Beginner's Guide to Steam

New to Steam? Short intro to level system, profile vanity, market and trading. And you'll save lots of $$$ in the process.

Introduction

Hello everyone!

This guide is meant as a short introduction and FAQ for users that are new to Steam or just new to the intricacies of the various intimidating things attached to it. It also includes some basic tips for navigating around the Steam universe so you won't get brutally ripped off while you just want to have a nice time shopping for the games you like and playing with your friends.

I mainly wrote this guide to have a reference to help people who ask me things about Steam, so it is by no means aiming to ever become conclusive. As thus, constructive criticism is still welcome, but don't expect a huge lot of effort in updating or maintaining this besides the bare minimum.

In this guide I will briefly touch on the following subjects which are all intertwined:
- The profile and level system (and trading cards and booster packs)
- The community market (and inventory, emoticons and backgrounds)
- Shopping aka. Not getting ripped off when buying games (and the trading universe)

Many people are only interested in specific topics so I'll try to keep things to the point and you can feel free to skip and search around in the guide for the things you want to know about. I do recommend you to obtain knowledge about all above topics sooner or later, though.

TL;DR

This section summarizes important points from the rest of the guide for lazy people that don't read.
If you are confused, you will have to read the actual guide.

Profile

Your profile page is found at <Your Steam display name> -> Profile.
You can access it through Steam client or browser. Browser is highly recommended.
Your profile page as shown is how everyone else can see it. You can edit it from the page.

You can further customize your profile by buying background items from the Community Market (or obtaining them elsewhere) and levelling up on Steam.

Levelling

You primarily want to level up only if you want to unlock showcases for your profile.
There are few other bonuses to levelling.

Levelling up on Steam requires 100 XP per level initially.
Then additional 100 XP per level every time you pass 10 levels.
Every 10 levels you unlock a Profile Showcase among other stuff.

You level up by collecting sets of Trading Cards dropped by certain Steam games and that are sold on the Community Market (or traded, but that is very bothersome and is not recommended). Upon crafting a badge with these sets, you get 100 XP amongst other stuff.

Use sites such as http://steam.tools/cards/ to locate the cheapest possible sets and buy them using the Community Market, paying attention to optimal buy and sell orders.
Efficient buying and selling can get you sets as low as €0.3 per set.

Always wait till Holiday Sales (Summer and Winter) before using your sets to craft badges, that way you will get Holiday Cards that can be sold for €0.2 each if you're quick. Then your net cost of levelling up will be as low as €0.1 per badge.
Though if you are the type of person that reads TL;DR sections, you probably don't have the patience to wait. Your loss.

Community Market

The community market is found at http://steamcommunity.com/market/.

Once your account has bypassed all ridiculous restrictions you can start using the market by charging a minimum amount of €5 or similar to your Steam Wallet.

All Steam-compatible in-game items and Steam cards, emotes and backgrounds can be purchased from the market. Emotes and backgrounds work as long as they are in your inventory.

Items bought from the market are untradeable (and unmarketable) for 7 days.

Shopping and Trading

The Steam Store is the worst possible place to buy anything. Before you buy anything, look up retail prices at sites like IsThereAnyDeal.com so you won't get ripped off.
Also look up bundle sites like HumbleBundle.com where indie and other games are often sold almost for free.
If you missed any cheap deals, use trading sites such as SteamTrades.com to get in contact with traders that have stockpiled extras for small profit. Avoid traders that basically try to scam you.

Profile and Level System

About your Profile page

As you might have noticed, all Steam accounts get their own profile page. This is a very dumbed-down version of the usual social network pages where you display various information about yourself.

The profile page has its own unique internet URL, which can be changed in Settings (I won't go into details with that). If you are using the Steam client browser, you can access your page by hovering your mouse cursor above the <Your current Steam display name> button (next to the large Community button on top of the page) and click 'Profile'. You can now right-click anywhere on the page and 'Copy Page URL' to obtain the URL to open the corresponding page in your browser, if you desire. (Alternatively, just use Steam from the browser in the first place. I strongly recommend that.) From here, you can see your profile as others would see it, and edit it.


By default, your Profile page shows your Recent Activity, which consists of three small boxes with information about your three most recently launched games.

Your Steam level is displayed in the top right corner of your profile (and can occasionally be seen in other locations).

What do I gain from levelling up on Steam, and why should I care?

Some features such as Steam emoticons and backgrounds are independent of your level. You can buy and use these directly from the Community Market (skip to that section).

New accounts can have limited features; these have nothing to do with your Steam level. There exist 10-year old accounts that have never gone beyond level 5.

