Valve’s new Trading Cards service in Steam is slowly picking up, well, steam as the beta testing community offers feedback and more and more developers get their hands on the necessary tools to add cards to their games.
This week alone four indie games have added trading card sets to their list of features: Monster Loves You!, Really Big Sky, Faerie Solitaire, and Bit.Trip Presents Runner 2: Future Legend of Rhythm Alien. By playing these games and trading with the Steam community, you can now earn cards, badges, emoticons and profile backgrounds.
More exciting is word that Valve is putting together a weekly schedule to release new trading card sets every Tuesday and Thursday moving forward. Soon there will be more trading cards than you’ll know what to do with!
As for the service in general, I’m not very fond of the limited drop rate while actually playing games and the subsequent reliance on the community marketplace to find most of the cards. The setup feels like Steam’s take on in-app microtransactions, rewarding gamers who pay for their status more than those who legitimately want to earn cards through committed replay of their favorite games. There needs to be some way of gaining additional drops, such as a system that rewards extra cards for completing especially challenging achievements or actually finishing games instead of playing just long enough to collect the timed drops.
Still, I do like the overall concept behind Steam Trading Cards, and see great potential for future growth. As more games are added, I find myself more and more addicted to collecting new cards. Any extra hook developers can add to encourage replay is nothing but a plus in my book.
Matt Litten is the full-time editor and owner of VGBlogger.com. He is responsible for maintaining the day to day operation of the site, editing all staff content before it is published, and contributing regular news, reviews, previews and other articles.
Matt landed his first gig in the video game review business writing for the now-defunct website BonusStage.com. After the sad and untimely close of BonusStage, the former staff went on to found VGBlogger.com. After a short stint as US Site Manager for AceGamez, Matt assumed full ownership over VGBlogger, and to this day he is dedicated to making it one of the top video game blogs in all the blogosphere.
Matt is a fair-minded reviewer and lover of games of all platforms and types, big or small, hyped or niche, big-budget or indie. But that doesn't mean he will let poor games slide without a good thrashing when necessary! 
