Steam changed their card drop rules

#1

You now have to wait 2 hours before you become eligible for cards. Even if you have owned the game longer than 14 days. Even if you didn’t acquire it via Steam and can’t refund it. Even if the game isn’t even 2+ hours long. This means on average you’ll have to play a game 3-4+ hours in order to get all it’s cards.

What are your thoughts on this?

Also @larsiusprime I think you might be interested in researching what effect this has on gameplay statistics. The average / minimum average gameplay time for games with cards seems like it’ll be completely ruined for devs. Though I imagine that plenty of them will be happy to use it as a point of bragging. :stuck_out_tongue: “90% of my players have played at least 3 hours of my game!”

#2

It’s interesting. I’d actually seen a whole bunch of devs half-joking about adding an achievement to their games for playing 2 hours.

As for playtime, yeah it’ll probably distort stats, but that was already happening with card idling when cards themselves were first introduced. This will just inflate it further. It seems like it will do it across the board, and thus it won’t mess things up too bad, as time played is mostly a useful relative stat to compare against other games on steam.

#3

So that is what happened… I was wondering why I recently got no cards after beating a game with a short first “episode”. (In this case it didn’t affect me since the second “episode” was an extra level section in the main game, and that section is much longer. (The first “episode” was basically a tutorial to the second “episode”.))

If Valve is worried about buying a game, getting cards, refunding cards, change things so no game refunds after trading away or selling cards from that game.