I think about 18 billion of that was me
I have stopped buying games that aren’t on 90% off sales, and even then mostly stopped. I only buy a game that I want to play immediately. I have way too much to do and play and it’s not worth building a backlog since I’ll just forget it anyways.
Long gone are the days of super sales where 75-95% off were common.
Edit: clarification: I buy very cheap games for my backlog and buy games full price as long as I want to play them right now.
The key thing indeed is to only buy what you need right now. This philosophy is also very helpful in other areas of lives to avoid wasting money on discounts (elg buying clothes you’ll never wear).
I’d rather pay full price for a game I start laying immediately, than to put something 90% off in my backlg, with no guarante I’ll ever play it.
There are a few games that you might miss out on with this method. Some devs (it’s not many) list their games at what they think is a fair forever price and will not ever offer the game at a reduced price. Again, this isn’t a lot of devs, but one notable one is Wube, makers of Factorio.
I generally agree with your method, mostly because I have a large enough backlog to be able to wait for sales, but it is also worth doing research on some devs to see if a sale will ever happen.
Corrected my first post. I don’t just but deep sales. I only buy games at full price of marginal sales if I want to play them immediately.
Steam just had a 90% off sale from an entire publisher. Right now, looking at the stores front page there is
86% off a call of the wild
70% off hell pie.
90% off dragon age.
85% off a worms game.
75% off blasphemous.
90% off another dragon age game.
80% off kingdom Come.
75% off riders Republic.
90% off team17 games.You’re yelling at clouds, old man.
Like…each of us…right?
Yes individually. XD
Haha whaaattt… Nobody actually does that…haha, that would be like, just kinda silly right…
glances nervously at Steam library
I played a bunch of older games i got cheap on steam deck and i’ll do the same when the deckard will come out. 10/10 games that are 10+ years old are great to play on the go!
what’s a deckard?
Is it like a henway?
It’s valve’s next VR headset. Code name deckard. It should be ready to announce this year or next year hopefully.
Don’t look at my Epic collection. Between it and Steam have a few thousand dollars in games. (If you’re counting retail prices)
I have never spent a dime at EGS, but I have hundreds of games from their giveaways. I’m rich!
That’s what I mean. For years I have collected games off of Epic for free, yet I haven’t played but one of them to completion.
Wow, are you me? I just finished my first EGS game a month or two ago, and that’s after years of collecting games. I played on Steam Deck with Heroic, so I haven’t even used their client (I claim on their website).
Not sure but can say I 100"s of hours on my Steam games though.
Yup. I’ve completed hundreds of Steam games, I’ve played one EGS game. My library size isn’t that different between the two (like 600-700 on Steam, 200-400 on EGS), but I spend a lot on Steam and nothing on EGS…
Same but think I close 300 on Epic and close 200 on Steam.
I’m at least $200 of this statistic, now do the people who played for less than ten hours. I’d be like $1,000.
Less then 1h i’m probably at around $1000 lol
To be fair, I have a ton of games I completed with under 10 hours in them.
And a bunch I didn’t complete, but felt I got good value from for <10h playtime.
This number is likely very inflated though and doesn’t match what people actually spent on unplayed games.
It couldn’t have accounted for key sales or bundle purchases. I have at least a hundred unplayed games that were included in some random Humble Bundle I bought just because of one game that was in that bundle. If you were to divide bundle pricing by amount of unplayed games, it’d be like 1 or 2 bucks per game.
If you were to divide bundle pricing by amount of unplayed games, it’d be like 1 or 2 bucks per game.
And even that number isn’t really representative, because when I buy a bundle for one game, it’s because the bundle price is at or at least pretty near the historic low for that game. So the “extra” games aren’t really costing me anything.
Gaben has now got 19 Billion dollars he’ll never spend.
I’m doing my part!
And I’ll do it again.
I think the summer sale starts tomorrow, definitely gonna add a few more to the old backlog lol
Humble Bundle is a big contributor to my unplayed games. There’s usually only a few games in a bundle that I’m interested in at a good price, and the test I’ll eventually get to… Maybe when I retire… If I get to retire…
Same. My unplayed list of games is what I plan on doing when I retire. When I can sit down and concentrate on something without someone pinging me on teams…
I have absolutely bought games and played them for less than 2 hours and never played them again. I’m a lot more discriminating now, but as recently as last month I bought a game because I thought I would like it. I played a couple of times but can’t get into it. I would love to have a new, fun MMO to play but there are so many that look interesting and then… bleh.
