Steam Community Market Beta Launches

[ríomhaire]

[box=right]
There are already over ten twenty thirty one hundred and forty thousand a lot of crates for sale on the Market.[/box]
Update: Valve has opened up the market to Dota 2 items.

"We've opened up the beta to include items from Dota 2. The items that you can buy and sell are currently limited to tools such as Diretide essences, Greevil eggs, and keys" (Linux Steam Group).

-----

Valve has launched the Steam Community Market today, a place where you can buy and sell in-game items for Steam Wallet funds. That's right: You can now sell your hats to other players for credit to buy games on Steam. For the beta period only items in Team Fortress 2 can be traded and for the moment it seems only Tools can be bought or sold.

The process is very simple. To put an item up for listing just click the "sell an item" button and select something from your inventory and choose a price. To purchase just select an item from the list and all currently listed items of that type will be listed for you in order of lowest to highest price. Click buy now on whichever one you like and a little pop-up to add funds to your Steam wallet and place the order will appear.

There is a Steam transaction fee of 15% with a minimum of 1c for each transaction, paid by the buyer. There is also a game-specific transaction fee (to be set by each game's publisher) which has been set as 10% for Team Fortress 2. These fees are subject to change.

If you have any further questions you can check out the FAQ page here and if you want to keep track of updates to the service or join in the official discussion for it you can join the official Steam group here.

 

[ríomhaire]

I've already successfully made 21c out of this.

 

[ChiliFan]

why can't i buy hats for my steam client window yet

 

[Acepilotf14]

Not a good call by Valve. Not being able to withdraw money from your steam wallet will kill it, and off-community trading will continue to be a better and cheaper alternative.

 

[ríomhaire]

Not a good call by Valve. Not being able to withdraw money from your steam wallet will kill it, and off-community trading will continue to be a better and cheaper alternative.

They may be more interested in the trading of items like keys and nametags than unusual hats. I can easily see them taking over a lot of that market with this. For low value things people will probably value security and convenience rather than risk paypal transactions. There's also currently a $200 limit on what you can store in your Steam Wallet, further limiting this.

 

[DEATH eVADER]

I think I have enough in my backpack to buy the Secret World (One off payment now) and Farcry 3. Either that or I hold of for Halflife 3's £299.00 Uber Collectors Waiting Edition Deluxe Pack

After 2 minutes of putting up stuff for sale, I have already had two transanctions

 

[Omnomnick]

Not a good call by Valve. Not being able to withdraw money from your steam wallet will kill it, and off-community trading will continue to be a better and cheaper alternative.

The point is to limit the ability of scammers in the trading community, making it significantly safer for people to interact with one another without having to fear risky paypal transactions, like riom said.

But what you said also stands true, you can't take money out of the Steam Wallet which in turn funds Valve through Steam transactions. I don't really think that the lack of a withdraw function is a negative, since you most likely made your money through Valve's hat economy anyway.

 

[Au-heppa]

There should be a way to take a picture of myself holding my 0.04 steam euros I made with this thing

 

[Hectic Glenn]

It's also worth noting the scale of the market place for items these days. You can find forums / websites & databases of people acting as resellers / middlemen / customers for all sorts of items with varying rarity. The scale is HUGE, if you just look around you'll realise these people are running businesses and making good money. I don't think Valve set things up with the intention of it going this way, but it has and now they need to build the framework within which it can exist - protecting Steam users as well as cutting themselves in on the revenue involved. You can be assured Valve consider it worth their time, after all they've put resource & time into it, with the latter always in shorter supply.

 

[Hectic Glenn]

There should be a way to take a picture of myself holding my 0.04 steam euros I made with this thing

You with a giant cheque which says 0.04 euros. I hope this happens.

 

[Eejit]

You with a giant cheque which says 0.04 euros. I hope this happens.

Yeah holding it side-by-side with Gabe, shaking his hand and smiling for the cameras.

 

[Tollbooth Willie]

I will have all the vintage hats.

 

[ríomhaire]

I think I have enough in my backpack to buy the Secret World (One off payment now) and Farcry 3. Either that or I hold of for Halflife 3's £299.00 Uber Collectors Waiting Edition Deluxe Pack

After 2 minutes of putting up stuff for sale, I have already had two transanctions

Just note there's currently a 200 transactions per year limit on trading with this that resets in January so selling your entire packpack/idling for items to sell every week may not be a very viable strategy.

Who wants to buy a Gentle Man's Service Medal for $200?

 

[Acepilotf14]

The point is to limit the ability of scammers in the trading community, making it significantly safer for people to interact with one another without having to fear risky paypal transactions, like riom said.

But what you said also stands true, you can't take money out of the Steam Wallet which in turn funds Valve through Steam transactions. I don't really think that the lack of a withdraw function is a negative, since you most likely made your money through Valve's hat economy anyway.

What? Yes, people made that money through the hat economy. But they get it in paypal. It's absolutely a complete negative for anyone who sells keys in bulk, because they generally tend to sell those keys for a non-Steam reason, like helping to pay rent or buying food. I know someone who is currently close to buying a new PC via trading.

This opens up new potentials for scamming, and as long as Valve allows outside trading and doesn't shut down those websites, it will continue until they allow withdrawal from the steam wallet. The $200 a year limit is also extremely low for most serious sellers.

This is good on the assumption that no one does serious big business trading, but it's there.

http://steamcommunity.com/groups/community_market/discussions/0/846939614990547003/

I wrote my rant here, if anyone cares. Keys are already up from $1.20 off the market to $2.05 on the market. It's a big difference, and it's only going to go up further until the steam market stalls and there's no incentive to buy.

Perhaps it will change for the better once you're allowed to sell unusuals, but for the most part the amount of money Steam takes from each transaction makes me extremely reluctant to do even unusual trading on that.

 

[-smash-]

Valve has opened up the market to Dota 2.

"We've opened up the beta to include items from Dota 2. The items that you can buy and sell are currently limited to tools such as Diretide essences, Greevil eggs, and keys" (Linux Steam Group).

 

[ríomhaire]

Acepilotf14 you got two different rules mixed up there. It's $200 max in your Steam wallet at any given time and 200 trades per year. In any case I think you're a bit too focused on how it'll change the existing market without considering how much it's going to expand it. This is going to bring in a hell of a lot of people who never would have dared trade with real money through paypal.

The unusual hat and high volume trading market are a tiny tiny minority of users and this could bring more people to it by making it far safer and far easier. And it's not like it's impossible to launder money out of your Steam wallet. Use it to buy shitloads of 75% off games in the Christmas and summer Steam sales then when the prices go back to normal sell them for 50% off or just buy lots of keys and undercut the Steam Market with cheaper prices on the black market. The price of keys has also gone back down again. It was over €2 when I looked yesterday and there's lots of ones for €1.5- now. It's too early to tell what way it will affect things long term (though I can see it drifting closer to the store price before attaining equilibrium). But what do I know? It's not like I really give a shit about the TF2 economy.