Hey, neat, it's my 6th Steam Birthday. 2008 me lived in a different province, soon to be in a different country. I didn't have a beard then. George W. Bush was president of the US. Stephen Harper didn't have a majority government up here. I had just earned my Computer Science degree. Flo Rida was on the radio. I was driving a Hyundai. I worked for a magazine company.
I never had any interest in HL2 and thus never had any interest in Steam until the summer sales started). I had also just bought a new gaming PC at the beginning of that month. An AMD Phenom II X3 720 and a Radeon HD4850. I'm still using that processor and that video card today. The only upgrades I've made to my machine have been adding more storage. It's a little long in the tooth, I must say. That hideous green army camo client design.
During my first year on Steam, I spent $78 and bought 9 games (counting the iD Complete pack and Orange Box as one game each) . The most expensive game I bought was Aquaria, for *head explodes* $15.99. I bought it because I was a big fan of Derek Yu's earlier freeware games like
Eternal Daughter. Incidentally that's still the most expensive game I've ever bought on Steam and I only played an hour or so of it. Maybe I should double back and play this at some point. I mainly bought the iD Complete Pack for Commander Keen. I mostly used the Steam client in mini-mode. LOL, remember when that was a thing?
During my second year, I started to take sales seriously. I picked up 36 games for $214. On any other platform, a sweet deal, but seems like an ungodly waste of money in the modern Steam context. I paid $15 for King's Bounty: The Legend, $13.50 for Crysis, $13 for Tropico 3 and Cryostasis, and $10 each for Ghostbusters, Trine, Majesty 2, and Torchlight.
During my third year, I spent $370 for a whopping 93 games. Cost per game declining, overall number of games picking up. I spent $15 for Burnout Paradise, $12.50 for Resident Evil 5, Metro 2033, and Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I see I repurchased PB Winterbottom for $0.49 when that was on sale--at the time I think that was the best sale Steam had ever had.
During my fourth year, my spending declined to $308... but I bought 145 games. $15 for Dead Space 2, $13.39 for Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines (it hadn't been on sale for years! Take advantage of what might be the only deal ever on the game. Oops!) $10.19 for Portal 2. I can see the impact of bundles here.
Year 5; 132 games, $177. Getting close to a dollar per game. $15 for AoEII HD (incidentally, I love that so many games from the late 90s-early 2000s made it out on Steam. In 1996 I made my first web page which had Commander Keen and Duke Nukem 3d content. Today I can play Commander Keen and Duke Nukem 3d on Steam. And all my favourite games from the generation after that too. I spent a lot of time in my high school years playing Age of Empires II.), but nothing else broke $10 or even $7.50.
Which brings me to year 6. By far my most expensive year on Steam yet. $486.00 spent. Practically emptying the banks. Of course, I did get 685 games. An average of 70 cents a game. This is the bundle end-game. Remember Me for $10 and Towerfall for $10 and Broken Age for $8.49 were my three most expensive purchases. Bundle turds are definitely the name of the game this year. It's all about quantity. I still defend it because really if you spend $1 for 6-8 games and you even try one of them and don't like it, you still did pretty well on the bundle as a whole.
Let's look back at my most played games. I play a lot of games on Steam, but almost all of them are one-and-done games that don't really rack up the hour count. My most played game on Steam is Plants vs Zombies GOTY at 40 hours, because of that one time that I left it on overnight accidentally. It's probably more like 12-15 hours total.
My actual most played games:
Cook, Serve, Delicious - 31 hours. I've got about 4-5 hours left to finish off the last few achievements. When leaderboards were introduced I was in the top 100. I actually won this game for free off Wario64, which I totally regret. It's just a really wonderful game. It's very fulfilling. It's very funny. It's got a sweet visual style. The subject matter is hilarious. You can really see chubigans' growth as a game designer in this game, and from what I know about his next game, it's going to be even more amazing.
