With a wink and a sly smile, a Grinch executed a nefarious plan to manufacture billions of gems and exploit Valve's Steam Holiday Auction.
Officials in Valveland ground the festive auction to a halt, swiped away each of the Grinch's 1.9 billion gems and are now preparing for a warm, fuzzy ending in which gamers can stuff their stocks with more games and digital toys they probably won't play.
All gems will be returned to the individuals who crafted them and all purchases made with the new digital currency will be reimbursed. All of the bids made before the auction's reset have been canceled and Valve says it is investigating gem trades on a "case-by-case basis."
"We apologize for the interruption," states Valve. "The Yeti has been contained. We had an issue with Gems that means we need to reset and start again."
Since trading cards were launched, Steam sales have always created a seller's market. Those trading cards generated by simply playing games on Steam could be converted into Steam Wallet funds in short order and at values that were typically higher than at any other time of the year.
Trading cards can be crafted into badges, but other inventory items, like wallpapers and emoticons, make for a much harder sell and generally fetch significantly lower prices. Steam's Holiday Auction seeks to change all of that, allowing all inventory items to be converted into gems.
The gems create the unified currency Steam users can tender in the Holiday Auction, which offers 100 copies each of almost 2,000 games, or a total of 200,000.
After its reset, the auction appears to still be on course to close its first round of bidding on Dec. 15, at 10:45 a.m. From there, each round of bidding will close in 45-minute intervals until the auction closes on Dec. 18.
The auction was shuttered on Dec. 11 when Valve discovered some Steam users discovered an exploit that allowed them to duplicate gems. Gamespot reports that one Steam user amassed 1.9 billion in Steam gems, which seems to be enough to win each of the items in the auction -- watchful Redditors took note of the user's ill-gotten fortune of gems and snapped this image.
"Sorry, but there have been some issues with Gems and the Steam Holiday Auction has been temporarily closed," stated Valve when it shut down the auction. "The elves are working frantically to get the issues sorted out, and the auction will start again as soon as they're done."
