Steam: How to Get Badges & What They Do

How to Get Steam Badges & What They Do

Steam is more than just a platform to buy and play games. It also has several community-focused features that make hanging out on Steam a lot more fun. One of those features comes in the form of badges, or the icons you see at the top right on your Steam Community profile page. They’re special icons that show off your contributions to Steam in general, your involvement in certain games, and how long you’ve been using the platform. They’re meant as a way to help you show off your tenure on the service, the events you’ve participated in, and lots of other fun stuff. Earning them is very simple, for the most part: You’ve just got to use Steam!

Earning badges will increase your overall Steam Level as well as help you earn XP in the long run, and different badges award different levels of XP. Unlocking more badges and going higher with your Steam Level will help you unlock new game coupons, emoticons, showcases for your profile, profile background images, and a host of other cool things. The more you do, the more you’ll be rewarded.

There’s no one simple way to get every single badge there is. There are a few different categories of badges that require you to do different things based on the category. For example, participating in Steam Holiday Sales might get you a special badge, as will simply being a member of Steam for a certain amount of time.

As far as Game Badges go, you can get those by crafting trading cards from certain games. There’s a whole host of these you can experiment with, and a list of some of the collection can be found at the main Steam page.

The Common Badges are the simplest ones to get, awarded for things like completing Steam Community tasks, beta testing programs like Steam Trading Cards, or for reaching member years of service milestones. These are pretty simple to get, but you need to make sure you’re an active member of Steam if you want to rack them up.

That’s pretty much all you need to understand about Steam Badges, but as the years go by Steam will almost certainly be adding more new and interesting badges to the fold. Keep an eye out for them as they hit the service and see how many you can collect!