Valve has revealed today The Holiday Auction for their popular digital distribution platform Steam, letting users bid on games they want for the chance to win them.

The Holiday Auction utilizes a new currency created for the event known as gems that users can acquire by breaking down Steam inventory items like trading cards, backgrounds and emoticons. This gives you the option to use the trading cards earned through playing indie games like Gun Monkeys or Tower of Guns that you enjoyed, but didn't quite feel the need to craft a profile badge, into gems to win new games. It's a clever way to potentially reward users, especially by using clutter like duplicate backgrounds that sell slowly and for extremely low values on the Steam Market.

Do be warned that the bids for these items are rather high at the moment, and that you will need to come with a substantial bid to be in the running to win an auction. Some games have exceeded 20,000 gems for their present bid, which will require you to convert a significant amount of your inventory into gems. Most items that I have seen thus far transfer anywhere between 17 to 100 gems, so make sure to farm your game collection for undropped trading cards to make yourself a decent pool of gems to gamble with.

You can participate in The Holiday Auction right now by bidding your gems on a list of over 1,900 items, with the first set of auction set to end on December 15th at 9:45am CST. After the first auction closes, a new auction will begin every 45 minutes until the last auction ends at 12:00pm CST on Thursday, December 18th. Don't worry, if you don't want to bid on games you can still purchase games with money like normal during The Holiday Auction with participation entirely up to you.