PHJF wrote on Feb 20, 2012, 15:18:
I can only assume Steam's recent venture into trading items/gifts is a step toward allowing some level of games trading. Perhaps purchased games can come with "trade activations", so that once a game is traded a certain number of times it is finally locked to a single Steam account.
No, its only allowing trade of a game before its locked to an account forever. And you can't play it without locking it. Once you play the game its activated and locked to your account. What you are trading is the games in a gift form. They are just making it easier to get an unused game to someone who wants it. And this way, if a gift is refused (I had this happen recently), it comes back to you as an inventory gift so you can give it on to someone else.
What would be cool is if you could pay a small fee and unlock a game from your account and trade it on to someone else. But valve would have to renegotiate all sorts of contracts if there was a way to transfer already activated games, and that doesn't even count the DRM hassles if something is layered on top of steam.