For me the answer is 847 USD over 14 years …
I’ve had and been using steam since 2003… I really don’t want to know what that number is. And I am also convinced someone is collecting this data point for nefarious purposes, because its 2026 and everything is being used for nefarious purposes. Including this comment.
Outside of my mom being an nefarious purpose there isn’t one here.
Rather to get a gauge of how bad and expensive it be if Steam just ceased to exist. Sounds like some people already had accounted for that
Not as much as you might first think as I generally wait for Steam sales. Well over a thousand bucks CAD though.
Total spend says 12k, not bad for 15 years considering how often I buy games for my friends lol
Shut down or not it’s already lost.
None because I don’t buy games with unbroken DRM (including the need for corporate-run servers) and therefore can always get 'em all back via piracy.
Like 20$ i guess.
$2908.44
That is what steam reports as total external funds added.
That includes hardware purchases (OG Steam Controller, Steam Link, and Steam Deck with the new price), and it doesn’t count the games bought on Humble Bundle.
Apparently $3135 is what I’ve spent on Steam games, according to Steam themselves. That isn’t what the current value is, but what I’ve actually spent.
Yeah, I have spent a similar amount on video games on steam
$0 because if steam deletes my library I’m going to pirate it back with 0 remorse
the money is already lost. if that happened i would pirate whatever i want to download again.
…erm
£12,898 according to SteamDB at today’s prices
In my defense I’ve had my account for 20 years and had humble bundle monthly/choice for like a third of that time, so the real number is hopefully not quite that
You can check your actual spend in the steam support --> Data about my account section.
Even that won’t be perfectly accurate, as it doesn’t include money spent on secondary stores for steam codes. So things like humble bundles aren’t included.
True, but it at least covers all of the purchases actually made on the platform.
Oh, I didn’t know that was a thing. Only $1,746 for me. Pretty sure my wife’s is much more, but she’s hidden her games.
$4,370AUD. Somehow both more and less than I expected. Over 11,200 hours of playtime over 18 years.
I keep a copy of the generic steam crack on my computer. It’s very well tested. So as long as I had the files on my computer I would only lost access to the very few games I have that use a different drm.
Many games on Steam are DRM free, included older Valve games.
Nothing I couldn’t pirate right back, given time.
FYI, you can get total spent by going to Help > Steam Support > My Account > Data Related to Your Steam Account > External Funds Used.
Or by visiting this link: https://help.steampowered.com/en/accountdata/AccountSpend
Many steam games are DRM free and would work even if Steam shuts down. It’s been like this at least since 2011 or so (that’s when I discovered this, it could be earlier).
I guess the impact would depend on the types of game which one buys on Steam.
If you had them downloaded yes. But if you didn’t and they disappeared?
I would just a get pirated copy.
I haven’t pirated games in a very long time, but this seems like a fair thing to do in such a situation. If the game is cheap and/or I like the studio, I would probably just rebuy on GOG.
Same here. Steam is the last “digital library” I’m ever really going to use or trust. I’ve been screwed over by everything else, so if that shuts down too, I’m basically just done, and will buy a NAS or something to hold all my games from GOG.
yep. the game exists somewhere. I’ve bought it. I have no issues pirating it to get access to it again. nobody has been hurt by this.
Steam has a back up feature I have my steam games backed up on my NAS
And, friendly nudge:
It’s not hard to back up games from Steam. Especially those with no DRM. Just keep them on a drive somewhere.
Pretty expensive though, given the prices on storage. And many of them will be out of date in a few months. Face it, we can download from the high seas at any time, the only reason most of us are buying on steam is convenience. Whatever we could backup on steam today we could just retrieve from elsewhere at any time.
Only 4.2% of games on Steam are DRM-free. It’s not as many as people think.
It looks like this list is manually curated, so there’s probably more that just aren’t documented as such.
Probably depends on your definition of drm free. You could start steam in offline mode and the vast majority of games would work forever. Their drm is also a known quantity and easily bypassed.
Didn’t know it was that low, I knew it was a smaller share, but I thought it would be double digit percentages.
That being said, many critically acclaimed games are indeed DRM free on Steam.
Steam Offline mode is your best friend for archiving games forever.
Yeah, I suspect if Steam shut down, not only would we see a bunch of cracks released for games that now have no way to update to try to kill the cracks, but we’d probably see something like emulation of steam to get around it without even needing individual cracks.
Generic stream emulators already exist and is how a vast number of games are “cracked”
I should’ve guessed, honestly.
Heck, there’s at least one opensource generic steam emulator that you just drop into the game files. I used it before when messing around with modding a multiplayer game, to run multiple copies at once.
