this post was submitted on 06 Jun 2026
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Before, you just played the game. Now when you play the game, these things fill your "inventory" out of thin air, and you can make transactions with them including buying them (to complete your collection out of FOMO, etc), of which Valve earns a cut out of them, again, out of thin air. Now scale that up to millions of users. Hmmm, it IS milking! Can't expect any less from the House of Valve.
You can still just play the game, nothing has changed. It's extremely easy to just ignore everything to do with the inventory on Steam, which a lot of people do.
If you don't want to give Valve and the dev money, you can also trade the cards with other people directly.
You could also recycle certain items into gems and use those to craft booster packs, to eventually get a full set completely by yourself.
Also, the only thing the trading cards are for at this point are the badges, that you can "show off" on your profile. All the other stuff (emoticons or wallpapers) can be bought directly in the Points Shop.