Ultimate Beginners Guide
Welcome to Barter.vg! Trading your unwanted leftover bundle keys for games is a lot of fun! This guide isn’t here to harsh that buzz, and overwhelm you. This guide just goes through a few value systems that might help you reach the most ideal trade for you, skipping the ocean of inexperienced trades you’d look back at in cringe. The biggest thing to note is that just because you don’t want a game doesn’t mean you can’t capitalize on how other people value it.
If you look back and happen to trade a game with a value higher than you previously thought for one that was lower than you previously thought, don’t worry! It’s somewhat of a rite of passage that everyone goes through on Barter, hopefully this guide cuts through the necessity of those trades and delivers insider knowledge that traders will likely use against you when you’re just starting out. This information overload is somewhat of a stopgap between taking away your freedom to trade with anyone and flagging/disallowing traders from trading with new traders.
Other beginner resources:
Have ⇄ : Want ★ ratio is the number of different traders who have a game available to trade on Barter.vg, in ratio to the number of traders who want it / have it wishlisted. High tradable, low wishlisted games are easier to come by and would be ideal to trade for your games of the same caliber, you can do this by looking at your wishlist tab by highest haves.
Getting familiar with this aspect of Barter.vg will help you enormously to avoid falling for an offer that someone looking to take advantage of your lack of experience will send you. Keep a close eye on past or recent Humble Choice games, as the number of tradables will explode at the start of every month, with grey market prices dipping as low as 30 or 40 cents, and copies available on Barter.vg inflating to as many as 200-500. Other recent bundles would be good to keep an eye on, but they don’t have nearly the same fluctuation in value that accompanies Humble Choice games.
The games you should keep a close eye on are purchase-disabled games (marked with "⎚" in your tradables or on the item page). They are games removed, banned, or de-listed from Steam. These are games which are the most likely to be low-balled away from you when you’re just starting out. ITAD doesn’t help with the value for these games, as there is usually a massive discrepancy between their historical low/full retail price, and their current price on the grey key market. Here is a list of all currently known de-listed games. Retail-only games might be less valuable on the grey market.
Games such as Rocket League, F1 2011, F1 2012, Poker Night at the Inventory or Poker Night 2 might seem easy to come by, as they were in lower priced Humble Bundles, along with low full retail prices/historical lows, but are prime examples of games you could possibly trade for God of War or something of equal / greater value. These are games that some traders on Barter will be eager to snatch away from you as they’d be making a pretty penny selling them on the grey market.
What is the grey market? The grey market is any site that unofficially sells video game keys, such as 
A note to keep in mind is that all these websites use reflinks, meaning that each click will earn them some money. This is done by setting a cookie on your browser that will be associated with all future purchases from the store you click on. While ITAD has this clearly indicated by the ♥ icon next to the store, gg.deals' reflinks are hidden behind multiple redirects, and are invisible even when moving your cursor over a link.
IsThereAnyDeal is a website that lists the historically lowest sale price of a video game across multiple official key sources. At the bottom of each Barter game page, there is a button that links to the corresponding ITAD page for that item ( 
The ITAD price chart tab will show you how recently the game has been on sale, as well as whether the lowest price is erroneously significantly lower than the avg. sale price.
SteamDB can show you the historical low of a game on Steam (SteamDB indexes only Steam games). Games without a sale in a long time are something to take notice of and may correspond with a higher grey market price than the historical low.
You can find the number of times a game was bundle under a game's thumbnail as a grey number and * to the right of the H:W. Hovering with the mouse on this value will show you in which bundles this item was featured:
With the supply of keys on Barter largely relying on bundles, unbundled games will typically have relatively few tradables available (usually less than 10). The traders that have copies available will likely want more value because of their rarity.
You can value games however you want, this isn’t here to put you down for however you choose to go forward with this knowledge. It’s simply here to make you aware of all of your options and the hidden values of your unwanted games. Some people value based solely on grey market prices and possibly h:w as well, however it may be unclear at to how many people use it to value their games, because only a minority of people include any information about their value system in their overview. A suggestion would be to seek 1:1 trades involving games with similar values across the board when starting out in order to build up your rep, but that’s just a suggestion. How you feel coming out of a trade is what matters most at the end of the day.
