I know it might sound insulting - in my opinion Steam makes some percentage of players addicted to collecting badges, achievements, cards etc.. Seeing what a leviathan this platform has become and how many other problems are simultaneously occuring in social dimension I don't think that such type of behavior will be discussed in Valve anyhow.

By addiction I don't mean some irresistible hunger to get one more award (possible) or clicking whole day on banana for some illusory gifts. I mean that some players, and in my opinion this % ratio grows every year, will choose to buy games with cards, achievements (preferably many and easy to get) and probably a lot of players will search only for similar games to what they know. Is it a problem to anyone? More games sold, happy customers etc..

The thing is, that achievements have greater impact on modern game design than some brilliant innovations. I've seen a thread about option to make achievements invisible but in my opinion this collectathlon policy has great impact on games overally and will have even greater probably on whole society.

Probably making a game without cards, achievements and some points shop items won't be destined to fail but I think that devs design most new games not with player in mind but around achievements. Round numbers, speedruns, all the side missions... The positive weight of some achievements grew to such a level that players don't think criticallly about game design, instead they treat difficulty to get some achievements as a major game value.

On the other hand, many smaller projects are lost forever without cards and achievements even though they are fairly good/similar to popular games with such collectables. Even without facts to base on the STCards community has over 2mln active members and is one of many such groups that could be described as lobbies.

SUGGESTION : Make a counter balancing badge, profile achievement, cards for playing the "healthy way". I mean that when a player gets used to some positive incentives for certain type of predictable activity - it's easy to build whole mentality or daily routine around it. So instead of hiding achievements, instead of destroying big, active social groups it would be a good idea to give players a safe way out. A kind of a programm that would change a quantity addiction into thought of quality addiction.

My idea would promote playing with pauses after 1-2 hour, not longer than 8 hours active a day, lower awards/losing awards for idle activity (energy costs), better awards for playing different kinds of games, for playing games without cards or achievements, maybe some awards for healthy play for long time. Kind of how real life social policy work, to even chances but not only for players - mostly for innovative dev teams.

I might not respond immediately. Thanks for reading