Poll Question 299 – How many Steam games do you own?

1st September 2014

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3

Somebody recently mentioned that he thought I had a lot of games. I had to look on my account to see how many I actually had. If I had had to take a guess without looking I would have said about 30. It was actually 60.

Then on Saturday I was chatting with somebody and looked at their account and they had 257, which I thought was a lot and just now I checked somebody out who has 513!

The whole thing got me thinking about how many games we buy and don’t play etc etc.

The guy who has 513 is called Jon. Now Jon has created a cool website called My Steam Gauge that access publicly available data and displays some information.

For example, here is my account. It’s not perfect, as he freely admits, because the information display how much a game currently costs, not what you actually paid for it. But it’s still freaking cool. There’s also the issue

I think there might be something wrong with my Steam account though, because it says I own Contagion and so does Steam but it’s not in my Steam Library and when I click “Play Now” I get a blank pop-up window. That’s not Steam Gauge’s fault, but thanks to them I can address the issue. Just in case you are wondering I don’t think I own the game, unless it was a gift and I have forgotten.

As a side note, I have written to Jon asking if it’s possible to work together to add some information about your Steam account to the new Enhanced PP Profile. Remember – this information is publicly available to anybody who looks. Nothing private is displayed.

Interestingly, William contacted me last year about joining an podcast interview with a guy called TechAnalyst who has over 2,200 games. AND he doesn’t have a special account – he actually bought them. Unfortunately, the interview never happened but the topic of game ownership via Steam and its regular Steam sales is an interesting one.

Final note

There are other websites that do this too, notably SteamDB.Info. In fact, for a few more Steam tricks, please check out the bottom of my Links page.

Time to Vote


19 Comments

  1. Ade

    We’re turning into collectors heh and they’re loving it, they don’t really care how much of these we actually play or even finish. It’s an industry, let’s not forget, but I for one am more temperate about buying games atm, at least not while there are still unplayed games in my lib. My magic number is 43, btw.

  2. StrikeVonNice

    I do have over 100 games the problem is shortcuts to other games and software like hammer and also having mods installed and left there means it often reads slightly higher then normal. (About 20 mods and shortcuts if you include steam releases of mods like No more room in hell)

    I do find it interesting with the large amount of games that some people have as I have played all games in my library at least once, however some people seem to revive or buy games and never play them either because the don’t have the time or did not really want them.

    Sometimes I do buy steam games but from other vendors like Kerbal spcae program and Prison Architect. I have even brought from Kinguin (which is very good for deals as they use steams bad exchange rate against them)

    1. I have never heard of Kinguin (the name itself makes me want to visit the site) and there is also GreenmanGaming, which has some great deals too

      1. StrikeVonNice

        It compares deals on sales of games (so green man gaming would be listed as a vendor). Look at the fine print if you want more details but I got CIV 5 brave new world for £3.40 instead of £19.00 and my account is still in good standing so I am happy with it. I have also used the customer service which was very good. (This is starting to sound like a ad =P ).

        1. ive just looked at “kinguin” … £5 for a bioshock infinite steam key is certainly a good deal …. is it safe to use ?

  3. I actually have 94 games.

    1. How many have you played and how many have you finished?

      1. I have finished most of them, and I try to get every achievement in them, just for fun.

  4. galocza

    458 here according to steam but thats including dlcs and such.
    there was a poll recently i filled about gaming addiction and i counted so i can tell you that i played approximately 25% and finished 15% of these.

    funnily enough, there are quite a few relatively big shots on my account that i never played or just started for various reasons:
    – im a perfectionist and playing games i expect much from that way is sometimes a chore not entertainment so i wait until id have the time and mood (dx:hr, fallout-nv, dsihonored etc)
    – i didnt like them at all (max payne3, dragon age, fear or crysis games).

    on the other hand i killed hundreds of fun hours with
    – older games noone ever heard of (including me) or long forgotten like kings bounty (113), king arthur (105), kohan series (66+42+42), majesty2 (93), pirates! (89), dow-soulstorm (410)
    – indie titles like a valley without wind (33 hours), defense grid (299), disciples series (94+140+55), ftl (181), plants vs zombies (184), reus (75)
    oh, and i just finished eador, 384 hours (ok, that game has some bugs but alttabs nicely so 50 maybe 75% of those hours were spent running in the background 8).

    i found only 2 games which can be considered aaa category and i put some hours into since steam tracks playing time: witcher (146) and skyrim (414). funny, it seems that my hl2/hl2 mods era was that long time ago? 8(

    3 things are that i owe this number of owned games: 1. sales 2. humble bundle (and the like) events. i often buy them in case i like them and spend some hours with them for the small bucks. 3. steams devilishly clever community features which prompt me to buy games im not sure id ever play (and of course this means i never will – oh and there are exceptions to these exceptions 8).
    from the bundles i got only 1 game so far that i didnt register on steam because due to the reviews was so bad i didnt want to have it on my list.

    its madness, really…

    ps: and i bought a lot of classics i will never play (again) but i just had to have on my account…

  5. I have 101 Steam games. Some of those are Expansions, for example, I remember Fear had 2 expansions wich is visible in the steam library.