There are signs that you should check for that will help you tell if person you've received an offer from is trading for profit/re-selling your keys on the grey market. On the offer page you might see collection indicators such as "tradable", "wishlist (custom)" (this means it was added manually on Barter to their wishlist collection and not through automatic sync of their Steam wishlist ("sync-api"), therefore not genuinely from their own Steam profile), and/or "wishlist (extra)" (this means they are finding a copy for their "friend") next to the game(s) they'd like from you. These are primary signs that they aren't looking to redeem the game(s) on their own account (sometimes these traders already have it in their library, this is also indicated by the "library" tag next to their avatar). Another sign is a private Steam profile / 0 games in their Barter library.
In the case that they show at least some of the tag indicators as above (or if you see that they have a private profile / no real Steam activity) you should check the gg.deals prices on the game(s) in the offer, marvel at their gall, decide whether to decline the offer based on that, and block them if you want to prevent future trades from them. Checking gg.deals, h:w, and historical lows before accepting or sending a trade is your best bet to avoid being taken advantage regardless of these signs.
The statistics displayed on a user's Barter profile will give you a vague idea about what kind of offers that respective trader engages in. Outgoing offers are marked with ">". A very high number in the "Total" column (thousands) will tell you that this user likes so send out spam-offers (especially if their amount of completed offers is significantly lower). A high percentage in the "Declined" column of the same row (for instance, 75% or above) will additionally tell you that those offers are largely unfavorable considering that most of the traders reject them.
Incoming offers are marked with "<". A very high number in the "Declined" column can indicate that the trader is rather picky with what kind of offers they accept.
These signs aren't definite proof that a trader has bad intentions, investigating their outgoing offers for the types / trends of trades they engage in will likely explain their intentions more fully.
You are strongly advised to not trade your Humble Bundle games as gift links because Humble Bundle is vehemently against trading keys sourced from them ,and Humble Bundle can't easily track key exchanges between users, but can easily track gift links since these are created on their servers. Trading a gift link to a reseller who similarly gathers gift links from dozens of other people, and resells them on the grey market might eventually link your account to this kind of network. If at least one of these accounts is identified as engaging in fraudulent activities, your account might end up being affected, even though you didn't personally sell that item on the grey market.
Resellers will insist on you sending them a gift link instead of a key, because they don’t intend to redeem the game on the spot, as a regular traders would. Gift links are more ideal than keys to resellers, because they can be checked to see whether or not they have been claimed (assuming it’s still valid), by simply accessing the gift link at any time before they end up reselling it (which may take months). In comparison, a key can only be checked to see if it has been previously claimed by redeeming yourself, and doing so would not allow them to sell it to someone else. As explained above, trading gift links can cause Humble Bundle to flag your account for violating their policy against game trading and deactivating it, possibly taking your account and all of your unrevealed keys with them, along with blocking your whole persona (any other account(s) you might create), and using a new phone number or payment method might not bypass this restriction.
Region restricted games are tagged with 🌐. You can see which regions the lock applies to by clicking on the game bundle on its Barter game page (under Notices), then the 
SteamGifts link on its bundle page. The presence of this icon in trade offers indicates that you should make sure that the keys exchanged can be redeemed in the respective countries of the two parties by checking SteamGifts before any exchange happens. Setting your region as specifically as possible through your Barter profile’s 🌐Region Settings is essential in avoiding any potential disputes.
Example: PAC-MAN 356 Humble BANDAI NAMCO Bundle 4 Barter.vg page Humble BANDAI NAMCO Bundle 4 SteamGifts page
Region excluded 🚫 is a game that isn’t included when purchasing that bundle from a certain region.
Overviews are bios for other traders addressing their preferred conduct for trading (waiting for their trading partner to be online and say that they’re ready, or dropping keys after you have added each other as friends), their approach to trading, and how they value trades; such as caring solely about a value, a mix of a few, and/or any values they disregard. Most people leave their overview blank, so it’s best to approach however you think is reasonable for a trade between the two of you. After a trade is accepted, let them know that you’d like go first if you’re unsure about your key working for any reason (you’ll have to go first if you’re just starting out anyway), then wait for them to tell you that they’re ready for a trade after you add each other as friends.
