This is how a man lost R200,000 worth of trading cards in the Steam Summer Sale

A Steam user lost over R200,000 ($13,000) worth of Steam Trading cards in this year’s Summer Sale.

St4ck bought the cards with the intention of being the user with the highest badge level before the Summer Sale officially ended on 4 July.

According to friend and Reddit user, sngisback, this was his plan:

he bought Summer sale (mysterious) cards every day from the 1st day of release on Steam community market for $2000 daily limit.
he prepared about 7,000 trading card complete sets from different games to get bonus Summer sale cards after craft them.
he ask for me with help him to get the maximum of Summer sale cards and i got few thousands from trades with many steam community users.

The problem arose when St4ck found he could no longer convert the cards past 32 767 Level of Summer sale badge, this despite Steam saying there was no limit as to the amount of times one could craft the badge.

As a commenter pointed out this is likely due to Valve storing the badge level in a “16 bit variable. 1 bit for the sign, 15 bit for the number. 2¹⁵ = 32768 (minus 1 because it starts from zero)”

The result:

$13,000 spent for cards, which (he) can’t sell in 20 hours (because steam wallet is limited and you will click “Sell item” and confirm 160k times via mobile a few months/years); you can’t turn them into gems with the same reason; you can’t craft them, because there is a limit.

We are sure that St4ck would be entitled to seek some compensation for the lost cards as Steam did say that you could craft the badge as many times as you want, but the perhaps the real question is how much St4ck already spent on the cards that were crafted – and who has that type of money to spend on virtual trading cards?