You gain the following explicit benefits from levelling your Steam account:

- An unique Profile Showcase (of your choice) every 10 levels
This is the main reason for people to level up, as they can unlock extra stuff to pimp their profile page. There are 14 distinct Showcases, and you can change them at any time - their internal content will be saved even when not active, so you can change back and forth without losing any data. After you've unlocked all 14 (at level 140), this benefit disappears for any further levels (unless Steam ever decides to implement more in the future).

- A 10% (multiplicatively stacking) increased drop rate of booster packs every 10 levels
Basically, booster packs are bonuses of 3 random trading cards (will be covered later in this guide) that randomly spawn extremely infrequently in people's inventories if you own a particular game with card drops and they have all been exhausted, and a number of badges are being crafted for that game (again, all of these topics to be covered later). So you get a slight increase to the drop rate of an item that is worth usually 15-25 cents, and drops about once a month for the average user. A perk of levelling up, but definitely not the driving factor.

- 5 additional friend slots per level
I have a feeling this was just implemented to give people something while they wait for the round numbers. Steam supports 250 friends on your list by default, so expanding this further is beyond the needs of any average person.

On top of that, a certain level might be required to participate in certain events, most notably the Holiday Sale voting events that rewards trading cards (more on that later) only to users that are of a specific level (usually in the 5-10 range) in order to prevent abuse (and to earn money by forcing people to level up).

Point being: The main benefit from levelling up - showcases - is a vanity effect only. If you're mainly interested in Steam for playing games and don't care about how your profile looks, you can efficiently skip the rest of this section and enjoy your $$$ saved.

How do I level up on Steam?

I'm assuming you're here because you've read the above and are still interested in obtaining levels. Because of the way the rewards are organized, I strongly recommend you plan ahead and aim for the round numbers.

Levels on Steam follow an extremely simplified Experience system. Basically, from levels 0-10, you need 100 XP per level in order to level up to the next level. From 11-20, 200 XP per level. From 21-30, 300 XP per level, and so on with an increase of 100 for each 10 levels.

So how do you obtain XP? There are two ways, with only one being realistic. First, you gain 1 XP for each game you permanently own on Steam. That was quite underwhelming, right? The other way involves - you guessed it - paying $$$. But it's not necessarily as bad as it sounds (you be the judge of that). First, I have to introduce the Trading Card system.

Trading Cards

There are a number of concepts working together here, so try to keep up.
Every single game on Steam has the option to include a feature called 'Steam Trading Cards'. You can compare it to games choosing to implement Achievements or not, for instance. Like achievements, Trading Cards might be added to a game at any time, often after release. The developers are responsible for the choice of cards and their associated rewards (continue reading) just like they choose the achievements for their own game.
When you own a game that has Steam Trading Cards, the game will drop a fixed amount of random cards at random intervals while you play it (i.e. Steam has detected the game has been launched and is currently open, you don't need to actually play it. If you don't, this is commonly referred to as idling the game). This doesn't apply to Free2Play games - these games only drop cards if you perform in-game purchases.
Since Steam now refunds recently purchased games that have been played for less than 2 hours, some people started abusing it to obtain cards before refunding the game. Therefore, games now only start dropping cards once you have played/idled them for longer than 2 hours.
Once all fixed drops for a game has been exhausted, Steam will now randomly reward you booster packs for that game at extremely infrequent rates (don't count on any). You don't have to install or play/idle the game to be eligible for booster packs. A booster pack for a game contains three random cards for that game. You can keep track of games and their remaining drops by going to your <Steam display name> -> Badges page.


Practically, this is a very unreliable way to obtain cards, but this is how all cards are generated. If you are collecting them, you'll be buying them off people that don't want them - which is what we're getting to in a moment.

By collecting a full set of cards for a given game, you can 'craft' the virtual Steam badge for that game, which will then appear on your Badges page. You can craft any game badge up to 5 times, and the visuals and title of the badge will change. Each game also supports a vanity 'foil' badge that can be crafted with rare 'foil' cards but this is usually just a waste of money.

Each game badge you own contribute a whopping 100 XP each. This is the only reliable way to gain levels.

There are a few badges you can obtain without using cards. These include, but are not limited to: the Community Badge, the Years of Service Badge, various Holiday event badges and Game Collector badges. These badges don't necessarily give 100 XP though. But since they are limited, you can't reliably level up much this way.

