It’s happened again – Another Steam Summer Sale exploit.
The fabulous Englishman, or Spiffing brit, has managed to bring us yet another Steam Summer Sale exploit.
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It’s happened again, another Steam Summer Sale exploit. The Spiffing Brit is probably the bane of a lot of Valve developers’ existence by now, as he’s brought us many Steam Summer sale exploits. The most notorious example of his work is the Steam 2019 Grand Prix exploit. He’s only gone and done it again with another Steam Summer Sale exploit.
Speaking of the Steam Grand Prix 2019, The Spiffing Brit is probably the reason we’ll never have another one. Well not really, it was fundamentally flawed, but he’s the one that brought the exploit to the attention of the world.
The exploit is still active as of 07/07/23, We’re hoping to bring this exploit to the attention of Valve so it can be fixed.
Steam Summer Sale 2023 exploit
The Spiffing Brit has done it again with his Steam-breaking exploits. The YouTuber has managed to figure out a way to get money for absolutely nothing during the Steam Summer Sale.
We want to start by saying that we do not condone using exploits for financial gain. Although we are covering the exploit, we are not suggesting you should use it. This is for educational purposes only.
How does the Steam Summer Sale 2023 exploit work?
We’re reluctant to tell you exactly how this exploit works, if you want to know that then you should check out The Spiffing Brit’s video on the subject. We have to stress here that we do not recommend doing this. It puts your account at risk and it’s simply not worth it.
Basically, during major sales events, Steam gives out trading cards to people who spend money on Steam. As of right now, you get one card per roughly £7 spent on Steam.
The exploit comes from spending a whole chunk of money to get around 100 trading cards to sell on the Community Market. So if you were to spend enough money to get 100 Summer Sale trading cards, that’d be roughly £780, as the Spiffing Brit demonstrates.
What happens then, is the cards are listed on the Community Market and you get a refund on your large purchase, leaving you with the money you have left from selling the cards on the Community Market. It’s a slow and arduous process, but if you have enough spare cash and patience, then you can rack up a good £50 with a couple of runs. You will have to part with almost £800 each time, however.
All that being said, the Steam Summer Sale has a ton of games with huge discounts. Don’t try to game the system. We can already save loads of a selection of awesome titles.
Will your Steam account get banned if you do the Summer Sale 2023 exploit?
We want to explicitly tell you that this is not a good thing to do and it will violate Steams TOS, and will leave your account liable to be banned if you’re caught doing these exploits. This won’t be hard because massive refunded transactions seem to stand out.
There were thousands of people that exploited the Steam Grand Prix 2019 and still have their accounts in good standing. However, that exploit didn’t involve you sort of stealing money from Steam, so we feel the severity has increased somewhat.
You don’t have to sell the cards for money, you can use the cards to level up your Steam account instead, which is far less severe than essentially generating cash from other users with items you shouldn’t have anymore. It’s happened again – Another Steam Summer Sale exploit.
Valve does have the right to refuse your refund
If you are found abusing Valve’s incredible refund system, then they reserve the right to refuse your refund. Valve clearly states on its refund FAQ page:
“If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.”
Imagine pulling a trick like this and spending a large amount of money just for Steam to pull the biggest UNO reverse card, sticking someone with a huge bill. All the more reason that this exploit is a bad idea to attempt.
Valves, and by extension, Steam’s refund systems are incredibly good, and it feels wrong to abuse them in this way. The refund system is one of the things that makes Steam better than basically every other game platform. Taking advantage of that only risks the refund policy being taken away entirely.
What is Steam’s refund policy exactly? We’ll outline it so you can truly understand how much of a sweet deal it is.
What is Steam’s refund policy?
Steam states that you have the right to receive a full refund if you have owned the game for less than 2 weeks, or played the game for less than 2 hours in total. This is a fantastic refund policy, considering it pertains to digital media, and it is one that is unmatched on the market today. The policy was introduced in 2015, so it has been running strong for 8 years now.
It would be a shame to see the policy changed or taken away, although this outcome is very unlikely, it isn’t impossible.
How will Valve fix the Steam Summer Sale 2023 exploit?
That’s a good question. The system is somewhat flawed, Valve cannot take away the cards given to users after they purchase games, because that’s part of the incentive to buy games during the sale. What we think they will do to fix the exploit is to add a sale timer of a week, maybe 2 to all the trading cards given, so that the Summer Sale Cards cannot be sold during the sale.
Another thing Valve may do is to claim back the trading cards given to the user if the purchase they were rewarded for is refunded on Steam. This seems like the more logical approach, but it’s probably the most difficult to implement on short notice. Valve already has the power to refund Steam points if a purchase is made on Steam and then refunded. So it’s not outside the realm of possibility that Steam can take cards if they are rewarded as part of a purchase when refunded.
As of right now, the exploit is till active, but hopefully that changes soon.
This is all just speculation, there’s no official word from Valve as to how they are going to fix the Summer Sale 2023 exploit. It is very important that Steam fix this exploit as soon as possible.
