Valve’s Gabe Newell discusses possibilities whether Steam will ever allow used game trade-ins in an interview with EuroGamer.

This topic has been up for discussion before Steam was even officially launched and while most of us would love the idea of it, the problem is how about does Steam go about it.

“We need to hire an economist, because we keep bumping up into these issues,” he said. “You’re starting to look at weird issues like currency and inflation and productivity and asset values and liquidity of asset categories. We just wish we were smarter about this stuff. We’re reading frantically. We’re brushing up, and all we’re doing is convincing ourselves that we’re more stupid. Half the time people are saying, oh, well, illiquid assets inherently have a penalty, so this argues for trade-ability, that we’re essentially becoming a Russian currency model in the 1970s. Everybody races off to try to read papers on the implications of that.

“We think we want to move in the direction where everything is an item of exchange. We just aren’t totally sure how to do that right. We’re sure there are economists out there who understand this really well. We feel like we’re this third-world developing country. We’ve discovered rocks! And we’ve discovered sticks! And there’s this other thing out there and we should move our economy in that direction. There must be somebody at the World Bank who can tell us what we ought to be doing. We just don’t know what that is yet.”

Damnit Newell, hurry up because my “used” games are depreciating in value.