Steam Launches Holiday Auction, Immediately Shut Down After System Exploit

Valve has temporarily shut down their Steam Holiday Auction after a gem duplication glitch allowed many gamers to exploit the system.

Valve’s Holiday Auction was a really good idea on paper. You could bid on games using gems between auction rounds, with the top bidder winning a game every 45 minutes, with other bids automatically carrying over to the next round.

Gems were originally used to make Steam Trading Cards, and are made by recycling Steam Community items. In some cases, just playing certain games can help you earn gems. As some fans point out in this thread, this was clearly a scheme to get emoticons and wallpapers off the market.

Valve was clearly excited with their latest promotion, so much so that they even made a comic explaining it, featuring Santa Claus’ significant other.

Unfortunately, they had to close the auction now, after their own users exploited a bug  using booster packs allowed them to make a potentially  infinitesimal amount of gems. It got to the point that 1000 gems actually dipped to $ 0.03 in value. Valve has subsequently removed gems from everyone’s inventories and shut down the event.

Unless fixing this requires heavy system changes, it should not affect the highly anticipated upcoming Steam Winter Sale. For now, though, if you are curious and interested in participating in the auction, you’ll have to wait for when Valve brings it back up again. You can still get details on how the promotion will work here.