How does the Badge Crafting Discount Coupons Work?

[raidio]

I'd like to know how exactly does the discount coupons you receive from badge crafting work? I've crafted quite a handful and the coupons I get have almost in every case been for games that I wouldn't play if the game was absolutely free. Can you only receive discount coupons for poor games or is there any kind of slim chance to get a coupon for a more popular game? If anyone knows anything about how exactly the discount coupons system from badge crafting works, please let me know. Thanks

[Poobah Gorg]

There are SOME coupons for decent games. More of them are for for less-popular, older or (particularly) indie games. Games that get coupons are usually the same games found in bundles, for the same reasons. However, there ARE some more-popular games that have coupons as well. Valve's own Portal 2 currently gets up to 66% off (at least), there also tend to be coupons for some of the more popular anime games (100% Orange Juice, the whole slew of Neptunia games). The Coupon Dumpster group is your friend. They even have a nice web site[new.steam.nyan.link] that you can search for coupons on. Handiest filter is to only show games from your wishlist.

Folks like me tend to wait until the next sale to craft our badges as instead of a coupon for a game you probably don't want, you instead get that sale's trading cards instead. On average you can sell those cards for ~.08 during/shortly after the sale. I personally try to sell 'em the week BEFORE the sale, when they are still called Mystery or Mysterious Card #1-whatever."

Once they drop to .08 I just craft as many sale badges I can for the additional XP. Another reason being that the sale backgrounds and emoticons can either be sold, traded or converted to 100 gems. Nothing else is worth 100 gems, so this tends to prop the sale values of these items.

[raidio]

Ah, alright. Thanks for helping me clear things up.