Steam Trading Cards

In a series of blog posts, Valve condemned this behavior, calling such games "fake", and claimed that trading card farming was responsible for damaging the Steam storefront.

[5] Steam Trading Cards entered open beta in May 2013, with six games initially participating in the system.

For most games, this threshold is reached once the user has received half the number of cards required for a full set.

[7] During seasonal sales, Valve releases unique trading card sets to coincide with the event.

[2] To counter this, Valve implemented a "confidence metric" system, wherein trading cards can only drop for games which pass a sales threshold.

[11] In September 2017, Valve ended their business relationships with Silicon Echo Studios, who were implicated in an asset flipping scheme involving numerous developer accounts managed by the same person.