Disclaimer: There are going to be many, many times during this post where you're reading along and going "Jesus, Sibyl, you have a problem", and you know something? I'm aware. Just follow along, and I'm sorry in advance. It will probably get worse depending on when this hits you.

It's me. I'm one of those Steam badge sickos. I do the trading card thing. Sometimes it's because I figure the cards I have to buy gives a tip to devs I liked, sometimes it's raw irony, sometimes it's to have the tackiest tat possible for my profile. I don't craft them for every game, and in fact, the vast majority I sell off, either as spending cash for sales, or to toss that credit back at picking up some rares for my own crafting. Despite this, I've crafted over 300 of the things, by Steam's own count1, and so now I want to talk to you about how Valve themselves have basically kneecapped this system and left it to bleed out silently, and why this is a nightmare for my more obsessive tendencies.
Steam trading cards kicked off in 2013. I know this because as a beta-tester for the function, I got a badge with a date on it. Badges predate the cards(-ish, it's weird), but after a certain point, sale events aside, you got them from cards or nothing. The goal is to get a full set of cards for a game, and you can "craft" (read: consume) them to get one rank of a badge. You get very minor bonuses from crafting them from cards2:
- 100 XP per level of a badge (you can get 5+1 per game)
- 1x emoticon for the game (random), 1x profile background for the game (also random), no dupe protection on either, per level you craft.
- The badge itself can be displayed on profiles in a few ways.
The Steam level system started as a kind of spam/bot reduction, because the thought was "actual people will engage with the social functions, and their accounts grow over time, and so we lock a few features to this to make it so you can't just roll accounts en masse and shit up the service". Did you know there's actually a hard cap on your friend-list? Every level you raise your profile boosts it from the default 250 (I want to say this is actually higher than it began as, my brain says it started at 150-200) by +5 people you can add. There's also locks on trading functions, f2p games, etc. Most of this is irrelevant to today's post, so just ignore it. Other people who talk to more than ~10 people on the Steam chat client can talk about what else they do with it.
So let's really drill down on the cards now, and how this works. To most people at this point, you just get a nag about them here and there and you probably either mass-sell them or ignore the things entirely. If you're playing a game that has cards, the developer can set a timer on how often they drop. Ever wondered why some are stingier than others? Blame whoever figured you needed 15 hours on a ~10 hour title to get the full dump. But here's where those social features come back in: you're only allocated half of the drops for a card's badge, rounded up, and games can have between 5-15 cards with no dupe protection (since, again, in theory you can craft up to 5+1 levels per game, so it's not a waste). The thinking was that you'd trade these with your friends to complete a badge, and if you didn't have others you knew who also played the game, or a specific one evaded you all, you could go to the Steam forums for a game (which all got a Trading subforum added) or just buy it on the Steam marketplace (where users could list for whatever price they liked, up to $1800).
But now there's the various ways rarity is inserted into this. First off: every card has two varieties, "normal" and "foil". I don't know if anyone ever said officially that this was the rate, but most testing over the years has picked up a 100:1 ratio of the two. When I said you could get up to 6 levels of a badge, that comes in the form of 5 normal badges and 1 foil badge. There are exceptions to this, holiday sales have "infinite" badges, where if you accrue enough cards, you can just craft them without limit, +100 XP per. Needless to say the people who go all-out on this sort of break a lot of the behind the scenes math we're gonna talk about in a second, especially since the levels are designed to scale, cost at least +100 XP from the last rank every time you level up. You might think I'm exaggerating but there are people who have earned hundreds of thousands of ranks on a single badge during sales. This is even wilder for reasons we'll get into shortly.
Some of you are going to be doing the math here and realizing that this is unsustainable, because if everyone only gets half a badge's worth of cards, and some folks are trying to gain up to 5 (let's ignore foils in all this, fuck foils), and crafting a badge wipes the cards out of the system. So now we get to booster packs. Whenever someone crafts a badge, the system generates X booster packs, where X is the number of cards for that game divided by 3, rounded up to the next whole number if it's not an even split. The system will then roll between every single account which is eligible (read: has earned all their drops from the game) to decide who gets these packs. But! This is where another one of those Steam level perks comes in. From Valve's own FAQ on the topic:
Once eligible, your Steam Level increases your rate of receiving a booster pack drop:
- Level 10: +20% increase in your drop rate
- Level 20: +40% increase in your drop rate
- Level 30: +60% increase in your drop rate
- Level 40: +80% increase in your drop rate
- Level 50: +100% increase in your drop rate (i.e. the rate has doubled)
Etc.