After a completed trade it’s common courtesy to leave a positive review on your fellow trader’s SteamTrades profile such as “+rep great trader". You can include a link to the completed trade if you’d like to, some people appreciate you leaving a +rep comment on their Steam profile as well*. To see what they expect you to do, just check "Next Step" on the offer page, after you complete it (this can be found right above the comments section).
*There are reports of Steam banning / restricting people after using trade-related key terms
Some games will have a major discrepancy in h:w ratio between different game packages / editions, so a game that seems hard to trade for might be easier than you think when looking for a different package through the Barter search bar example: The Long Dark (147:149) vs. The Long Dark: Survival Edition (168:21). In this example, the two items are different editions: the regular edition includes the WINTERMUTE DLC so it’s harder to get, while the Survival Edition doesn’t include the Wintermute DLC, but is much easier to get. This is a common theme with past Humble Choice games.
In the case of Control featured in March 2021 Humble Choice, a specific package was created for this bundle, and this package is substantially different in contents from the Ultimate edition package which is sold by default on the Steam store. The bundled version was misleadingly named "Control Ultimate Edition" just as a store package, although it does not include any Ultimate DLC content. In trades, this version (which is stripped of important content) is often used in place of the version which includes the Ultimate DLC, therefore if you want the full edition, make sure that you trade for it instead of the Humble Choice one.
Developers generate keys for a specific package that they define themselves, so when it comes to keys and their types, the first question is: "what package / sub does this key activate?"
Depending on the package, you can perhaps classify them (as SteamDB does) into:
- Store or CD Key - this is the default type of package for which keys can be generated; it's the package you get when buying a game directly from the Steam store, but retail keys can also be generated for it and then shared with other retail shops; most bundle keys activate this kind of package
- CD Key - a package that is not sold directly on the Steam store, but for which retail keys can be generated; sometimes this kind of package is featured in bundles instead of the store one, and while it has a different id from the store one, it usually has the same content.
- CD Key (Buy Restrict) - a package that is not sold directly on the Steam store, but has regional restrictions (region-locked packages, also used in boxed copies because those are usually region-based).
- Free Weekend (Demand) - packages generated as part of a promotional free weekend; you won't keep the game after the promotion ends
- No cost - packages claimable for free; once you claim it, you will forever keep it
What is a Package?
A package is a collection of one or more applications and depots that can be sold via Steam or can be granted to users based on the activation of a Steam key. This can be thought of as an SKU or a license. Some game bundles lump a certain amount of games into one key, this key can activate multiple items, but always only one package.
What is an App?
An Application (or App) is the main representation of a product on Steam. An App generally has its own store page, its own Community Hub, and is what appears in users' libraries. Each App is represented by a unique ID called an App ID. Generally a single product will not span multiple Applications.
What is a Depot?
Depot is a logical grouping of files which are all delivered to a customer as a single group. Depots are uniquely identified by a Depot ID. When a customer installs an app, one or more depots are downloaded and "mounted" on their local drive.
These games do not add a game count to your total games on your Steam profile, give you xp towards account level-up when added to your account, or count towards the game collector badges.
These games drop no cards, a common restriction for free-to-play games, in place to stop card farmers from earning money from selling these cards on the Steam market. Among the games for which the devs do enable card drops, only some will actually drop cards, depending on Valve's algorithms.
These games can’t be shown on your Steam profile’s achievement showcase. However, you'll still be able to see the achievements earned for such a game in your Steam library or activity feed.
Regional notices are manually added by moderators based on users' report. There is no automatic indexing of the region lock info. This means that there are cases when games, for which regional packages exist on SteamDB, are not tagged with "region locked". Additionally, the region lock notice does not mean that all keys are region locked; this simply means that some customers receive region locked keys, while others receive keys that can be redeemed worldwide - the region lock of your key is decided based on the IP you purchased the bundle from.
