Comment on [Discussion] What was first Steam game you ever purchased?
cobysev@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
It’s been 18 years, so I don’t know exactly which game was first, but I remember hearing about how Steam would honor physical game purchases if the game existed in their store. You just type in the game code of your physical copies and Steam would add them to your library for free.
I added Call of Duty 1 and 2 this way, along with Left 4 Dead and… a few other games that aren’t coming to mind now. I remember being upset that my Warcraft WarChest collection wouldn’t add to Steam, but I learned years later that Blizzard never sold their games through the Steam store. Well… not until Activision bought them out and sold a few limited games through Steam like Diablo IV and Overwatch.
The first game I actually purchased from the Steam store was probably Half-Life.
18 years later, I have nearly 5,000 games in my Steam library. Their consumer-friendly practices kept me coming back for more games all these years.
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 19 hours ago
I wish this was still a thing. Microsoft, if the rumors are correct, seems to work on something where physical games can be added temporarily to your account until someone else pops in the disc in their system. I think this is pretty much the best of two worlds. We will never have physical media again on Steam, sadly.
18 years, 5000 games…
I am at 13y and almost 1400 games. I am no longer buying too many games anymore… and its still too many. I also removed some low quality games. How do you even manage 5000 games. wow.
cobysev@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
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.
Image
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.
I just checked my profile and my Steam anniversary is tomorrow. My account will be 19 years old!
thingsiplay@lemmy.ml 15 hours ago
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 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
wasis great.cobysev@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Yeah! I don’t know if it’s still a Steam beta option or if it’s site wide already, but if you right-click any game in your library, then go to Properties, the Customization menu on the left side, then scroll all the way down to the bottom. There’s a new section titled “Custom Sort Name.”
It was just announced by Valve sometime earlier this year. You can create custom sort names for everything now. It doesn’t change the name of the game in your library, but it lets you sort them by a common name. If you don’t see it, then turn on the option for beta updates in Steam.
So for instance, I own the entire Sniper Elite franchise. But technically, from a timeline point of view, Sniper Elite 3 is the first game in the series, followed by 4, 5, Resistance, then 1 and V2. I can create a custom sort name for each game, naming them something like “Sniper Elite 01” through “06,” in the order I listed above. And then they show up in that order in my library!
Or for a more visible example, look at the screenshot of my library in my previous comment above. The Metal Gear games are all arranged in story timeline. Play them in that order and it makes more sense than if you played them in release order.
If you don’t custom sort games at all, then they just show up in alphabetical order in your library. There’s an option for game companies to add a custom sort name to all their games in Steam, and I’ve seen it on some franchises (I think Assassin’s Creed used to list their games in storyline order for a while). But most companies leave it blank and you have to do research to find out which game to play first in a series if they’re not numbered.