Well, I guess there are lots of people who don’t really care for Trading Cards, especially among VR fans, as most VR titles don’t seem to have them anyways 😉
I really like them as part of the Steam environment though, and as a first-time VR developer, I would be over the moon if our game had Trading Cards as well. Somehow, it would make the game seem “more legit” and that is exactly what seems to be going on here. Steam only allows games to have Trading Cards once they have crossed a certain threshold of “user engagement”, even though they don’t even tell devs what exactly they mean by that. Probably some algorithm mumbo jumbo 😛
But the thing is, for us as developers, the “Trading Card” option in SteamWorks is greyed out. We may still upload all the assets for the cards, which we have done a long time ago in naive enthusiasm, but on our store page it says on the right hand side “Profile Features Limited”. That is a next stage of a message that initially read “Steam is still learning about this game” or something along those lines. When you browse through VR-Only titles on Steam, you will find that most of them show this line – unless they’re really super-successful, or have not been updated in over a year which seems to flag them as some kind of “abandonware”.
At any rate, I find it a bit mean, as this “Profile Features Limited” also means the game doesn’t even count towards your game collection and global achievement count! And I have the feeling that the metric if a game has high enough “user engagement” is based on 2D games, which naturally have a much larger potential player base. Even though no-one outside of Steam seems to know the exact metrics, I’ve gathered that you need at least a thousand sales and 50 reviews (also coming from flat-game devs). Which means we are quite close with our game now, as we sold over 1500 copies and have 48 reviews. Of course it could be that these numbers have to be reached inside a certain time frame, like 12 months or something like that … So I’m afraid we’ll only know it for sure once we get there.
If anyone has insights to share about this, I’d be excited to hear them. Also, what do you think about the fact that most of your SteamVR games have these restrictions… isn’t it a bit unfair?
In case you want to have a look at how things look with our game Rainbow Reactor, here’s the store link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/789090/Rainbow_Reactor/
(which is why I flaired this post as “self promotion”)
You can see the “Profile Features Limited” line at the right hand side, right above that brown “EULA” box. If you like, compare some of your owned SteamVR games and let’s compare notes 😀
Cheers!
submitted by /u/grooviak
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