So, I'm confused by what's going happening on December 24 (also December 11 to a lesser degree). This is something I've seen happen quite a few times. Is there something I'm missing - Is there a particular reason that someone would purchase a card for several dollars when the average price is roughly 10 cents?

That's nothing, I saw one where a trading card was sold for more than a hundred dollars over value, which almost looks like money laundering at that point.

Drugs, son.

ah hah! This is my time to shine! Well see, in trading community, people often times put up items to sell as a way to purchase something. It appears a guy bought a game for 4.44. Odd he didnt buy tf2 keys, but whatevers. Either that or I heard it's an easy way to give a friend some cash. (but steam takes some percentage anyways)

Need to figure out how to get someone to buy my cards for that much. :P

Chemtrails

Yeah, I was thinking that, but the fact that Valve take a cut and the fact that there's an actual trading interface still make that seem weird.

I like to think it's just some fools first time using the thing and starts hitting random buttons without knowing what they are really doing.

Steam doesn't let you gift wallet funds directly, hence anomalies such as this likely occurring between real world acquaintances.

But aren't Steam trading cards just meant to be dumb?

@sexytoad: ahh. So this is how you might trade a game for steam credit. You have them buy one of your useless things at a high price on the marketplace and then send them the game. Interesting.

@truthtellah: If Valve has a staff economist, then surely they saw that coming. I wonder if monitoring these anomalies is them dipping their toe in the used games market?

hmm. Well, you can't sell used games, but people can definitely trade stuff they bought but haven't tied to their account. I imagine they may keep these kind of of outliers in mind though.

My thought is that this experiment might provide information about the supply-side pricing of unwanted games (i.e. how much less than the current retail price will sellers accept in order to bother with the process.) The demand for a used digital copy is probably more estimable, since it would always be higher than the demand for a retail digital copy. That may factor into discussions with publishers to allow selling used copies of a game.

Also, I have no real clue what I'm talking about. Just a random thought :)

yep, its drugs, weapons, and money laundering. valve cant stop it.

Ah. Well, the marketplace in general is definitely providing a lot of data towards eventually allowing for some kind of reselling of Steam games if they wanted to pursue that. Does seem like the future.

I just made 0.12. It's Drugs