If you’ve managed to shell out some money on Steam, $5, at least, to be exact, you would have noticed something called levels on your profile.

You start on level one, and as you spend more time in Steam, engaging with community actions, browsing the store, unlocking achievements, checking out the community market and playing games, your level gradually increases.

In this article, we discuss how to level up your Steam account, what are steam levels and how levelling up helps.

Also read: How I got my Steam account hacked and what I learnt from it?

So what are Steam levels?

As soon as your Steam profile gets the limited account restrictions off it, you’ll graduate to Steam level 1.

Steam levels are a way to showcase just how big of a gamer you are on Steam. Yes, it’s just a big flex. It does have some advantages, though.

For example, the higher your Steam profile level, the lesser are your chances to be accused of hacking in games as most games. That’s just because games mostly take into consideration your Steam profile to evaluate how long you’ve been around as older players are far less likely to hack.

Mostly, if I’m getting owned by someone CSGO, I would usually check their Steam profile before reporting them. If they have a Steam profile level of 50 and 5000 CSGO hours, they’re just too good for me. This is standard practice in the CSGO community to check Steam profiles of people before accusing them of hacking.

The rest is just a bunch of customization unlocks to your profile. For example, here is my new Steam profile, made earlier this month.

As compared to someone’s who’s been around for quite a while.

You can see the difference.

Also read: How to buy skins in CSGO? Can you get free skins?

How to increase Steam profile level?

This is a question that baffles a lot of newcomers on Steam. Luckily, the answer isn’t that difficult.

Just use Steam, A lot. That’s it.

As you dig into the vast array of features that Steam offers, you get badges. You need to acquire a certain number of XP points to reach a certain level.

Initially, it only takes 100 XP to reach the next level. However, this amount increases after every 10 levels. This means that after level 10, you’ll need 200 XP to level up, after level 20, you’ll need 300 XP and so on.

Every time you level up, you gain five more friend slots. When you rank up for the tenth time, you get one profile showcase, (up to a maximum of 16) and five friend slots.

Now there are three main ways you can get the XP points required to level up.

• XP points from owning games: Each time you buy a game on Steam, you get 5XP points which keep on decreasing every 10 games you buy. Note that this doesn’t apply to free to play titles.
• XP points from Community actions: Completing community actions on Steam like uploading a screenshot, adding a status, using emoticons and participating in sales and community events earns you XP. You also get 50 XP for each year on Steam.
• XP points from crafting badges: This is by far the fastest way to level up. As you play more and more games on Steam, these games give you trading cards. Once you have enough of those, you can put them together to craft badges.
  You get 100 XP per set that you craft and a flashy badge to show on your profile. You can even buy these trading cards.

Also read: How to rank up in CSGO?