Steam has rolled out a new “Trade Protection” feature, and it’s going to make it much harder for hackers to steal your valuable in-game items. This new system is designed to help you out if your account ever gets compromised due to malware, hacking, or phishing.
When you make a trade involving items from a game that supports Trade Protection, those items are delivered instantly, and you can even equip and play with them right away. For the next seven days, those items are considered Trade Protected, meaning you can’t consume, modify, or transfer them. Once that seven-day period is up, the Trade Protected status expires, and you can no longer reverse the trade. It’s a clever way to give you a safety net without completely locking down items forever.
Right now, this only applies toCounter-Strike 2, but Steam is pretty open about this not being a standalone feature.Counter-Strike 2is only mentioned once as the items that are protected, but the rest of the rules feel incredibly broad and seem to cover trading in general. Steam has also mentioned that it “plans to make this available to other games on Steam.” I’d imagine that cards and the Steam community market are also on the roadmap.
For now,Counter-Strike 2items are Trade Protected for 7 days after they’re received in a trade. You’ll be able to tell if an item is Trade Protected because it will be clearly marked in your Steam Inventory and the Steam Trading interface.
One important thing to note is that you can’t mix protected and unprotected items in the same trade. All items in a trade need to have the same level of protection. This makes sense, as it keeps things consistent and prevents any loopholes or people from trying to game the system.
If you ever find yourself in an unfortunate situation where you need to reverse trades, you’re able to do it directly from your Trade History page. When you choose to reverse trades, all trades containing Trade Protected items will be reversed, and all items from those trades will go back to their original owners.
Just be aware that if you do this, your account will be restricted from trading and using the Steam Community Market for 30 days to help prevent any future security issues. This isn’t going to be taken lightly, and there doesn’t seem to be any easy way from that cooldown. The rules are pretty clear that Steam Support cannot remove that 30-day cooldown, so you’ll likely just have to wait it out.
This seven-day reversal window is a huge relief for anyone with high-value items in their Steam account. WhileCS2has a massive economy, there are plenty of other games on Steam with valuable tradable items that are likely next. I can seeTeam Fortress 2orDota 2being the next few games this applies to, but Valve will likely let us know when it decides what games are next.