All game packages besides curator can be revoked, and package revocation is entirely up to the discretion of the dev. Beta keys for the purpose of play-testing are the most likely to be revoked after public release, as their purpose has been achieved. Free weekend games are revoked after a period of time ordained by their devs, removing the license from your account. Retail, limited, and "beta" as retail are rarely revoked, but there is nothing to stop a dev from doing so. Curator packages can not be revoked, this policy is in place to block devs from retaliating against an unfavorable review. However, if a curator group is found to have violated steam guidelines then that group may be removed.
Retail keys are the standard activation method for games on Steam, they are the full public release, and they can be delivered directly to your Steam account by purchasing on the Steam store. Either avenue they are added to your account, they provide +1 to Steam profile library, drop cards, and achievements showcase. They are only available to play after release date. The limit for retail keys provided by steam to a dev to sell off-site (bundles / retailers) is 5,000, and it's up to the discretion of Steam whether or not Steam will provide more to devs on a case-by-case basis.
Limited games are low sale games which currently provide no +1, no achievements showcase, and no card drops; signified with the ⚙️ icon on Barter. This is a measure in place to stop cheap/low sales games from being used for achievement/card farming. This type of key has no trading restrictions, they are redeemed as normal retail copies. After they sell enough copies (totaling $1000 dollars directly through the Steam store), have enough monthly players, reach a certain number of reviews, or meet a mix of these metrics they might unlock all profile features for their game. Messaging is unclear from Steam as to what metrics need to be reached in order to leave "Limited / Steam is learning about this game" status.
Beta packages are just a special type of "CD Key", except that the package is allegedly used for "Beta testing". Developers are limited in how many keys they can generate for a certain package (2,500 and they also have a cool-down), so smaller indie developers use this package to generate keys that are equally functional to the store package keys, and use them as if they were store package keys (i.e. they bundle them, send them out for reviews, etc).
Examples:
- A Sceptic's Guide to Magic for Beta Testing is actually A Sceptic's Guide to Magic Retail
- Chroma Squad - Beta is actually Chroma Squad Retail
Major publishers aren't restricted in how many keys they can generate (or the restrictions are much looser), so they use the Beta package as it should be used... as a beta test, that they will revoke after the beta period ends. However, there have been cases of beta play-testers receiving full retail versions of the game after public release. Some beta keys provide a +1 to profile library, cards, and achievements showcase.
Curator Connect Copies are tagged with 
These are copies of games provided by developers / publishers to curators (with a maximum of 100 curators per game) for promotional purposes (reviews, streaming etc.). Currently, this system is heavily abused by traders who request copies from the developers via email with the promise of using them for promotions, but instead exchange them for keys for other games that they can resell for profit or (in much rarer cases) activate themselves.
The curator copies are not delivered as Steam keys; instead, they require direct activation on your account, thus becoming bound to your account. Since only the officers of the group associated to the curator have access to these copies, the process of redeeming them involves joining their group, then having the other trader promote you to a moderator position (thus granting you all the permissions needed), and after activation you'll be demoted to a regular member or removed entirely from the group after the trade is complete.
This bypasses any need for manual key activation or any chance of you reselling it on the grey market. These activations provide no +1 to your steam library count, no achievements showcase, and drop no cards. Some from 2020 or earlier provide +1 to library. Some have less content than the full retail release. If you find these trades unethical, you can state in your bio that you wouldn’t like to receive offers involving curator copies and they should steer clear, but if you’d like to make sure that you don’t get any you may ignore these traders (there aren’t many) through their Barter profiles.
Steam Playtest is a system in which players receive a “child” / “demo” appID separate from the main game, so it doesn’t interfere with wishlists, steam keys, or user reviews of the main game. This appID is delivered directly though Steam. The sign-up is linked as a button on the main game, the playtester may be added immediately or in a different wave of playtesters. It is at the discretion of the dev if they want to deactivate the app, or experiment with upcoming features. This exists because beta keys have a limit of keys generated, and this function does not.