When you craft a badge, you also produce three by-products (rewards): An emoticon and a background for that game, and a random coupon for a Steam store game (almost always worthless). If you craft a badge during the bi-annual Holiday sales (Summer and Winter) the coupon is replaced with a holiday card, which can be quite valuable and always profitable compared to the coupon. Unless you're impatient, it is strongly recommended to save all your crafting for the holiday sales for this very reason.

Profile and Level System cont.

How do I level up on Steam? Summary

So to sum it up, you want to purchase and collect sets of cards, based on either games you own or not - it doesn't matter. You then want to wait until the holiday sales to craft these cards so you can get the valuable holiday cards instead of the worthless coupons. One question remains: How to obtain these cards in the most efficient way.

You need to have access to the Community Market in order to buy and sell cards on Steam for the quickest and most efficient trades. If you need help on using the Market, skip to the next section, then come back here. Alternatively, you can trade cards from sets you don't want for cards you need using sites such as SteamCardExchange[www.steamcardexchange.net], or even trade cards with other Steam users (as is the original intention I suppose), but this is a very tedious process and requires you to have a lot of (spare) cards in advance.

Using a Steam Card Database[steam.tools], you can quickly identify the sets that are cheaper than others. A good rule of thumb is that anything above €0.40 per set is way too expensive if your only objective is to level up. The reason that some sets are much more expensive than others hinges on demand for some rewards that are deemed more visually attractive.
Also remember that the above database sorts by sell value, so you are likely to obtain the cards much cheaper than it states.


When buying cards, remember the difference between Buy and Sell orders. In most cases, you can save a lot of cents by matching the highest Buy order instead of the lowest Sell order and have some patience. Use the graphs to check whether your order is realistic.

Remember also to check how many cards are in the full set. €0.03 per card may sound cheap but if the set has 15 cards it's going to be more expensive than paying €0.06 per card for a set of 5 or 6 cards per badge.

When done properly, you can obtain full sets as low as €0.3 per badge, and if you craft and sell the corresponding holiday cards for €0.2 with the right timing, you will level up rather cheaply.

Using the above numbers, you will ultimately pay roughly €0.1 per badge. Example calculations:

€1 to get from level 0 to 10
Additional €2 to get from level 10 to 20
Additional €3 to get from level 20 to 30
and so on. So it doesn't have to be as expensive as you think, but you need to invest (considerable) effort. If you want less effort... pay more money.

Community Market

The community market is found at http://steamcommunity.com/market/.

The market serves as the base for Steam user-to-user microtransactions.

Steam takes a fee of roughly 10% for every market transaction, with a minimum of 2 cents. For most minimum-value items, this equals almost 50% of item value, so plan accordingly.

You use the market by charging money from any cash source (such as credit card) to your Steam Account, and those funds become available and are denoted as your Steam Wallet.
The charge amounts are preset so you always have to charge at least €5 or similar (depending on your country). However, you can use the excess money to add into purchases in the Steam Store at a later time.
Steam Wallet currency is the only way to buy and sell on the Community Market.

To start using the market, first visit it and see if your account is under any amount of rather ridiculous restrictions. Note most importantly that Steam Guard must have been active for 15 days (so your account must likewise be at least 15 days old) and that newly added payment methods go through another 7 days of cooldown unless you manually verify the payment. The catch? The verification system is functionally impossible to use outside the United States, and Steam doesn't care. You'll be forced to wait 7 days.
If your 'charging pattern changes' e.g. you charge money to Steam more often than you usually do, you are also liable to get random 7 day market restrictions. Always make sure to charge well in advance of large sales etc. to avoid this problem. If you charge money and is then restricted, your money will be stuck on Steam until the restriction is removed... (although it can still be used for Store purchases).

The Community Market houses all the various game-specific Steam-compatible items that are allowed to be marketed (they will appear with the tag 'Marketable' in your Steam inventory). Aside from that, it also serves as the main place to obtain profile vanity items such as emoticons

copy+paste: http://steamcommunity.com/market/search?q=&category_753_Game[]=any&category_753_item_class[]=tag_item_class_4&appid=753

and backgrounds

copy+paste: http://steamcommunity.com/market/search?q=&category_753_Game[]=any&category_753_item_class[]=tag_item_class_3&appid=753

You can use the Advanced Search function to look up anything else you specifically desire. Background databases[steam.tools] exist for those interested in browsing those in larger view.

If you buy an item on the Market, it will (with few exceptions) become untradeable for 7 days. Thus, if you're really unwilling to spend money on items on the market, you could ask friends to buy them for you instead if you are willing to wait 7 days.

Buying and selling items

To buy an item, use the search function to locate the item's page on the market. If the item is a commodity (such as trading cards), trades are conducted using Buy and Sell orders.

