are live now, so if you've got some digital junk you'd like to clear out you can give it a rip right here [http://steamcommunity.com/my/tradeoffers].

Source: Steam [http://store.steampowered.com/news/11395/]


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[TiberiusEsuriens]

You've got a problem. You have a ton of useless crapola building up in your Steam inventory that you have absolutely zero use for

You mean ALL OF IT? I honestly can't understand the point of it, or the enthusiasm the community has towards it. To each their own I guess, but every time I get a "you got something new" notification I just give a deep, depressed sigh. Unless Valve creates a way for me to sell my entire inventory for cold hard cash with the click of a button, I personally would rather they just remove the system.

Trading cards? How about allowing to trade in useless crappy games.

That's something I can get behind. It's a bit of an insult here, but Origin is better at that than you, Steam! (oh snap)

 

[SadisticFire]

You mean ALL OF IT? I honestly can't understand the point of it, or the enthusiasm the community has towards it. To each their own I guess, but every time I get a "you got something new" notification I just give a deep, depressed sigh. Unless Valve creates a way for me to sell my entire inventory for cold hard cash with the click of a button, I personally would rather they just remove the system.

You mean like the steam community market? The thing you can sell unique items too?
But this does seem kinda nice. It allows me to complete the sets I want to I can get more booster packs, and in turn sell said booster packs for cheap indie games or DLC. Or open them and complete sets to get stupidly good coupons. Yay getting Portal 2 for free.

 

[Saidan]

Trading cards? How about allowing to trade in useless crappy games.

Baby steps, my friend. Baby steps.

 

[Bat Vader]

And yet still no word on being able to trade or sell games in my library that I have no intention of playing at all.

I know how you feel. It would be cool if I could sell some of my Steam games on the Steam Community Market or trade them to friends for a different game. I thought for sure that after EA allowed people to return their games on Origin that Valve was going to do game trades on Steam.

 

[Silva]

This could be a fun feature for about five minutes, I guess. Not usually what I'd call newsworthy, but then it may be a slow gaming news day.

Trading cards? How about allowing to trade in useless crappy games.

This came to my mind as well. It'd be especially useful for indie games which were fun for half an hour but you aren't likely to play again.

But that would reduce Valve's profits as a middleman company, and there's no way of turning that into a way to make money. So it probably will never happen. Half of what works in Steam is that you buy a game because your friends have it. They can't really remove that need without a loss.

It may not be the biggest Steam news ever but given the popularity of trading cards and the way some of this bric-a-brac tends to build up (anyone need Half-Life 2 Deathmatch?)

HL2DM was excellent, always nice to see a shout out to multiplayer games that actually remember to include "fun".

 

[tzimize]

Trading cards? How about allowing to trade in useless crappy games.

QFFT.

What the fuck do I want with all these stupid hats, and even more useless cards. Level up my steam account? WHAT?! I have to GRIND my game store?! Are you fucking joking?!

Steam is good because of its offers, stable functionality and mostly no BS interface. I just wish the had a button to disable the useless achievements as well.

Other digital game stores are playing with the trade in idea, steam will follow. I'm sure of it. I just hope they dont drown us in useless crap. Thats Microsofts job.

 

[Metalrocks]

like many of you, i also hoped i can trade my games i dont want. i sure have bunch i like to sell like crappy duke forever.
selling the cards made it sure easy for not using my own money to buy some small dlcs when they are on special but games would be even better, h

hope this will change soon.

 

[Strazdas]

Why not just allow the items into the auction system you already ahve set up and use that for everything on steam?

 

[Kahani]

You have a ton of useless crapola building up in your Steam inventory that you have absolutely zero use for

That would be everything. The Steam inventory does not ever contain a single thing with any possible use, it just has a bunch of pretend "cards" that don't mean or do anything. Are we really supposed to be happy that they're wasting time with this shit instead of just deleting the whole thing and doing something useful?

 

[Redlin5_v1legacy]

Oh hey, a feature I will likely never use... I mean sure, maybe others might enjoy trading virtual cards and achievements but I have never had any interest in them unless they had an effect inside the game.

Now if we could trade games with friends... That would be something special.

 

[Zakarath]

Trading cards? I just sell all of those on the marketplace for about $.15 each... Eventually I'll be able to buy some game that's on sale with em ^.^

 

[Something Amyss]

Unless Valve creates a way for me to sell my entire inventory for cold hard cash with the click of a button, I personally would rather they just remove the system.

It's really annoying to see an item that's not tradeable or marketable.

Trading cards? How about allowing to trade in useless crappy games.

But they can satisfy a bunch of people with some shiny superficial features and not have to compromise their own bottom line at the same time.

Why would they do something useful?

 

[Infernal Lawyer]

And yet still no word on being able to trade or sell games in my library that I have no intention of playing at all.

Trading cards? How about allowing to trade in useless crappy games.

While I can understand most of the reasons why people would want to sell their games, what you two are saying sounds, well... Extremely snobbish. Hey, I'm sorry, but if you bought a game you don't have any intention of playing, is that really Valve's fault? Wanting to trade used games that you're finished with or return games you don't like/don't work is one thing, but complaining that you can't sell a game because your library is over-saturated? Talk about First World, Upper Class problems.
I'm sorry, but while their are many legitimate reasons to complain about not being able to sell your games, having a bloated library because you kept impulse buying during the sales or got something you didn't care for in a bundle is not one of them.