The first game I ever paid for, but did not directly purchase, was Garry's Mod in 2011 or 2012 after UndeadPatch stopped working. I didn't have a bank account, so I paid a classmate in cash to gift it to me. Considering that I first learned programming through Wiremod's Expression 2 chip (basically a virtual ESP32), leading directly to my computer science studies and my current job as a sysadmin, I'd say it was $10 well spent.

My first purchase on Steam was "The Classic", a sniper rifle in TF2, just to remove my account's F2P trading restriction.

Then I got a whole bunch of games through Humble Bundle's subscription. The first one was December of 2018, specifically for MGSV.

The first game I ever actually bought, actually on Steam, was Slay The Spire.

HL2: Episode One, in August 2006. My Steam account was actually created in August 2004, that was just the first time I gave them a credit card number. Probably the first time I actually had a credit card number to give them!

It wasn't often I had to battle for a top spot because I was putting all my friend's bands music through it to see how the highways generated lol. Always #1!

My first purchase was "Ravensword: Shadowlands"

Edit:
I am not sure if I ever played the game at all, and if I have then I don't remember anything from it.

Counter Strike 1.6, I still remember the controversy.

I think it was Half Life 2... or possibly TES4: Oblivion? I'd played Morrowind before Oblivion and I remember thinking that the graphics were so realistic!

I remember that whole kerfuffle. It spawned the first meme gif I can recall seeing. Warning, moderately NSFW:

Half-life 2 ofc :)

Weird several games are not on that list for me?
It goes back to 2013 2012, but I used Steam on Linux way before that.
But in the beginning I had my games gifted to me because I didn't have VISA.

Edit typo, it was 2012 not 2013.

Me too, I'm pretty sure. But iirc it was very different. I don't think you could even buy other games yet

Half Life 2 obviously. My account age reflects that purchase, LOL.

Steam for Linux was released 2013. You probably used the Windows version through WINE. Or maybe Linux version was in Beta before, I don't remember the details. Some in the comments in this thread suggested that the purchase history doesn't go back to the beginning.

So your account is legally allowed to drink. :p

Same. It was a steaming pile of shit back then. It got better

Civ V Complete for € 8,45 in 2016.

Given I clocked some 500ish hours it seems like a good deal.

Half-life 2

Wow, so many Half-Life 2 as their first game. ... wait a sec, is that a kbin account? I thought kbin died. It was one of the reasons I switched over to a Lemmy instance.

It's Mbin now, but they kept the original URL. There's also fedia.io

Civ 4.

Spec Ops: The Line $6.59 in 2015. Great game, I had been playing Team Fortress 2 for free for a while at the time. I do remember also getting some game keys included with hardware purchases prior to that as well.

Most of my PC gaming before steam was through CDs and I had a period in between CDs and digital copies where I was exclusively gaming on consoles.

That reminds me 😅. Dad bought me Settlers II for Macintosh back in the day (first game on CD-ROM, whoa).

It needed 16 MB of RAM, but I had only 8...but there was this thing in MacOS 7 called "virtual memory", which is just swap.

I did not understand it, so obviously I was like "what is this shit? Why can I just have RAM, but need to activate it?" So of course I cranked it up to a whooping 32 MB, Hackerman that I was.

Game ran like shit, but it ran. There was a button to skip some time ahead, idk, like 30 seconds. Took longer than those 30 seconds to skip ahead with my shitty HDD RAM 😅. And I thought "what a shitty button, does not make sense at all, wtf is this?"

Oh Spec Ops. I was there in Berlin, every week in their office to play Street Fighter after work. The game has some special place in my heart. I purchased it later on Steam too, because I played it on console first. The game is delisted on Steam, so good for us to have it in our library.

RWBY Grimm Eclypse lmao, definitely not worth the $15 I paid. Was really into RWBY at the time, I wanna say I bought it between seasons 3 and 4, but it might've been before S3, idk.

Weird, I must admit my memory is unclear on that.
On my list it says 5 Apr, 2012 Age of Empires: All in Wonder 13,49€
So if the Linux client didn't come until 2013 I must have run it in Wine as you say. Because I've been running Linux since 2005, and I "only" dual booted for a couple of years.
It may have been my first Visa purchase then? Kind of embarrassing that I paid 13.49 Euro for a Microsoft game. 🙄 Especially since it became free to play soon after. 🤡

Thinking about it a bit more, I now recall I had multiple steam clients installed in Wine to start them up with different Wine settings, because the games didn't run with the same settings.
But to see my first game, I may have to ask my wife, because she had Visa before me.

Undertale

I never finished it

Hey no shame in paying money for good games! ... would I have said if I played it. I assume its good.^^ Usually if a paid game goes free to play, they often give some owners specials. Didn't they do something? At the very least it was not expensive game, (Edit: here is something missing, I think I wanted to say it still hurts if it goes free after paying) especially if it gone free to play not long after.

For the thing with Linux, there were presets to run Steam through WINE in tools similar to Lutris (not saying Lutris, but some tools making it easier to use WINE).

Looks like I bought Deus Ex GOTY, Human Revolution, and Arkham City. $50 according to that page. In 2013.

Interesting title as the first game too. But how did you not finish it? Didn't it appeal to you. Because the game isn't actually very long. I only played it once through.

I think I got stuck on an early fight and just moved on to playing other games I owned on consoles

I didn't play it very much, I suppose it was OK, but I think it was a huge failure for Microsoft. Maybe others did like me, only played it for a few days, and then lost interest.
I think we had Playonlinux back then. Before that I personally only used WineHQ and their recommended tweaks. So 100% manual. Goddam there were some weird settings for graphics that could be crucial. 😋 It was quite a chore to get anything to work back then.