Sell orders are placed by prospective sellers that want to receive the stated price as a minimum for that item.
Buy orders are placed by prospective buyers that want to pay the stated price as a maximum for that item.

If a seller meets the price of a buy order, or a buyer meets the price of a sell order, the trade is instantly conducted.

If you are looking to buy an item, either match the lowest sell order to buy it instantly at the cheapest price, or match the highest buy order or go one cent higher in order to buy it quickly at an even cheaper price.

To sell an item, locate the item in your inventory and click on it, then click on the Sell button. You should locate the item's page on the market as well (as if you were going to buy it) to check prices. Then, match the lowest sell order price to get it sold in reasonable time. If you are incredibly impatient, you can go one cent lower or even match the highest buy order to sell it immediately, but I highly advise against it.

In both cases, you should always check the Graph which shows pricing history over Week, Month and Lifetime of the item's existence. Look for stable maxima to set your sell prices, and stable minima to set your buy prices. Find out what works for you depending on your patience. Faster trades = more costly for you.



In this example scenario, you are guaranteed to sell instantaneously at €0.04, but you are very likely to sell at €0.05 with minor patience. Similarly, you can buy instantaneously at €0.05, but judging by pricing history you would most likely buy extremely quickly at €0.04 as well.

For non-commodity items (such as skins), the system works a bit more intuitively, so I'm sure you can figure that out for yourself.

If you are buying or selling very expensive items (higher than a few euros), consider reading the last section as well for potentially cheaper alternatives.

Using emoticons and backgrounds

Steam emoticons can be used in any Steam forum topic, discussion, group or private chat as long as at least one copy of that emoticon is currently in your inventory. Once it leaves, you lose that ability. The emoticons can be triggered by shortcut keywords if you can be bothered to remember them. Other people can see your emoticons without owning them and vice versa. If you attempt to use shortcuts for emoticons you don't own, nothing will happen.
Similarly, backgrounds can be added to your profile as long as at least one copy of that background is currently in your inventory. See the first section for details about your profile.

Shopping and Trading

The above two sections covered most new users' questions about Steam profile, levelling, trading cards and backgrounds etc.

This section is some free bonus advice so you won't get ripped off when dealing with Steam offers.

Most people will intuitively think that by using the Steam platform, it is obviously easiest to buy the games and software you need directly from the Steam Store.

This is the largest mistake you will ever make on Steam, and most people have done it (multiple times).

Depending on your region, the Steam Store is by far the most expensive place possible to buy Steam-redeemable games. In the EU and US regions, you may save as much as 50% or more on certain mainstream titles and in most cases 95% or more on most indie games by looking for alternatives.

Often, these alternatives are only a few clicks away. The only reason to ever buy anything in the actual Steam Store is if

- You are scared to death of interacting with any kind of third-party website and/or have extreme paranoia against other Steam users (both can be justified, and I won't judge you)
- Steam has a huge sale happening that has somehow not yet occurred for that particular game anywhere else in any shape or form.

So what do I want you to do? I won't advertise for any specific websites here, but I'm just saying that there is a ton of trustworthy retail sites (and some in more shady territory) where you can get most games at far below Steam price. I will leave you with this tracker: IsThereAnyDeal[isthereanydeal.com], which will show you almost every price change a certain Steam software item has gone through. Use it! You can get the Enhanced Steam add-on[www.enhancedsteam.com] - an incredibly useful browser add-on - to automatically display this information about any Steam item you are viewing while on Steam from your browser, which I strongly recommend.

Browsing with Enhanced Steam. If a game has been bundled before, this will also show (see below).

So much for that. But you may or may not also have heard of the so-called Bundles that have gained increasing popularity on the internet lately, with the ever popular Humble Bundle[www.humblebundle.com] in the lead (which is the only one I'll link because it has by far the most value-for-money, the most trustworthy design and is the most successful to boost). Basically, the bundles consist of game developers working together with Steam to occasionally bring you mediocre/good games at an incredibly low price. Obviously, this practice is often used as a promotional resort to get any money at all for really poor games, but there are frequently really good classics and sometimes even newer high-quality titles in the mix.

But what does it mean? It means that certain titles will sometimes have been in a deal where you pay a dollar and get 3-5 Steam keys. Then you look at the Steam Store and see how they're priced there for €10-€15 individually, and don't know whether to cry or laugh when you think about those who actually paid Store price for it. Never make that mistake again!
Use IsThereAnyDeal mentioned above and/or the Enhanced Steam add-on to track items that have been in bundles before.
But what if an item was bundled and/or really cheap in the past, but it doesn't help you because you want it right now? That (and similar principles) is why the trading network exists.
(Also remember - the more often it has been really cheap, the greater the chance that it will be so again in the near future - again, it's about patience versus money).

