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If your goal is to boost your profile “level” or earn cosmetic drops, you can focus on Steam XP instead of Points:
1. Play free-to-play titles
Many F2P games give you a small number of trading-card drops just for playing (e.g. Team Fortress 2, Dota 2, Paladins).
Craft those cards into a badge → +100 XP per badge → a handful of badges each week can get you dozens of levels over time.
2. Community tasks
Writing simple game guides (even just a “How to install mods for X” walkthrough) awards XP when readers “Appreciate” it.
Voting in Steam Labs experiments or tagging games under “Your Tags” also nets small XP drops.
3. Market-buying single cards
If you already have some Steam Wallet funds (coupons, wallet top-ups, gift cards, etc.), you can spend as little as a few cents to buy the last card you need to finish a badge set.
Each crafted badge → +100 XP (and some free emoticons/backgrounds).
All of that earns XP, which unlocks profile showcases, extra friend slots, etc., but does not earn you any Steam Points.
Nice ChatGPT post full of utterly false information.
Only paid games give card drops. F2P games only earn one free drops for every $9 spent through Steam for in game stuff. TF2 only gave free cards to those that owned a retail copy of the game when trading cards were added.
I figured I might as well buy trading cards from the market. I had already idled in a hundred or two games. I found which ones would be cheapest to complete the badge. Several games only needed 2 or 3 cards, and I idled in a couple more games to pick up more cards. I instantly sold any foil cards I got.
If a badge required me to buy a card costing $0.25 or more, I considered selling all my cards for that game on the market instead. If the badge required $0.20 or less to complete, I completed it. That netted me a background and emote that I could crunch into gems or sell, plus I got a summer sale card.
The summer sale cards sell for a decent price. Depending on which card and when you check, it can be anywhere from $0.12 to $0.25. Assuming I can get $0.18 for the summer sale card, $0.01 for the background, and $0.01 for the emote, those $0.20 badges were actually free.
Something to consider during seasonal sales.