Real Time Trades

Real-time trades were the original way to trade on Steam. Trade offers were introduced later, and for a while they were distinct. Now, real-time trading sessions are essentially fancy UIs to build a trade offer. When a real-time trade is confirmed, it is turned into a trade offer.

The behavior of these trade offers isn't immediately apparent. Like all trade offers, real-time-trade offers have a "sender" and a "recipient". Experimentation has revealed that the "sender" of a converted trade offer appears to be the user who sent the Steam trade request. The exact behavior in the case of in-game-initiated trade requests (e.g. TF2 in-game requests) is presently unknown.

What is known, however, is the process of confirmation. Once the trade is done, the "sender" first has to confirm if they're losing items. The "recipient" won't be able to confirm the trade until the "sender" confirms, and the trade offer won't be visible to the "recipient" either (this is standard trade offer behavior). Once confirmed (or immediately if the "sender" isn't losing any items), the "recipient" will see an outstanding Active trade offer. It will be automatically "accepted", and the recipient will see the confirmation in their app (or in their email if they don't have 2FA on). Once the "recipient" confirms, the trade completes and the offer goes Accepted.

At any time between when the real-time trade session ends and when the trade completes, any party to which the offer is visible can cancel or decline it.

If you're using TradeOfferManager, you can use the realTimeTradeConfirmationRequired and realTimeTradeCompleted events to determine what stage of the process you're in.