If you like collecting Steam trading cards but aren't really interested in bashing through your Steam discovery queue on a daily basis to pick them up during Steam sales, the SteamDB browser extension now makes it easy to score the reward without doing the work.
The SteamDB extension is available for Firefox, Chrome, and Edge, and it does a lot of good things, like displaying a game's lowest recorded price, showing concurrent player counts, automatically accepting the subscriber agreement on purchase pages, and a whole bunch of other stuff.
I'm a pretty well committed Augmented Steam user and not terribly inclined to change, but a newly-added feature in the SteamDB extension has me thinking about maybe running them both. (Yes, the interface gets a little crowded, but it's workable.) As announced by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik on Twitter, the extension now has an option that lets users claim the daily trading card or sticker that's awarded for browsing their discovery queue, without having to actually browse the discovery queue.
Steam's discovery queue is essentially a curated list of games you might like, based on games you've played in the past. To encourage its use, Valve traditionally offers a new digital thing—a trading card or sticker—for browsing your daily discovery queue every day during a Steam sale. In theory it's a way to find new games to play when you don't know what to play, but in reality for a lot of people it's simply something to power through so you can get a collectible.
It seems like a fair trade to me—a small inconvenience for an equally small reward, and hey, maybe you'll actually find a cool new game along the way—but now you don't even have to do that. With the SteamDB extension installed, go to the "Store" dropdown menu in Steam and select the "discovery queue" option. Lo and behold, with the extension installed you'll see a new "auto-discover" button. Mash that, watch the numbers spin up as the machine discovers you queue for you, and blammo, you've got your daily reward. The whole thing happens in just a few seconds.
I tried it, and it works. It's a complete violation of the spirit of discovery queue rewards, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if Valve somehow killed that functionality in short order. But I also wouldn't be surprised if it ignored the whole thing, much like it refuses to acknowledge the existence of Deadlock even though half the planet is currently playing it. You just never know with Valve. Either way, if Steam trading cards are your thing, you're definitely going to want to give this a try.
