For me the answer is 847 USD over 14 years …
About US $3000 over 20 years. Not as much as I thought, to be honest. I wait for sales and try not to buy things unless I’m sure I’ll play it.
Aah, that’s a bit hard to calculate due to Steam keys from bundles and other websites. Running some rough numbers it looks to be about $2600 CAD over 15 years, so… not too bad?
@64bithero
4771 € according to SteamDBLike… 5 bucks or so? For Hollow Knight. The rest of the games are either free, demos or gift.
The vast majority of my library is on GOG
…erm
£12,898 according to SteamDB at today’s prices
In my defense I’ve had my account for 20 years and had humble bundle monthly/choice for like a third of that time, so the real number is hopefully not quite that
You can check your actual spend in the steam support --> Data about my account section.
Even that won’t be perfectly accurate, as it doesn’t include money spent on secondary stores for steam codes. So things like humble bundles aren’t included.
True, but it at least covers all of the purchases actually made on the platform.
Oh, I didn’t know that was a thing. Only $1,746 for me. Pretty sure my wife’s is much more, but she’s hidden her games.
According to SteamDB, $18,181 over 18.6 years. I’m sure that number will be much higher when the Steam sale is over, since it pulls data from current game prices.
That’s jaw dropping
Hah, I have you beat by $200.
…Nice! Glad to know I’m not the only person sinking ridiculous money into my gaming habits. 😅
It’s cool, I’m sure they’ll bury me with my steam account.
More true than you know. Valve won’t allow you to transfer accounts to other people, so your account is legally dead when you are.
I am completely fine with that. I wouldn’t really expect anything different.
Nobody wants my steam account, they want and have their own, so its fine.
Many steam games are DRM free and would work even if Steam shuts down. It’s been like this at least since 2011 or so (that’s when I discovered this, it could be earlier).
I guess the impact would depend on the types of game which one buys on Steam.
If you had them downloaded yes. But if you didn’t and they disappeared?
I would just a get pirated copy.
I haven’t pirated games in a very long time, but this seems like a fair thing to do in such a situation. If the game is cheap and/or I like the studio, I would probably just rebuy on GOG.
Same here. Steam is the last “digital library” I’m ever really going to use or trust. I’ve been screwed over by everything else, so if that shuts down too, I’m basically just done, and will buy a NAS or something to hold all my games from GOG.
yep. the game exists somewhere. I’ve bought it. I have no issues pirating it to get access to it again. nobody has been hurt by this.
And, friendly nudge:
It’s not hard to back up games from Steam. Especially those with no DRM. Just keep them on a drive somewhere.
Pretty expensive though, given the prices on storage. And many of them will be out of date in a few months. Face it, we can download from the high seas at any time, the only reason most of us are buying on steam is convenience. Whatever we could backup on steam today we could just retrieve from elsewhere at any time.
Steam has a back up feature I have my steam games backed up on my NAS
Only 4.2% of games on Steam are DRM-free. It’s not as many as people think.
It looks like this list is manually curated, so there’s probably more that just aren’t documented as such.
Probably depends on your definition of drm free. You could start steam in offline mode and the vast majority of games would work forever. Their drm is also a known quantity and easily bypassed.
Steam Offline mode is your best friend for archiving games forever.
Yeah, I suspect if Steam shut down, not only would we see a bunch of cracks released for games that now have no way to update to try to kill the cracks, but we’d probably see something like emulation of steam to get around it without even needing individual cracks.
Generic stream emulators already exist and is how a vast number of games are “cracked”
Nothing I couldn’t pirate right back, given time.
7228.16 USD with 2026 prices but don’t forget inflation over the years.
https://help.steampowered.com/en/accountdata/AccountSpend this is a high security page so if you know how to open it in the steam client, that will be easier.
Great link. I really appreciate the savings too. $3400 total spend $3200 savings Bought my first game in 2017. Tough part is I was on humble choice for 2 years so that’s all savings throwing off my numbers. But not bad for 9 years of fun.
I don’t wanna set my library to public so SteamDB can figure it out, but it’s over $1000 just going by what I can get to in my purchase history (which does not go all the way back to 2003 when I first made my account and had gotten HL2 and Ragdoll KungFu as my first two purchases on Steam). Not sure how accurate SteamDB is anyway, since it wouldn’t necessarily know if what I bought was on sale when I bought it 🤷♂️
Can you not check directly if your account is private? I went through Help > Support > My Account> Data Related to Account > External Funds Used for totals. Does that rely on a public profile?
While I have spent a large amount on games on steam, I have easily gotten my money’s worth and would not regret it if it disappeared tomorrow. I would be disappointed of course, but would see it like an old console breaking and not feeling like replacing it.
This is mainly because I don’t frequently replay games after I have had my fill of them.
