Okay Geek Farm
Newell: "We're a little naive about used game trade-in's"
Ricardo Trejo
Steam has always been on the cutting edge of giving players what they want at the right time. The next step in the gaming client’s future has community trading in its sights. This is more than just gifting in that you can trade gifts and even extra purchases for other goodies from players. But this brings up the interesting question: will Steam allow used game trades amongst its community?
Speaking with Valve’s Gabe Newell, Eurogamer’s extensive interview on Steam’s Trading Beta touched a bit on what sort of future developments might be coming to Steam — namely, used games trade-in’s:
“We need to hire an economist, because we keep bumping up into these issues. You’re starting to look at weird issues like currency and inflation and productivity and asset values and liquidity of asset categories. We just wish we were smarter about this stuff. We’re reading frantically. We’re brushing up, and all we’re doing is convincing ourselves that we’re more stupid. Half the time people are saying, oh, well, illiquid assets inherently have a penalty, so this argues for trade-ability, that we’re essentially becoming a Russian currency model in the 1970s. Everybody races off to try to read papers on the implications of that.
We think we want to move in the direction where everything is an item of exchange. We just aren’t totally sure how to do that right. We’re sure there are economists out there who understand this really well. We feel like we’re this third-world developing country. We’ve discovered rocks! And we’ve discovered sticks! And there’s this other thing out there and we should move our economy in that direction. There must be somebody at the World Bank who can tell us what we ought to be doing. We just don’t know what that is yet.”
It’s pretty interesting to hear about gaming studios hiring eonomists, or even psychologists (which Newell later reveals they have one on board). Gaming has certainly gone to the next level in becoming monetarily viable in whole new methods never thought of before.
Online game trading? Sign me up when this becomes a reality! And from the sound of it, if it’s the right move then Steam has no beef with the idea.