This means the people who did all the boosting for levels above with the wild holiday badges now get, let's say they were only at level 1500 (they were not, I've seen people in the two- and three-thousand ranges), roughly 30 times the default drop rate for boosters. And holiday badges don't have boosters! They have to be purchased off the market, traded for, or earned via spending cash on the store (you get one card per $10 in sales). I need you to know even I never whaled this hard, this was one of my first hard limits once people got wild with this.
Later on "gems" became a secondary currency for this economy. You could scrap unwanted items or cards, and the rarer the item was in the system, the more gems it was worth. You could bundle 1000 gems into a "sack" and sell them on the market, similar to the old TF2 secondary economy of "scrapping" items, or, once this was introduced, feed gems into the Booster Pack Creator, wherein you can choose any game you're eligible for boosters on and spend a variable number of gems (6000/[number of cards in the game's set]) to get one pack per day. Granted, if you just want to roll the dice or get a bunch of cards fast, it might be faster to go to the market, where you're in no way limited on buying boosters other people have put up for sale...
I mentioned rarities. There are three types of it. Obviously there's standard versus foil on the trading cards themselves, but those emoticons and backgrounds I mentioned also had rarity tiers assigned, with Common, Uncommon, and Rare (I presume these are set by developers as well. I know these days, with this economy meaning less and less to most people, I've seen some games that don't even have 6 cosmetics for each badge level for you to roll on, just 2, so... it's clearly not a hard guideline.) The thing is, though, this is where the real shotgun to this whole process kicked in: the Steam Points Shop.
In 2020, Valve added a new function to the store itself, slow-rolling its debut over two sales: every dollar you spent in the store got you 100 Steam Points3. These could be exchanged for the cosmetics from games, or little profile tweaks, and eventually, even more point sinks like variant keyboard skins or startup movies for the Steam Deck (which cost you the equivalent of $50 and $30, incidentally). With this, the market for any backgrounds or emotes was dead overnight. Why gamble on badge-crafting or pay the $4.20 someone wanted for the :weed: emote that a single game added when you could just grab it for $1 after also buying a game first? Reselling these items has basically dropped to the bare minimum of $.03 per on all but the rarest of these, because nobody needs to buy them from you anymore to get a copy...
Except for cards, for badges. And even then, that's being undercut by this, because twice a year, they offer a "spend $1 per level, max it out at Lv40" seasonal badge, which still gives the profile XP, and so there continues to be even less reason to engage with the trading cards system for even the social features it granted you. If you're just buying games here and there, they've got point-dumps for even the least social of you in the various Deck customization options.
Let's back up in time to the 2013-2014 range, though. Once upon a time, card collectors became very, very weird about badges and the collection thereof, trying to streamline things or find more efficient ways to engage with one another. Sure, there were the 'official' subforums on a game for these, but sometimes you just did not want to deal with the hassle, or people lying to get an invite4. So what happened was third-party bots and trading sites became a thing.
The majority of these that I engaged with had a currency: they loosely calculated what a card was "worth" based on sale prices and rarity in the system, and you could trade cards to the bot group of the site for points, then "spend" those with the bot to get things out of their inventory as a counter-trade. This was still a hectic, stupid process, let me be clear. You'd have to trade quickly, you were on a timer, sometimes the Steam backend took a dump on maintenance day or busier periods and the whole thing got wonky, and whether you were successful or not, once "your turn" was over, you'd get delisted by the bot so it could free up its friends list slots for future trading. And even then, you still needed someone to have traded the card or cards you wanted into the bot in the first place to find it. But this also made it easier by a large margin to find rarer cards if someone wanted to dump it to complete their own collection, or just get something "worth more" out to sell on the market, and these sites came with a searchable list of their bots' inventories.