    I just can’t help myself. Whenever I see a game on sale I go on YouTube and look at some trailers and gameplay and stuff and if it looks fairly interesting I buy it.

    Some are games I play once and never touch again, Broforce is one, some are games I play everyday, Binding Of Isaac is one of those and some are games I launch play for 5 minutes, close it and never touch again, Hack Slash Loot is one of those little buggers.

    There was a time when I was in serious competitive gaming competitions in Team Fortress 2 and Counter Strike, I won maybe 50 dollars in my “career” but Now I just prefer Casual Gaming.

    The Half Life series still holds the number 1 spot in my top 10 games of all time though 🙂

  6. Well, I have around 40 actual games. Before I built my new PC and subsequently formatted my HDD, I had something like 90 games because I had a ridiculous amount of Source mods… Too bad those don’t carry over to other PCs through Steam.

  7. Zekiran

    Steam says I have 137, though I think most of those are actually just sourcemods. Possibly half that are actual bought/gifted / real games. Yeah on a manual count, only 84 of them are real games, and most of those are not even installed – or on my laptop instead where they are my ‘backup can’t get online / can’t run my desktop’ games from indie bundles.

    As far as completing a game goes, generally speaking unless the game is unplayable for me for whatever reason, I will make every attempt to complete it.

    Alice Madness Returns, unplayable. STALKER omg horribly unplayable (and I’m not going to download an entire mod just to play it). Started but had to move so didn’t really ‘play’ Mass Effect. Started to try playing the GTA games but holy crap those things are garbage and removed from my drive. The only 7.50 I regret paying during a steam sale… Some were gag gifts (… Secret of the magic crystal, really, I tried. I honestly did want a game about horses. … but not that game.)

    But a lot of the games I have are open-ended fluff games like Chuzzle and Peggle and Plants vs Zombies.

    It kind of surprises me that I have zero interest in playing Limbo or Machinarium – good games that lots of people loved, but I just cannot get into them. Boring platform scrollers are boring to me. Outlast … I should like. I really should. But too many things I really can’t stand about it (too damn dark, headbob, the pure stupid of ‘can’t pick up a weapon and defend yourself’ …) to bother playing it more. I don’t care for fantasy that much, so I own but have never even installed Skyrim. I prefer Fallout for my open world stuff.

    And then there’s Fear, Fallout, Half Life, Borderlands, Saints Row… Those are the ones I will continue to go back to, over and over, and enjoy just as much as the dumb flash games I like so much. They feel comfortable, fun, familiar and yet challenging to me.

    So for the number of times I’ve finished any given full game, I’d say that far outweighs the number of games I’ve got on my list that I haven’t played at all or didn’t finish.

  8. Unq

    Steam tells me 149 games. I don’t think that’s a whole lot, to be honest. Most of them come from Steam Sales, only a handful from bundles I’ve bought.

    I have a fairly good distribution among AAA games (shooters, mostly), classic games from days gone by, and indie games including some “anti-games” like Stanley Parable and Dear Esther.

    Overall I have probably played less than 50% of them – and some I have played before but not on Steam (like the Jedi Knight and Max Payne games).

    I am comfortable with my number. This year I’ve completed games I’ve been wanting to play for a while: Antichamber, System Shock 2, and Thief: The Dark Project (played this way back in ’99). It feels good to complete a game, and these three were all fantastic experiences. If a game isn’t a fantastic experience I simply don’t invest that much time in it.

    1. I love that phrase: anti-games.

      I agree that a game has to fascinate, same as books and even movies. There’s too much good stuff out there to just “persevere”.

    2. JG

      Hey, at least Stanley Parable has something to say. 🙂

      It’s a sly commentary on video games that pokes fun at video game cliches through absurd example. It’s not preachy or pretentious about it – it just shows how silly a lot of game design cliches are by taking them to the extreme. It was hilarious to play through it myself, and then I got to experience the hilarity again watching a friend play and hearing their reaction to it.

      As far as I’m concerned, Stanley is mandatory playing for anyone with an interest in game design.

      It’s impossible for me to play a linear shooter now without seeing the Stanley Parable Adventure Line™ dragging me around by the nose.

      1. Unq

        I agree totally. I wasn’t disparaging any of the games by calling them anti-games, it was more to mock the ongoing “debate” that says experiences like Dear Esther & The Stanley Parable shouldn’t be called games.

        For my part, I thoroughly enjoyed both of the above as well as Gone Home which is talked about in the same vein.

        1. JG

          I’m sort of agnostic about Gone Home since I haven’t played it. However, it’s always struck me as a game that benefit heavily from its timely choice of subject matter, same-sex relationships, more than anything else. If it weren’t for that, it probably wouldn’t have been on anyone’s radar.

          That, and its asking price of $20 is steep for a game that’s relatively simple. Sure, not all games need traditional gameplay elements, but at the same time, we have to acknowledge that there are certain conveniences and development luxuries that come from getting to ignore them. 🙂

          1. Unq

            I disagree about the same-sex relationship being the reason for its success. It’s a compelling tale that unfolds in an interesting way.

            $20 may be steep for it, but that’s why we all buy stuff during Steam sales!

  9. JG

    There’s only one correct answer: Too many.

    Although, in my defense, those sloppy Telltale games account for 16 entries which should have been condensed into one.

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