Valve's Gabe Newell Says Steam Needs More Time & Expertise To Look Into Game Trading

If there ever was an argument about one of the things that Steam DOESN'T have, a lot of people would probably point out that Steam does not allow people to trade owned games for new ones(or from others). This makes it different from owning a physical disc(which at the moment is also getting more difficult to trade your PC version of discs since many of them require some sort of online account). Gabe Newell told Eurogamer "We need to hire an economist, because we keep bumping up into these issues,” he said. “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.". Which means we won't be getting this soon regardless. It's good of him to admit not knowing enough of this matter but if this interview is any indication, they are indeed looking into it or have looked into it. Certainly allowing game trading will have an effect on sales of new games and I understand their reservations(if there is any). I like how Green Man Gaming does game trading, where a used game is less than the price of a new game, so you'll have to trade more than 1 old game to get a new one. Valve is brilliant... I'm sure they'll be able to figure it out.

Source: Eurogamer