Idle Master

Steam is a great gaming platform, and one of its strongest points is the fact that it offers some unique features, like the Steam achievements or the Steam trading cards.

In fact, features like the Steam trading cards are sometimes the sole purpose and reason why some players use Steam. These cards are meant to help you customize your Steam profile, but they also represent a great method of obtaining some extra bucks which can be spent on additional Steam games or items. Most people use these cards to increase their Steam levels and personalize their Steam profiles, but just as many people farm these cards just to sell them forward for those extra cents. Anyway, this latter category of people has to face a small inconvenience. In order to obtain those Steam trading cards, you have to actually play their corresponding games. And downloading plus installing a large game of a couple of Gigabytes, and then playing it for at least two hours, seems like quite an effort when all you want is four mere trading cards.

The good news is that a tiny handy application has been created specifically for these cases. The Idle Master is a small open source tool that you can download and install completely for free. It will then “lie” Steam into thinking that you play some games and as a result, Steam will generate the corresponding trading cards. In other words, it makes Steam unlock trading cards and you don't even have to install any game, not to mention downloading it or even running it.

This tool can simulate that you are in a game for every game in your Steam library that has trading cards. It will automatically move from game to game after each one finished dropping the cards.

Idle Master is also pretty simple to use and easy to configure. I would have liked if I could use it only for a specific game, and not for all the Steam games with trading cards in my library. For example, I started playing Outlast, but after an hour of play time I concluded it's not my kind of game and I gave up. I still wanted its cards though, so I thought Idle Master could help me with that. It didn't, it could only cycle all my library games, either alphabetically or by trading cards' value. Anyway, for those really interested in obtaining Steam trading cards with ease and in great numbers, Idle Master is truly an awesome tool, of undeniable help.