Steam Game Borrowing and Cards on the Horizon - Nerd Age

Article first published as Steam Game Borrowing and Cards on the Horizon on Technorati.
The popular game delivery service Steam is making some big changes. They are currently in a trading card beta and there are many rumors of them letting you borrow games.

The Steam Card Beta

You can join the Steam Trading Card Beta here. By buying games, playing games and buying things in in-game stores you can get virtual trading cards. You then craft these into badges which up your Steam level, unlock backgrounds and allow you to have more features on Steam.

Steam Game Borrowing

Some code within steam itself has led some to speculate game borrowing may be a feature soon. Here are the lines:

• “SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicense_Title” “Shared game library”
• “SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicenseLocked_OwnerText” “Just so you know, your games are currently in use by %borrower%. Playing now will send %borrower% a notice that it’s time to quit.”
• “SteamUI_JoinDialog_SharedLicenseLocked_BorrowerText” “This shared game is currently unavailable. Please try again later or buy this game for your own library.”

As you can see it looks like they will have a borrowing system in the future. We assume there will be both time limits and use limits on it though. However this is quite an impressive feature if you can loan games out to friends.

Why are they adding these Features?

The Steam Card system is obvious. For one you get cards by playing the games in many cases, which increases hours played for them. This allows their publishers to tout “X hours played” and see that people on Steam are playing their games. This means more publishers for Valve. The second reason is that you can get an advantage by buying cards off the Steam Marketplace. Valve gets a cut off of each sale. They also get money from the in-game stores of TF2 and Dota 2.

As far as game borrowing it probably falls on the heels of gamer outrage for how Xbox One handles game sharing. To put it simply you can only share games with a limited number of people, which outrages some gamers. Valve appears to be trying to make gamers happy with this new policy.

Still in Beta

We should see these systems evolve over time as the trading cards need some work on drop rates. The game sharing will also likely have some problems to work out. Steam will probably have some more interesting additions soon so we will keep you updated.