Age of Empires Online - 26 hours. I have pretty mixed feelings about AoE:O. The visuals look great and the core gameplay works as well as any other Age game. In that respect, it's not toned down or casualized at all. And while the campaigns have a ton of grinding out missions to level up, those missions also really taught me a lot about build orders and fast aging. Unfortunately because of the paywall I was never able to actually play any games against anyone else, and I also felt like the game incentivized people who had bought equipment/upgrades--in general any permanent boost to stats in an RTS is going to be a bad thing for game depth and playability. Still, I don't regret any of my time with this and I hope that one day we'll get an Age of Empires IV that looks this good but plays more traditionally. This game, incidentally, will shut down a few days from now.
Rogue Legacy - 25 hours. I didn't really expect this to be in my top 3. I think it's a good game. Movement is fun, the classes are fun, the graphics are great, it's very compelling... but near the end of my first playthrough I sort of saw the puppet strings. I saw the way attrition was used rather than skill as a core game mechanic. I saw the way that much of the upgrade diversity overlaps (relics, equipment, and upgrades literally do the same thing in many to most cases). So I was left feeling like this is a game that was less than it could have been... and yet I got all the rest of the achievements and played through to NG+5. So I guess I liked it after all?
My favourite game on Steam? That's easy. I didn't even play Psychonauts until 2012. I didn't have an OG Xbox and it slipped through my fingers on PS2 and PC at the time. I actually became a Double Fine fan from Costume Quest and later Stacking and vague memories of Monkey Island and Full Throttle from my younger years. So coming back to Psychonauts and seeing their crowning achievement was a real eye-opener for me. It's funny. It managed to understand so well the odd and mystical feeling of summer camp. The level variety, both in terms of objectives and in terms of the visuals, is amazing. The characters are great. It's long and it's meaty and it has lots of collection stuff without feeling like a garbage N64 3d platformer collectathon. It looks so good in crisp high resolution. And Meat Circus isn't even hard you bunch of complainers. Psychonauts is not a game you should miss.
I'm also a big fan of Greenlight. Greenlight isn't responsible for all the junk you see on Steam. That's all on Valve; they decide how much they want to admit or how little, and they decide whether people need to go through Greenlight or not. Greenlight has been probably the best indie discovery tool for me ever. I've found so much great stuff. And I've also found so much stuff that has potential but isn't there yet. I've tried to leave comments here and there to encourage devs. Some are humble and react well, others sort of flip out because they don't understand the idea that their game idea couldn't quite be there yet. I've voted for 1,263 out of the 3,086 games on Greenlight. If you want my vote? Start by not being an F2P MMO, a top-down twin-stick shooter with a zombie theme, a block-related construction sandbox game, or a no-combat exploration horror game with default engine assets.
Greenlight coming at the same time as Early Access, as the growth of Kickstarter, as the growth of streaming and video-based game content, as the growth of easy to use engines and middleware... it's all a perfect storm. It's never been a better time to be a gamer, it's never been a better time to be a PC gamer on Steam. I just bought Goat Simulator. A game where you're a goat. And you can play as a giraffe, which the game allows because a giraffe is just a tall goat. How the hell is this a thing that exists? It could only exist now, and it could only exist here. I hope that Tree-growing sim where you're just a tree and you do nothing gets ported to Steam. That could be a GOTY contender.
The Steam community is also a big part of how I use GAF today. I used to take part a lot in the Nintendo Downloads communities, but as virtual console dried up and the downloadable games have mostly been junk, there wasn't content to keep me there. I took part in the XBLA thread a lot, and even reviewed every single XBLA game there (all of them. Not lengthy reviews of course. By the way: Man, I wish Steam had mandatory demos with one-button purchase conversion. *sigh*) Xbox One isn't backwards compatible, XBLA is dead, and the community there expressed concern that my posting was too negative. So I don't post there anymore. Steam-GAF on the gaming side and TV-GAF on the OT side are my jams.
I wonder where I'll be six years from now.