I‘m old - Half-Life 2 in the box. I had dial-up. Needless to say I loathed Steam and it’s puke green interface through the 00s. I’m still not exactly fond of it.

Jan 16, 2010
The Orange Box

2010 Torchlight, then Puzzle Quest three times, and then Terraria.
Torchlight was for scratching the Diablo II itch, but it didn't really do so for long. $20.
Puzzle Quest was pretty addicting, so I gave two others their first hit. $1.50 for each one.
Terraria was $10 and I've been playing it on and off for 15 years now.

Yes, I was thinking of PlayOnLinux, just couldn't remember. I never got into Steam over WINE, because WINE was always cumbersome to use for me. And I didn't want bet my money on that. Lot of people did though, with various levels of success. Wish I was more brave!

apparently counter strike source, but I don't think I've ever played it

so I'm going to say The Orange Box, technically my second purchase, but I actually played Portal

Puzzle Quest and Audiosurf are the earliest entries in my history, both purchased in February 2008.

Apparently it was Arma 2 back in 2012 to play DayZ mod. I remember that I barely ever played vanilla Arma 2 until just before Arma 3 came out. It was always DayZ mod.

How do you even manage 5000 games. wow.

Humble Bundle has helped a lot. They currently give me about 9 games every month, which includes at least one AAA title. Much cheaper than buying them individually. Plus, I've been subscribed to them for so long, I get a default 20% off anything in their store.

I also keep an eye out for every sale event on Steam. Probably a good 95% of all my games are purchased on sale. I couldn't afford my library if I paid full price for everything. And I tend to buy bundles of games to get a further discount on their price, which adds drastically to the number of games in my library.

As far as playing them... according to SteamDB, I've played 25% of all my games. Because I add so many bundles of games, I don't get around to playing all of them. But I have a nice variety of games so I always have something to play.

Plus, folks on my Steam Family have tons of games to play, so it doesn't matter to me if I have games I'm not interested in. Someone will enjoy them.

I also organize my Steam library by franchise. Every game, soundtrack, software, videos, and tools that are connected to a singular franchise are grouped under a collection with a common name for the franchise.

And thanks to the new option to create custom sort names, I can arrange them in that category order, so all my games are first in a collection, then soundtracks, software, videos, and finally tools.

I sort all the games by story continuity in my library, so I always know what order to play the games in. For non-canon games in a franchise, or separate unrelated stories, I create secondary (or sometimes tertiary) collections to logically organize them. Like the Metal Slug series in the image below.

Another example is Call of Duty, which I have broken down into collections by conflicts: WWII, Black Ops, Modern Warfare, then the standalone games that aren't connected to any other series in the franchise. (Ghosts, Advanced Warfare, and Infinite Warfare) Since the individual conflicts don't have any connection to one another, it doesn't make sense to throw them all into a massive collection together.

For all my games that don't have any connecting content I can group into a collection... they're currently just sitting in an "Uncategorized" group at the bottom of my library. I tried creating custom collections for them at one point, but it got too cluttered, so I'm leaving them alone for now.

18 years, 5000 games…

I just checked my profile and my Steam anniversary is tomorrow. My account will be 19 years old!

Someone made me buy Counter-Strike: Source for a LAN party in 2008.

I'm actually veeery impressed with how you organize your library so cleanly. I was actually expecting absolute chaos! Especially because you had already a big list of games after the custom Collections where introduced. My lists are often out of sync, those which are not dynamic. In example I have a list for games that are delisted, but I was a bit lazy.

And I also didn't think of Family sharing (even though I did that in the past too). One of the major improvements over old Family sharing is, now you can actually share games without everyone else getting kicked out when you play a game. Remember that? Now you can play something, while someone else is playing at the same time. Correct me if I'm wrong please!

What do you mean by "create custom sort names"? If you refer that to options in the Collection, then there is no explanation needed. Otherwise, is there such an option outside the Collections?

BTW Humble Bundle got me too, when it was in its prime. Nowadays I don't use that service anymore. There was a time when I purchased keys from shady sites, but at that time I didn't think of anything bad... until games got removed from my account. Then I informed myself and since then buy on Steam only. (nothing todo with Humble Bundle BTW, complete separate issue)

I just checked my profile and my Steam anniversary is tomorrow. My account will be 19 years old!

I don't know if tomorrow happened for you already, but congratz. May the next 19 years as fruitful and fun as the past. :-)

Thank you for sharing, that was is great.

To be fair, at that time you had all the rights to be pissed about it.

I played Counter Strike in LAN parties too. But I don't remember which of the games it was, probably the first! I played in early 2000s around. A friend brought me there, it was awesome.

Nidhogg!

Same!

There are dozens of us!

Also, Steam was released adjacent to either hl2 or the orange box, don't remember which but that's when i got it. I remember being pissed at the time for it installing a launcher lmao

I don't know if this is the first game I ever bought, but according to the link in the OP it was Portal. Which feels almost poetic in a way. Apparently I would have been 18 then.

I didn’t have to look it up to see what game it was, but I didn’t remember the price. I bought Portal for $19.95 almost 19 years ago. Played it on a Windows PC that was not focused on gaming. I guess I’ve also played it on every computer I’ve had since then, including my new-to-me refurb Steam Deck a couple days ago.

Totally underrated. I never played the second game BTW.