I don’t really use steam and I have this problem too. I buy discs used, and I don’t always look up gameplay videos… so yeah, often not my cup of tea turns out. But resellable if I want down the line, at least.
Just the other day I bought a Wii super monkeyball game that uses the balance board. I have everything I need to play it, but the chances of actually doing that are pretty slim, tbh. A lot of the older games (anything under $10 for consoles more than a decade old, really) I buy are like that. “Might be fun, might never get played, but in an emergency, can be sold”.
I miss playing mmos, but none of them have hit like vanilla wow on a pve server, and now I hate people too much to bother. If I could spin up a server of my own and just play by myself or with a few people I know, sure, but most games don’t allow that. So single player it is.
Prior to WoW a much better MMO, EverQuest, was already out. There’s a reboot server that’s about to launch the second expansion on the 1st that’s free to play run by enthusiasts. It’s called Project Quarm and it’s easy to get going.
I really never got into EverQuest. Maybe I’ll try again, but honestly at this point I’m sort of over social games. I played a lot of neverwinter when I was transitioning off wow, and it did the job, but I’ve not found any sort of mmo since that really makes me want to play… because all I want to do most of the time is solo play and pug dungeons (always a disappointment).
I used to be a raid leader and main healer for the guilds’ clan (we had a group of iirc 6 casual guilds that shared forums and a vent server and would do stuff together like a super guild) and I miss doing that but… not enough to try to find it again I guess.
I desperately want to be into games like helldivers or other “major hit” social play games, but they are without fail not my style of game. So… eh. I think that time in my life is just gone. Maybe when immersive VR is a major thing and there are mmos for it (ideally that don’t give me horrible motion sickness), that sounds pretty cool. But I won’t wait around with bated breath.
I just did that with the Manor Lords the city builder. Looked super cool, was way way too steep of a learning curve and very slow for me, so I never went back. If I don’t see a game getting more fun or accessible after ten hours, I’ll never touch it again. Basically did this for Rust, Ark, Pal World, and Zomboid most recently.
Why do they have to personally attack me like that?
They probably saved 30 billion through sales and got even more worth out of finding the games they really enjoy that they may have never even tried without the sales.
I can confidently say that I spend less per year on games now than 25 years ago, very rarely regret a purchase, and don’t bother with refunds (which I hear are easy) because if I buy three games for cheap and spend all my time on one then I got my money’s worth.
Hell, I spend less each year than my wife spends on switch games and get way more entertainment out of it.
alternative headline “steam users have a ton of games they got from a humble bundle for super cheap and we didn’t take that into account and used the msrp value of each game for this shocking headline.”
Also some games don’t count time on older games. i know I have games like half life 2 episode 1 that i have beaten that show I never played them since I played them before they started tracking time.
I’ve had games not record time because I was in offline mode on vacation and I pre-downloaded it, or I just played in offline mode or directly from a game’s executable without steam’s crap embedded.
In the past it’s been trivial to set achievement unlocks and time played with 3rd party tools too.
I don’t see any kind of discounts mentioned either. I almost never buy from steam directly, usually reputable 3rd party sites like Fanatical, GamersGate, WinGameStore etc that I find through isthereanydeal. It’ll show as being on my account but nobody knows what I paid for it and I almost never pay MSRP.
Then there’s the countless bundle keys I used to get that I definitely never played and will never play because I wanted 2-3 games in a bundle of 10-20 that was cheaper than one of the games alone.
It wouldn’t shock me at all if there was 10 billion worth of unplayed games though. I have friends that buy all the hot releases and then barely touch them because a couple hundred bucks a month is not significant to their monthly budget.
agreed but barely touch is not the same as never touch that’s why I think they are looking at play time as some kind of real metic where it’s been broken from the beginning. You make a really good point as well about offline can also impact that as well.
Finally, a customer base for my games
