As someone who almost entirely emulates their games with the occasional pirated PC game, I’ve now spent about $150 on Steam games in the first month I’ve had my Deck. I can only imagine the bank they’re making off of people who are already used to buying their games. I’m officially ensnared. I haven’t been this excited about gaming since the original Xbox came out 21 years ago.
Year after year, I heard “nobody buys computer games.” The people behind World of Goo talked about the piracy rate for their game. This was around the same era when PSP software sales were apparently flatlining. I got the impression that except for the handful of UMDs which parents bought, nobody cared about Sony’s fragile discs. Likewise, this was around the same time when R4 cards were common, and the anti-piracy for Nintendo DS games was broken in a day or two.
I’ve bought only a dozen Steam games. Maybe this’ll increase once I can justify the cost of a Steam Deck. In the meantime, I am wondering if I’ve wasted money on Windows CD-ROM games. Getting my early 2000s games to run on a Windows 11 computer has been hit and miss.
I’ve had my account for 20 years and I’ve only managed to spend about a grand in that time. Once you hit a certain point (like 500ish games) you buy less and less every sale.
Best part is when you go to redeem a key from a bundle and you get the ‘you already own this’ message.
Whoops.
Yeah. I think Steam has so many features that it has greatly reduced pirating overall for many people I know. I used to pirate a lot of games over a decade ago. But now, I just like having all my games in a library. Achievements. Cloud saves. Game streaming. Game sharing is insane. I have a buddy who buys a lot of games at release so I just download from his library and play. There are a lot of places you can find games for cheap.
Just speaking for myself, but pirating is more trouble than it’s worth. Games are getting larger in size. Download speeds vary based on source. With Steam, I can download a full size AAA game in an hour or two. Need to find cracks. You have to worry about viruses. You need way more storage space. I mean if I’m low on storage for Steam, I can just uninstall a few games and redownload it later if I ever want to replay them.
Making the Deck OLED available to buy such that it’ll arrive in time for the Autumn Sale is…genius
Even more than that, I just can’t buy games on other services, even if they’re a better deal.
There is built in value in the fact that my Steam games can come with me.
While you can’t really use Epic or Origin, sure, there are quite a few stores that sell legit steam keys. IsThereAnyDeal is a great source for checking and tracking them E.g, Horizon Zero Dawn, most if not basically all of those shops will give you a key you activate on steam.
Yep this has been me since getting my deck too. sales and key sites. Genuinely check them multiple times a day like an addict 😅
Not sure if it’s been mentioned here already, but RetroArch is a thing on Steam Deck too for all (most) of your emulation needs.
I’ve gotten 3 bundles from humble and it almost wiped out all of my storage for the deck. I got the Resident evil bundle, the Metroidvania and the WB100. That last bundle, for $15, for the 12 games and these are big games taking up a lot of space. Currently still waiting for humble to provide me with the keys to middle earth. That game alone is like 70gb, batman Arkham Knight is another 70gb. Spent a total of $35 or so for those three bundles and added 30 games to my Steam library. Still have around 6+ titles I haven’t added or installed. I’ve also spent over $150 purchasing game from Steam. God of war for $40, FF7 Remake $50, RE4 Remake $40, and Spider-Man just today at $35 to name a few.
Re4 and Re4 Remake are so good!
Just finished re4 remake the other night. I went back and tried to play the regular RE4 and just couldn’t bare the controller scheme. It was so hard to play, like having to stay stationary while attacking/shooting. RE2 remake is way better and much closer feel to RE4 remake.
Yeah I guess I have the bias of growing up with it and playing it so much on GameCube that it doesn’t bother me at all.
My Steam library is ~700. I pirate most every game that comes out if it seems interesting to me. But normally I end up buying them unless they’re from a crap dev or they used to be Epic exclusive. Frequently, because of the size of my backlog, I’ll download the pirated game, never install it, then buy the Steam game because it has been updated a bunch by then and its convenient to go back and forth between my PC and deck due to streaming and cloud saves. Also workshop, god damned do I love workshop. Except that one time it made me reinstall ~200GB of Arma 3 mods.
Same, I purchased like 3 games in 2021.
Now these mfers got me on the hook.
I avoided Steam for years, only used it for Football Manager as no other option. Always been a mostly console gamer. Then I got the OG Steam Deck and now have nearly 600 games in my collection…a lot of them not even played and a good portion games I played And completed several times on console like Mass Effect, Skyrim, Fallouts etc.
So Valves strategy works.
You’ve bought 600 Steam games in a year and a half?
Rookie numbers.
Pre steam I used to pirate everything.
I didn’t even have a Steam account prior to getting a Steam deck. 1.5 years later I have 40 games in my Steam library and I’m on my 2nd Deck (my OLED arrived last weekend 😍)
I remember when I first got my Steamdeck I swore up and down that I wouldn’t buy a game cause I already had a library of 2000+ Roms. So what more could I want to play! I had a ton of Wii, PS2, GameCube, and even Switch Games!!!
…Then the Summer sale happened a couple months later and some of the games I like were pretty cheap…
Then the Autumn sale, and a couple more games that I liked were on sale…
…I have now spent a combined total of $300+ on games from Steam (and even then, that’s buying them specifically when sales happen)
Pretty much me. Whats some of your favorites youve picked up recently