My favourite publisher Valve has just announced a new feature on one of my favourite games. The Steam trading Beta is now open!…What exactly is the Steam Trading Beta? Well…
As Im sure any gamer will know, Team Fortress 2 went crazy with hats a little while ago, infact they went kind of insane. Everything went all RPG when they introduced tradeable items within the game that you got randomly and other items that you could make by getting several items together. Then they went and made the game free as revenue from the in game shop went up. Well today they have announced that you can now trade garbage for good stuff!
What if we told you that you could barter for things that weren’t garbage, AND not die of polio? Steam Trading Beta lets you securely trade your in-game items for other in-game items from participating games. You can also trade Steam gifts (games on Steam that you’ve purchased but not yet added to your Games Library).
To get involved in the beta its pretty simple go to Steam > Settings, and opt into Steam Trading Beta. From there your Steam Community profile will have an item inventory, and you’ll be able to view the item inventories of every public profile in the Steam community.
So now you can swap those in game items (pesky hats) for games on Steam. You do this by inviting one of your friends or someone in group chat to trade with you. They can then agree to swap the TF2 unlocks for games that you have waiting to be gifted or that you received as an extra copy from a friend. I think this is great as Steam always has some form of a great sale on publisher packs, the problem is that I usually have a bunch of the games in the pack from another sale. With no way of trading that game or gifting it, spare games just sit in your list waiting for someone to gift it to.
Valve has said
“Portal 2 should be [added] reasonably soon and we hope to have several third-party games in the next few months.”
I can see this as being another feature in which they will use to to differentiate themselves from Origin, Green Man Gaming, Impulse, D2d or one of the many other online gaming stores. Though I will have to give Green Man Gaming some credit as they were the first store that I knew of to make trading in games purchased online tradeable.
While your at it, you can add me on steam too, look for gengiserrorist 
