Valve has kicked off what it’s calling the Steam trading beta, which currently allows players to trade Team Fortress 2 items for unredeemed gift games on Steam, and vice versa. What this essentially means, is that you can swap Team Fortress 2 items, such as hats, outfits, weapons etc., for actual Steam games on the condition that the games are unredeemed.
At the moment the trading system is only really beneficial to Team Fortress 2 players who have excess unredeemed Steam games. It’s a neat solution if you buy a bundle of games and already own some of them, as you can now simply swap unwanted games for Team Fortress 2 items. You still have the option to gift extra games to your friends. It also means that dedicated Team Fortress 2 players who have accumulated extra items can now use them to buy unwanted games from other people.
At the moment the scope of the auction house is admittedly quite limited, but it’s only just gone into beta and we can expect it to grow in the future to include more exciting prospects. “The Steam Trading Beta lets you securely trade your in-game items for other in-game items from participating games,” says the official post on the Team Fortress blog, which suggests that further down the line additional games may be included and it will be possible to swap items from a variety of games for unredeemed Steam games, and vice versa.
“We’re working now with other game developers to incorporate both Trading and Inventories. Portal 2 should be reasonably soon and we hope to have several third-party games in the next few months,” reads the official FAQ.
If you have a Steam account you can opt into the beta right now by simply navigating to “Steam Settings” and selecting the trading beta from the drop-down menu.
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