Steam Trading Cards System Is Changing
Valve is taking countermeasures in order to combat fake games.
One of the most popular digital distribution platform around the world, Steam, is getting an update in order to provide a safer environment, combat fake games and improve the overall Steam Store experience.
Steam Trading Cards are collectibles which you can earn by playing games. You can trade them with your friends or sell them on the community market. Actually, I grow very fond of Steam Trading Cards for a while now since I can collect and sell them, and spend the money on sales.
But, some coyotes always want what they don’t deserve. Some people are releasing fake games on Steam. They create Steam Keys and, hand them to bots running Steam accounts and make money by farming trading cards.
We could restrict the ability for developers to generate Steam keys for their games, but we hate to degrade tools that legitimate developers are using to make their players happy. We’re also not certain it would actually solve the problem–there are many ways a bad actor could try to get their game owned by all their bot accounts, and they just need to find a way to do it that costs less than they’re making from selling their Trading Cards.
Everything we buy or sell on Steam, effects the Steam economy. There is a working algorithm related to Steam Store which brings the games you might be most interested in to the fore. But, these fake games are affecting the result.
The algorithm’s primary job is to chew on a lot of data about games and players, and ultimately decide which games it should show you. These Trading Card farming games produce a lot of faux data, because there’s a lot of apparent player activity around them. As a result, the algorithm runs the risk of thinking that one of these games is actually a popular game that real players should see.
From now on, a confidence metric will decide when we can get the cards. Once a game reaches that metric, cards will drop to all users. We will now get these cards for our playtime. This precaution may prevent false games and card farming on Steam.
Enjoy!