Steam store purchases are packages delivered directly to your account through Steam. Depending on how the store package is defined, some games can produce an extra inventory gift for the same game, or for a different game. Some games also have the option of buying a 2-pack / 3-pack / 4-pack, in which case the buyer automatically activates one copy upon purchase and the rest are delivered as inventory gifts, region locked to the buyer's Steam region. Starting with the changes regarding Steam gifting from May 2017, there is no way to store inventory gifts any more through direct Steam purchases aside from the cases mentioned above.
Gifts that were created before May 2017 were not affected by this change, but since there are only a very limited amount of these left, they have higher values in trades than a retail key for the same game. While a key can perhaps be invalidated by the devs, or the game might become unavailable for purchase (delisted, banned), Steam gifts will always remain redeemable and tradable. Paid Steam store purchases provide +1 to Steam library count, card drops (when available), and achievements showcase (when available), unless these features are Valve-limited.
Free to play games are games that can be claimed for free. They provide no +1 to Steam profile library, no card drops, and no achievements showcase, if you purchased one of these games before they went free to play then these restrictions do not apply.
Demos are provided through direct Steam activation (when claimed), might be revoked, and usually have a limited content (your progress through the game will be limited to the first chapter only, for example). They provide no +1 to Steam profile library, or drops cards, most have no achievements showcase, however, some do.
Free weekend games are akin to direct Steam store purchase in the sense that they activate directly to your account, but after the promotional period ends, the users who claimed the free weekend will have the license removed from their account, and will no longer be able to play the game. With this condition, they provide no +1 to library / profile library, cards, or achievement showcases.
Devcomp keys are intended for developer use only, they are for internal testing. They are used to provide developers with access to the product if their Steam account is NOT already in your Steamworks partner group. They have little relevance to trading on Barter, as they have little content or resemblance to the retail versions of a game. They are generated only for a few select people, and most often there is no need for them to be generated at all. You won’t find devcomp keys on Barter.
“dev” or “dev sourced” keys being phrased as “sourced by devs” gives the impression that they are obtained by having an official relationship with these devs. Most of these keys will activate as "for Beta testing" because the package used for generating the keys is the beta package and not the store package, however they provide full game content in line with the store package. In practice, “dev” or “dev sourced” most of the times means that the trader received these keys after emailing the devs with the prospect that they’d like keys for “review” purposes or "giveaways" for their audience. Dishonest requests like the above usually come from traders with fake Youtube content (botted subs / views, videos stolen from other channels), and also Youtube accounts created by template. You activating such a key means that the trader can justify it as being given away, when in fact they are exchanged for gems / TF2 keys or other sellable items / game keys.
For such traders, the advantage of knowing which users activate these keys (as opposed to selling them directly on the grey market to unknown Steam accounts) lies in the fact that in the eventuality of these keys being revoked, they can "prove" to the devs that they know exactly which key was "given away" to which account, thus the "giveaway" is a legitimate one. The devs can't know that behind this exchange lies a transaction in marketable items or other game keys for reselling purposes. Additionally, in case these keys are revoked and the trader chose to sell them on the grey market instead of pretending to give them away, buyers will complain about the revocation (perhaps even resulting in negative reputation / feedback if the seller refuses to provide a refund). By completing their trade with you they have successfully converted their un-sellable keys to ones they can sell on the grey market without decreasing their rating by doing so. The devs have no knowledge about their activities, and actual uses of these keys, abusing the trust of smaller indie devs looking for promotion of their game(s).
Augmented Steam is a highly recommended addon available for Edge, Chrome, and Firefox. It provides ITAD sales info and additional links on each game page, filters for better browsing, highlights for owned and wishlisted game, and is full customizable through its options menu.
Enhanced Barter is a highly recommended userscript applied easily through the Tampermonkey add-on. It adds a
The Barter.vg Discord is welcome to anybody and will happily help beginners with trading advice, support, additional information for identifying bad trades and actively discuss new bundles. You can also opt-in to receive notifications about new offers or when another trader adds to their tradables an item that you follow.
The Barter.vg steam discussion group is available for any concerns with your Barter.vg experience.
Official Barter.vg Steam profile
Additional tools available for Barter.vg