While doing a little Steam account cleanup this weekend I had the realization that my account has grown quite a bit over the years. I'm someone who I would consider 'lazy' when it comes to overall Steam culture. I don't participate in many of the seasonal events. I don't craft many badges or collect series of cards. Shoot, I don't even really participate in the 'sales' the way I used to. Not that the deals are really all that great anymore anyway. I've really just kinda coasted through the years with minimum engagement but thought it would be a fun exercise to do a quick inventory and assessment of my Steam account.
My first Steam experience occurred waaaay back in late March, 2013. I actually remember this pretty well. I was going through a pretty nasty break-up at the time and was looking for just about anything to distract me outside of the gym, which I was hitting twice a day just to keep my brain busy. A co-worker of mine, who I actually didn't really know all that well at the time, sorta keyed in on the fact that I was going through a tough time and asked me about the games I play. Now, I have been a gamer most of my life but during this particular relationship it was a sacrifice I had to make, so I really wasn't gaming at the time and the laptop I was using for the small amount of computer time I did get was not really meant for gaming.
I do admit, I was starting to degen on some late night Call of Duty sessions with some pretty vulgar rando's to pass the time. Those were dark days.
After some discussion it was determined that I was to complete a homework assignment that evening, which was to go home and create a Steam account. After doing so, I text my co-worker to let him know and he replied with a steam product keycode. I had no idea what I was doing so I had to google how to redeem the key. Upon redeeming the key I was presented with a congratulations screen and boom, my first game was added to my library.
The game my co-worker had gifted me was XCOM Enemy Unknown. Immediately following activation, I received another text that contained another key for Bioshock. This was the beginning of my Steam journey...
As you can see, my co-worker (who went on to become a very close friend and roommate of mine) continued to send me some gifts for the next few days. He ultimately sent me Arma II and the original DayZ Arma II Mod. This took over my life for a while.
In the time since those days, my account has grown significantly. I've activated 460 games on my account. Now, I do have to give a disclaimer here that I have a video game business and have access to some games so that definitely helped quite a bit, though I've definitely still got quite a few keys games I can redeem. Someday! I'm in no hurry, really.
My top usage-time by far goes to Grand Theft Auto V FiveM Roleplay with over 6,000 game hours. Much of this was also development time as I built and ran my own roleplay FiveM server for 3 straight years. That will definitely rack up some hours!
What can I say, I love creating things and I love roleplaying! FiveM was a perfect storm for me.
Now some of these times are not fully accurate, as I use third-party launchers for some of them, but you'll get a pretty decent understanding of some of the types of games I play when I do have free. These tend to be more sandbox style games that give me free-roam or the ability to be creative at my own pace.
Arma III definitely dominated for quite some time. I ended up building a roleplay server with some friends and spent countless days running roleplay military simulations or dressing up in the 'arsenal', which is an outfit builder. I'm a bit of a fashion diva when it comes to games!
Most of the other games at the top such as Conan, DayZ, Rust, Dark and Light, etc are games that I also either have or are currently hosting for people to play on. I love games and love providing a place for me and my friends to play and meet new people.
I've earned a total of 33 badges, and 244 Game Cards (though the game card number is definitely not accurate as I did have a short phase where I was trading them on the internal Steam market). To be honest, I think most of these badges came from the first year that badges came out and everyone was racing to burn through some cards to see what they could craft. I'm not super into it these days (maybe if they were NFTs ;D ) but it does look like I'm pretty close to crafting another badge for Warframe. Maybe I'll pick up that last card and call it a day?
Personal thoughts
All in all, I don't really think Steam has capitalized on being the big dawg it has been and has really instead focused on maximizing profits while failing to deliver on really anything the consumers have wanted (I won't even mention HL3...or will I). I think Steam could have taken us into the Metaverse before someone like Facebook started walking farmvillers into the digital space.
With their mediocre track record of releasing products, less and less sales appeal each year (summer sales are joke these days), and more competitors popping up every year or so (Epic Games, Amazon, etc) I think Steam is going to be in for an interesting next few years in trying to maintain their market dominance.
Oh, and recognize NFTs are here to stay Steam. Get with the times.