Card shark: One man's quest to turn a profit from Steam card trading
By Tom Hatfield July 14, 2013

Like many, I rolled my eyes at the concept of Steam Trading Cards. "Worthless pictures of games being sold for real money? Why bother?" But immediately after my disdain came a second, more treacherous thought: "Can I make any money out of this?" The idea was tempting. Cards are relatively easy to find, so all I needed to do was not care about actually making any badges and I could make a killing, or at least a modest maiming. So I set myself a target: Could I, an economic dunce, make enough money from trading cards to buy myself a copy of the sweet roguelike, Rogue Legacy (£12 / $15 base price on Steam)? I grabbed a brick phone, yuppied up and got to work.

Then the cards began to lose value. As more people found cards, they started relentlessly undercutting me in order to try and grab sales. This'll be that 'supply and demand' thing I've heard so much about. Every time I listed an item at a competitive price, a dozen more would rapidly be offered at a few pence cheaper. Cheap enough to drive prices down, but not so cheap that I could make any money from buying and re-selling. I rapidly grew to resent the competition, and with good reason, soon my margins were so small that speculation wasn't making me any money at all.

Of course I didn't admit that to myself. Instead I kept buying and selling cards nonetheless, making only pennies on each sale. The problem was the transaction fee. 15% of every sale is split between Valve and the game developer. This meant that to make money I need to make a big gain with every transaction, something that was becoming harder and harder as the prices fell. Even that lovely Alyx card was losing value faster than I could sell. The price dropped from £3 to £2.50 to £2 before eventually being sold for £1.50. Other cards were dropping in value so fast I ended up selling them at a loss.

Oh, wait. I stopped and took a look at myself. Was this really worth it?