Return to 2023, and this isn't a system anymore. A lot of changes over time would make it harder for the bots to continue functioning. Steam Guard and the related 2FA requirements per trade meant someone either had to be automating or managing every transaction, as at this point in time, non-Guard accounts simply cannot trade. This was the successor to an earlier policy, wherein if you weren't using their security functions, your trades had a 15 day hold on the items. The logic here was that in case you were trying to empty someone's account, they had time to reverse it or contact support. The final nail in the coffin for most casual scripting on this front was the Limited Accounts role in 2015. If you're unaware: any freshly created Steam account is now considered "Limited" until it spends $5 USD on the store. Activating games via keys won't lift this, Steam level won't overcome it, it's cash or nothing. Until you do, you cannot do a lot of things, but particularly brutal to the bots: You're entirely unable to trade or chat with other users5. I'm sure you're thinking "oh, this is fine, drop $25 across some fresh accounts and have a small network" except for the fact that there's a different trade limitation in place as well: you can't trade if you haven't made any Steam purchase between the last seven days or over a year ago.
Yeah, go ahead, re-read that. It's just a sliding 8-365 day window you need to have given them money in to send anything at all to other users. I would also stop trying to manage this whole bloody thing if I ran one of the trading sites too.
I'm sure some of the bigger accounts still run trading groups or circles, I know I was briefly in some of this space for a while6, but I actually have no idea how much of that's still intact. And this is where we come to the reason I sat bolt upright in bed and began writing about this entire topic, because I've actually been trying to finish one foil badge for over two years now and realized that all of this madness, all of this crumbling system that sits here decaying, taunting me and driving me mad, was probably worth a read for someone.
And it's not even a good badge. Or a game literally anyone on my 200+ friendlist has played. I can't trade with people, I can't even whale the badge because literally nobody is buying this game, which means nobody is selling the card. The standard badge for this game is one of my 10 rarest badges according to Steam's own count. The foil will probably jump to the #1 rarest I have, which is saying something given that my top three are currently "a foil for an adventure game nobody played", "the level 5 badge for a game that literally never released", and "level 5 for Spelunker Party, which may as well not have released for how many people were as in love with that game as I was".
Anyway this is what mental illness looks like. Hi. I have a lot of problems and I expect to get roasted for a lot of things I confessed to in this post. If you actually want to know more about some of the olden-day shenanigans of this market, especially in the TF2/CS:GO space, one of the major traders of the time who went by Captain Invictus wrote a series of letters to the Idle Thumbs podcast covering it, which they archived on their Youtube channel.
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Steam actually does a lot of fudging of numbers. If you get a large enough game collection7, you'll notice more, because any delisted games do not appear in the "official" counts on your profile, but in your library, they still count since... you can still install them. The profile says I own 7111 titles, my library says I have 7537 to install. Are some of these very old duplicates or betas or the like? Yes. Have I actually watched delisted titles vanish from the count before? Also yes.
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If you actually care, there are a lot of weird, silent passive badges which also contribute to your Steam XP/level. Every game you own is +1 XP. every year old your account is is +50 XP, giving and receiving Steam Awards levels up a pair I never bothered to do the math on. You can tell where I stop being quite so rabid about this based on the ones which I have less hard data about!
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I say "slow-rolling" because before this was called Steam Points, it was called "Lunar Tokens" for a lunar new year sale earlier in the year, down to the limited-time badge and cosmetics you could spend them on. Lunar tokens did not convert into Steam Points, but they did have a warning in FAQs about their limited time nature.
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I definitely saw people try to cozy up to me with invites so they seemed "more legit" to try and get to folks on my friend list who had rarer TF2/Dota 2 items back when that was also a thing with a functioning market to be sold for credit or Steambux. Nobody ever wanted the Portal 2 items. Did you remember Portal 2 had a slapdash cosmetics store? Most people don't.
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Or use the API, so the sites couldn't scrape as easily, or get card drops, or... honestly, roughly half of the Limited Account functions just KO the bots used for these networks.
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Short version - remember how I said the higher your level, the higher your booster drop rate? There were a lot of higher-level accounts, especially early on where you could, with enough cash or patience, have EVERY BADGE before Steam opened the floodgates to any game ever, who would just befriend each other and just go "hey, I need one more level for X game, I have the drops you're missing for Y" and trade that way, filling each other's pockets with more boosters as they crafted new badges. Why was I in this space? Uh, well, before said floodgates opened, there was a point in time where I literally owned over half of all the games on Steam at the time. I had a lot of booster drop chances for games nobody else was into.
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Jesus christ, do not try this. I've legit had to file bug reports about the size of my library breaking the client before they did some code cleanup on this in the past few years as people other than myself began amassing 4000+ title libraries.