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.