On the PC digital game store, Steam, they have been adding experimental features under the name Steam Labs. One that eventually was implemented on your main library page was a feature called “Play Next”. 

This is simply recommending games that you already own. Steam users are notorious for having massive gaming libraries of games that they haven’t even played, so this was actually a highly requested feature.

I was looking at the discussion page for this feature and found a thread called “Can you add a different metric to use besides “0 hours played”?”

Right now it looks like Play Next only suggests games that are registered to our account and have no play time. As someone who idles games to get card drops, it would be helpful if there were some other metric we could use instead, like maybe “0 achievements earned.”

So he downloads a game and installs it. Then leaves it running without playing it just to get some “cards”. Cards are just simple images that are awarded to you after you play a game for a certain amount of time. Maybe it’s a random period of time. You may get around 5 per game, but maybe there are 8 cards to collect. So you have to buy the others from other gamers to actually complete your collection.

What does he do with the cards? He either sells the cards for around 2-5p each profit, or buys the remaining cards which could cost around 12-20p (Steam takes a cut of your sales). Then he can feel proud of his complete virtual card collection for a game that he hasn’t even played.

I’m guessing he isn’t paying for his electricity.

Meanwhile, Valve, the owners of Steam are laughing. They are basically printing money and keeping their users engaged.

Maybe they should make another Steam Lab feature that actively tells you which games have remaining “card drops”. There was (or still is) a page that shows this, but it was always hidden away.