Buy Games using Steam's mobile application

If you are a Steam user you know that Valve is having regular sales on the platform where games are offered for a discount. That's often a great way of buying games that you are interested in for a fraction of their regular price. I'm only buying games that I'm really interested in on launch day or shortly thereafter, while I wait for sales to happen for other games.

When you are not on your computer when the sale is happening on Steam, you may not be able to make the purchase in time to buy the discounted game. Say you are on holiday in another country and do not have your computer with you. While you could try and find a public computer to sign in on the Steam website using your account to make the purchase, it is not really that practicable for a number of reasons.

First, you do not really know what is on sale unless you visit the store every day to find out. Second, I'd not recommend signing in on public computers let alone making purchases on those machines.

The alternative? The official Steam application that is available for Android and iOS. The application makes available the Steam community and store on the mobile phone. I do not want to get into too many details in regards to the community features that it offers as it is not in the scope of this article. Still, you can chat with anyone on your friend's list, participate in Steam groups and manage your user profile using the app. The chat may be interesting to find out if your friends also plan on buying a game you are interested in. Sometimes you band together to buy a 4-player pack for an extra discount.

The application not only provides you with the means to find out which games are on sale, but also with the capabilities to make purchases right from within the app. Once you are logged in you need to tap on the settings button at the top left corner to display the navigational menu. Select Catalog from the menu to go to the Steam store.

You find sales, flash sales and specials at the top that you can browse to find apps that are on sale. Tap on any game listed here to open its profile page. From here you can find out more about it, add it to your wishlist or to the card to make the purchase. Steam makes available the same payment processing information that you use on the desktop client. If you have configured the software to automatically use a payment option the mobile client will use that option as well.

So, using the Steam app can be useful to browse the store and make purchases during sale periods when you do not have access to the desktop version of the application.

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