Would probably just buy games I didn’t already play on some other site like GoG.
$0 because if steam deletes my library I’m going to pirate it back with 0 remorse
the money is already lost. if that happened i would pirate whatever i want to download again.
Lost? Not really any. I’ve replaced everything I can on GOG, and replaced what I can’t with pirate copies.
The 2GB RAM usage of a client that does no more than spam me with irrelevant recommendation isn’t worth it now that I can’t just slap another 16 in there for the heck of it.
I moved the “common” folder installations out, tried launching them all directly, anything that did not force Steam to open or scream that it wasn;t running I kept official and made a backup. Anything that did I dumped and yarred the games I already owned.
My Steam library is something like 1500 games, spent a lot replacing console stuff when I moved to PC, but now I consider it to have been a mistake. I just don’t trust Valve anymore, simply being better than Ubislop and BiowEAr isn’t enough, with ho the state of gaming is shifting to be completely anti-consumer. We’re not the customer there, we’re the product, proven by how a publisher can add DRM after launch, or break a game and force out an update, and Valve will demand that we accept this no matter how bad it is.
The Steam client has never used 2GB of RAM.
Sitting at 1.4, right now, which is more than every other part of my system unless I’m using plasma crap on the desktop.
That’s double Heroic, more than Heroic and Itch put together, and you could almost throw in Luitris (Before I dumped it thanks to Claude) and still use less RAM than Steam.
Maybe they just suck at Linux? You’d think not, since they pretty much own the backend now with proton, but it’s sure the least efficient and most obnoxious piece of software I have dealt with.
1.4 is significantly less than 2.
Currently running at, meaning at that exact moment, in the background with no game playing or service running.
This, for those who have trouble with the English language, means that it is a current snapsot of usage not a record drain on resources.
I understand that, I just don’t see much reason for it to vary wildly unless it’s processing shaders or something which wouldn’t really be a fair reading of its resource usage.
Maybe in the orange box era? Did we even have that much memory back then? /s
The PS3, which had hardware a bit ahead of the curve when it launched in late 2006, had a whopping 512MB of RAM.
So 2GB would have been relatively beefy specs in comparison when The Orange Box released the following year. 4GB would be excessive.
I recall the PC I built in 2011 for Skyrim had 4GB of RAM and I thought that was great at the time. A lot of games (Skyrim included) were 32-bit applications at launch and were limited in terms of the total RAM they could utilize, so 4GB was the cap for a lot of titles until 64-bit support became more commonplace.
Jesus christ I forgot what dark times those were. Just checked and indeed min memory was 512MB for Half life 2
Goddamn kids these days don’t know how good they got it (ignoring all the other stuff going on right now)
I remember the first PC I built to play Elder Scrolls 3 Morrowind, which I installed to my amazing 40GB hard drive. I think Morrowind alone ended up using 10GB of that with all the mods I had.
My current computer has 32GB of RAM, so I have almost as much RAM as I used to have storage back then. I could save Morrowind plus mods onto a RAM disk if I wanted to and just play the whole thing on memory.
My Linux Steam client uses 391MB RAM - the last reboot has been 2 weeks ago.
Mine uses none, now that everything is running woth Goldberg instead of Valve’s crap ;)
Steamemu can be nice, but to be honest, i really like a lot of the Steam clients features. I like opening the Wiki for games in the steam overlay and seeing all game updates in a nice overview with patch notes, and i like the steam forums (toxicity aside - if the devs use them, they are a good information channel for planned stuff and submitting bug reports)
Steam Forums are the major plus, I find myself going there fairly often for GOG support, since the devs just ignore the other forums.
Not really interested in the client features, though.
Achievements? Meh. Cloud save? Ludusavi. Multiplayer? I prefer solo campaign or LAN play so it works better for me without Steam.
Workshop is nice, though, but the only reason it is nice is because so many people stopped using anything else to release mods and you have to use it now. I actually own a game on GOG, and on Steam, never played the Steam version, just installed it so I could add mods from Workshop and then copy them to the GOG version I play… That’s not a benefit for gaming to monopolize mods, though they get props for actualy managing to do what Behtesda keeps failing at XD
I also don’t care much about achievements, and i simply sync my Faugus / Heroic game Prefixes with Syncthing, so Cloudsaves are a non issue if they weren’t provided by Steam. Steam Workshop works well, but i have to agree that i would prefer if the downloading of mods wasn’t coupled with the need to have a license for the game on steam; some games like Rimworld, KSP and Factorio have their own clients (which is ok)
But i have to admit i don’t really know if the need to have a steam game license to download mods is something steam is enforcing or an option under control of the publisher. Since the decision if Steams DRM is used is up to the publisher, it would be quite strange to force this restriction on them.
2,900 CAD apparently