Trading

Trading is summed up like this. Some people are looking to make profit, the basic 'buy low, sell high' yada yada. Then there's you who want to buy a game to actually play it, but you missed the bundle/deal/sale/whatever. Tadaa, common interests.

I'd advise you to start off on a site such as SteamTrades[www.steamgifts.com] (it's fully integrated into SteamGifts now, but I like the old name). There you can search for explicit titles you want and find large walls of text of people that stockpiled excess games they will trade to you at a price.

So what's a reasonable price? Well, if multiple independent traders agree on a certain fixed price, it's likely a good starting point. Let me mention trading currency here. (The trading world is a huge thing of its own and there are other people with better guides for it. I'll only cover the basics).

People mainly use crate keys from the popular Steam games CS:GO and TF2 as trading currency. They are considered to be worth very roughly €2/$2 each in real-life cash equivalence. There are multiple ways to obtain these, none of which are probably very cheap or intuitive for the average Steam user. The easiest but most expensive way is to own either of these two games (TF2 is F2P) and buy these keys from their respective in-game stores. However, this will cost you about 25% extra compared to their 'trading value'. The cheaper way is to buy keys with real cash in private from trustworthy traders that are looking to 'cash out' their Steam earnings (and therefore sell them about 20% cheaper). I won't link any of the latter here.
The main reason people use crate keys as currency is most likely to avoid the Steam tax, as trading items avoids that issue entirely. However, if you're trading crate keys for items outside Steam (such as game keys), you need to be able to completely trust the other person. Sites like SteamTrades maintain trade reputation which helps you determine trust.
For minor software such as bundled/indie games, trading cards (and to a lesser extent, sacks of gems) are often used instead. They don't have any specified value but you can always check particular cards' value on the market. Traders usually expect a mix of cards worth at least €0.05-€0.10 on average.

A fair price should logically be somewhere between the cheapest price that the game was ever obtainable at (for bundle games, this is usually a rough estimate since you obtain several games at a total price) and the cheapest way to currently obtain the game. Any price lower than that would be illogical for the seller, and any price higher would be illogical for the buyer.
The exact price is up to you and the trader to negotiate in either case, resulting in profit for both.

And compared to the Store or even retail price, you should have saved a LOT. You're welcome.

Ending notes

Hope you enjoyed the guide! If you have any questions (you probably do) feel free to leave them and/or comments in the guide itself, or on my profile. Please don't add me blindly without leaving a reason anywhere. And remember, constructive criticism will be considered in moderate amounts.

Freebies

On an ending note, a lot of sites give out free Steam games from time to time! Keep yourself updated in certain Steam groups or just Google some trustworthy sites, but watch out for obvious malicious places as lots of people unsurprisingly try to scam you. SteamGifts[www.steamgifts.com] is also a great place to try out if you use their trading service anyway, it doesn't cost you anything (unless you want it to)!

[76561198288010404]

This is an incredibly thorough guide! It's extremely well written, organized, and simple enough for people *points to self* who are completely new to Steam. Thank you for all of the hard work you put into it! I added it to my "favorites" and I'm sure I'll be coming back to it with questions as I learn more about Steam. =)

[MonoTheKing⭐]

Very helpful guide, there are stuffs I didn't know before

[HalfHexed]

I love this guide. It's awesome. Thanks, Dan. I admire the fact that you specified each and every precise detail.

[beats]

nice work

[fPuxLa | AoR]

Woohoo! Great guide, Dan!

[Nomie]

More like Nifelheim Yummy ;) Dan I wish I had this guide when I was starting out in March of this year! It took me a solid 3 months to figure out the market, the cards, the levelling system, and that was only after pillaging the pros (people like yourself) in the group chats I was in, asking them countless questions, that I finally got a grasp in June. I know, it sounds like yesterday. This is just what every newcomer to Steam needs and I'll be sure to point them this way, should I ever cross paths with one.

[Dan]

Thanks for the nice words! I'm really happy it helped you out, and look at you, already navigating the community and trading market like a pro! Makes me feel the work was worth it!

[MO3]

One of the most useful guides I have read! It's perfect for noobies like me that are not overly familiar with the whole steam trading cards aspect of steam! Thank you Dan! I'm on the path to valhalla...ugh, i mean, lvl 100!

[Dan]

Added some pictures after suggestion from SpacePiratePanda.

[Dan]

Added TL;DR after suggestion from Mina.