That would have been great. And very innovative too but its probably too late to do it now. There is so many games with cards today it would turn into a hot mess lol. They should have done something like that when the card system first went into effect. Also they probably don't care either way since they made a ton of money with the cards already. I would really love for them to do something someday because Hearthstone needs competition. I can't think of anyone better than Valve to go toe to toe with them.
Yes, this definitely should have been something they did earlier on to make it much easier on themselves. And you're right - they probably weighed the cost of maintaining a game like this with the potential revenue stream and thought it wasn't worthwhile.
The idea sounds lovely but wouldn't that put a lot of work onto valve tho? If it's supposed to be a somewhat competitive card game it would have to be balanced properly, meaning they couldn't just allow all devs to make cards by themselfs like they're doing now.
Not necessarily. They could make cards similar to Hearthstone and let the developers simply pick which cards from their game had what properties. They could also have rarity rules like "here is a list of the properties of the rare cards, which can only be assigned to foil cards". That way, they could create a pool of around 300 or so cards of various rarities and simply let developers choose which properties (what that card does in the game) be assigned permanently. The downside, of course, is that you could end up with two distinctly different cards that do exactly the same thing in the game, but that wouldn't be that big of a deal honestly and it could be mitigated further by increasing the number of card properties available initially.
And speaking of increasing the card pool - rather than releasing "expansions" they could simply release a set of another 100 or so cards that have been play-tested and balanced so that they became available for new games or to entice games that don't already have trading cards to join in. Even if they added 100 cards every six months, they would eventually have enough variety involved to keep both players and developers happy.
It would also be kind of neat (from a user perspective) to have your Steam Trading Cards "battle" each other, or whatever. I think it would entice a lot of users (myself included) to move from a "harvest -> sell" mindset to a "harvest -> collect" or "buy -> collect" mentality. I think it could work, but then again this is all just a thought experiment since we know Valve wouldn't actually put the effort into something like this.
