Physical, real life trading cards would be nice

[Mr. Zorg]

Hi!

I have started to collect digital trading cards here on steam and thought that it would be nice to have a possibility to get "real" trading cards also from games. Graphics of those cards are awesome, but it would be even cooler to have trading cards in physical form so people could meet more each others on card tradings etc. like we did when we were kids and were trading ice hockey cards :)

Of course there is always some kind of real life problems how to do that, but for example if Valve (or whoever) would made some kind of offering to developers that Valve could create a physical trading cards from digital version and every time they will sell them through web site, developers could also get money from it.

For example cards would be sold on game page. If people buy physical card it would be posted on their home address and part of the money goes to devs, part goes to Valve.

In the beginning it would be quiet maybe, but in future who knows if those trading cards would be changed to others in real life situations. It would be nice to meet new players on own area and trade pyhsical cards to others.

Might be a silly idea but at least when we were kids it was awesome to collect ice hockey cards and change them to others. Real life social community and meetings for the win :-)

What others think? Totally doomed idea?

EDIT: Surely if developers have ideas how to make their own trading cards also "playing cards" in real life, that would be super. Like "Magic the Gathering" and "Pokemon" cards etc. New card games which would support digital game or might be also totally new game.

[DrWillz]

It would cost too much to create and wouldn't have a very big audience.

[Mr. Zorg]

Maybe, maybe not - how much is too much? How much gamers exists who might buy them etc. Dunno, hard to say.

[Shortbread Head]

Why not create the audience by making it so that when someone collects all cards in a set and creates a badge they are sent a pack of those cards with a percentage of the pack (based on how many cards are in the collection, so if there were 6 cards 1 would be shiny, 12 there would be 2).

I feel like this would benefit everyone, it would create an interest in interacting with the marketplace, giving steam money from the percentages of digital sales, it would give people a reason to craft badges, it would also mean people would try to craft the badge to multiple levels in order to try and get different shinies, then people would want to trade for missing ones.

I don't see how this would be a bad move on valve's part, as they could be the distributor, the developer would also see a much higher income from their cut in the marketplace sales and it would bring attention to the games to the world outside of steam.

[Shortbread Head]

Sorry, I just realised I didn't finish what I was saying in the first part, I meant with a percentage of each pack being shiny. I've seen some games with like 15-18 cards, so it could be a really good mechanic for people to engage with. People feel much more of a connection to tangible objects, so having a load of physical representations of their digital library would also increase engagement from an emotional connection.

[zirkustier]

Didn't it give you pause for thought that nobody took up this idea for 10 years?

[Mont]

This thread was quite old before the recent post, so we're locking it to prevent confusion.