I only have three words for you

[Curunir]

Steam trading cards.

Because we all know we need and will dearly cherish those sweet minotaur emoticons, am I not right?

Come on guys, the preparation of the cards, backgrounds and pixel-art emoticons will only take like a day or two! And we will love you forever. While looking at our amazing Grimrock profile background images!

Please?

[petri]

We'll look into it but no promises because we are quite busy with LoG2

[Komag]

I have no idea what Steam Trading Cards are. I wonder how many people would really want them?

[Curunir]

It's a collectible card feature added on Steam. Developers make several background images for use on people's profiles, several small pixel-art emoticons for use in Steam chat and discussion posts, several images to be used on the actual cards and several badge images. Cards drop into players' inventories as they play the games. The cards can then be used to craft the said badges that give Steam XP, one emoticon and one background.

I am sure Grimrock fans playing through Steam would love to showcase the game on their profile and in chat/discussions using the emotes, art and badge.

A bunch of indie developers have already hopped onto the bandwagon but at least 50% of the games taking part are rather... underwhelming in quality and don't exactly have a 'fanbase'.
All developers who have a product on Steam are invited to take part and can do it, provided they send steam the art required.

You can read more about the whole thing here: http://steamcommunity.com/tradingcards/

[Komag]

Hmm, looks like something that could be sorta fun

[eLPuSHeR]

Yes, I heard something about it the other day while playing L4D2. One guy (who had the newest L4D2 beta) said that two of those trading cards had popped up in the middle of the game. I have also read somewhere that there are four of them in the game (eight in total). The remaining four must be acquired by trading between friends and/or any other people online.

[karadoc]

I dislike steam trading cards. I see it as basically just an in-game advertisement for steam. Steam is fine as a game distribution platform; and I find it to be a convenient way to manage game updates and save files and so on - but that doesn't mean I want every game I play to be about Steam. In general I don't really want in-game worlds to be tainted by out-of-game collectable card games.

These collectable cards are designed to be addictive rather than fun. They exist only to create a lock-in effect to encourage people to stick with Steam as a platform. As I said, I have no problem with Steam, but I don't think game developers should be leaping to get on-board this Steam advertising machine. Like many others, I am somewhat susceptible to to the kind of completionist compulsion which drives gamers to try to collect things like this. But I don't like it, and I don't like it when developers try to manipulate players to get them addicted.

[JohnWordsworth]

Very well put Karadoc and I agree with you. It woud be a different story altogether if the cards were collectable cards in some form of free-to-play card game (like Magic: The Gathering) that runs across the Steam client... Now that would be awesome.

[Curunir]

I fail to understand how the existence of cards for games you don't care affects you. On the other hand, I also see it as a positive thing to have cards and profile bgrounds for a game you really like - it's a great addition that helps promote games more than it does Steam.

[zukas3]

I'm sorry to bump this up, but this would be so cool! Please let me be fan of this game on Steam and have a badge <3