[Discussion] What was the first Steam game you ever purchased?


There is not much to specify for the question, its really simple: Which title is the first game you have purchased on Steam? Was it a good decision? How much did you pay? When was it and what device? You don't have to answer all questions, this is just a fun discussion to have.

You can check your history: store.steampowered.com/account/history/ Edit: Some in the comments pointed out that the purchase history doesn't go back all to the beginnings of Steam. So if you purchased something earlier, it won't be listed on your account.

(I reply with my game too.)

Esta entrada fue editada (hoy, 0:17)
in reply to thingsiplay
My first game was Bastion on 6 Apr, 2013. It cost me 14 Euros. At that time my PC didn't actually have the biggest horse power for gaming and frankly, at that time there wasn't much Linux games available on Linux. Steam was new on Linux and we didn't have Proton yet. A friend told me about this game, it sounded fun and interesting, and it wasn't expensive.
in reply to Gumus

I loved the soundtrack! Together with its unique story telling, it's art style and the soundtrack brought a fantastic atmosphere. I did listen to some tracks even after finishing the game. It's lovely.

Just listening to it again, brings back times. I think my favorite was and still is the Mine track "Mine, Windbag, Mine" (YouTube, Invidious), I'm a sucker for this kind of music.

Esta entrada fue editada (hoy, 9:55)
in reply to thingsiplay

Puzzle quest.

My friend bought me the orange box, ugh I have to install this new "game manager" to play these things, but they look fun....

At the same time "how do I figure out which of these files to torrent when the game is only 50mb? So many viruses are 50mb". Sure enough I download a virus, wipe my computer and create the " 1 dollar per ten megabytes" rule, so long as I'm getting at least 10mB of information per dollar I'd rather pay for it and not risk getting another virus.

Sure enough, puzzle quest just barely fit into that rule, I bought it and have since added a thousand other games (and just recently bought the re-release of puzzle quest!)

in reply to thingsiplay

2007 Garry's Mod $10. Judging by the three gift copies I made shortly thereafter, seems like it was a good purchase.

Also had several games on Steam before that, because physical copies had steam keys. But technically not Steam purchases.

Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 20:19)
in reply to thingsiplay

Ragdoll Kung-Fu

It was pretty fun back in the day. It was one of the first games even sold on the platform, too.

Now, I did own Half-Life and the stand alone Team Fortress Classic and Counter-Strike releases that switched over to being on Steam and needing Steam to play online after the WON servers were shut down. But I bought those in a store, before Steam was even announced.

Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 20:24)
in reply to 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮

It was 2005, but yes

little fun story is, that I was part of a small mod team back then. And by pure chance we were in contact with someone at valve, who told us about the plans of opening up steam to 3rd party games and mods. And our mod was considered to be put as one of the first games to be put into the store. at least for a short time (alas, didn't work out for... internal reasons. I think mainly because it was a mod and not a full game)

in reply to 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮
store.steampowered.com/app/1002/Rag_Doll_Kung_Fu/ is not available in my region (Germany). I wonder what happened.
in reply to thingsiplay
Violence, maybe? I don't remember if it had blood effects or not. I don't think it did. But it was released back in the day when Germany was almost as bad as Australia in terms of censorship/banning games so maybe it just never was available there. 🤷‍♂️
in reply to thingsiplay

I think that page only tracks 2008 and newer

Because my "first" purchace aparently was in 2009, and by that point my steam account was already in active use for 6 years.

The first game that I used steam for was CS 1.6 - about a week after steam launched.

And I think the first new game I paid money for and added to steam was HL2

in reply to Atherel

Yup. First Steam account created 24th of December (guess why) 2007 for Orange Box.

Back then, it was possible to play Team Fortress 2 on one account on two PCs at the same time, but not on the same server. So my brother and I sat beside each other playing TF2 "together", but each on a different server.

We did this until we gathered enough money to buy a second copy of Team Fortress 2 in April of 2008. We were finally able to play both in the same match and it was glorious.

We both have and use these accounts to this day.

in reply to thingsiplay

My first steam game was CS 1.6 because I was forced onto steam to continue playing when steam was first released -_- (I had been playing since 1.3 I believe)

My first purchase was Day of Defeat: Source but no it wasn't a good purchase because I barely played any. I kept on playing regular Day of Defeat as I prefered it over the source version.

in reply to thingsiplay

The Witcher: Enhanced Edition in 2013 for $9.99. Kind of ironic really as I still haven't played it for more than an hour or so.

The next game I bought was The Witcher 2 three months later for $19.99 which I finished and loved.

Most of the early games were bought on steam sales and were either games I'd already played on console/PC or classics I never got around to.

in reply to Protoknuckles

Team Fortress 2 was the first game I played on Steam, one of the very few games working on Linux when Steam was new on Linux. I always heard about this game. At that time it was free to play. And it catched me! Love the game.

I also played Magicka with friends in a couch-co-op session. Man the combos, it was hilarious, we laughed so much. I was a little bit trollish too... not everyone enjoyed that.^^

in reply to thingsiplay

Only goes back to 2009 and I'm pretty sure I bought something between 2003 and 2008. Maybe I just played all the games I had purchased elsewhere and added to steam, such as the Counterstrike, Orange Box, Dawn of War, and a few others I can't recall. I ended up tossing most of the cases once steam was reliable and I wasn't likely to go back and play.

First one listed is Left 4 Dead and that was a fantastic value. Many hours playing that and LFD2. Scrolling through the list and I don't feel bad about not playing most of them for very long as the vast majority were 75% or more off.

Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 20:54)
in reply to thingsiplay

I'm pretty stoked about Dawn of War IV becsuse they are going back to DoW style battles instead of the MOBA route they went with DoW 2 which I disliked.

Adding DoW and the expansions I already owned to steam made updates seamless and I could replay it today if I wanted to.

Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 21:01)
in reply to thingsiplay
Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 21:02)
in reply to cobysev
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 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 was there Gandalf, I was there 18000 years ago


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.

in reply to thingsiplay
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in reply to cobysev
in reply to thingsiplay
in reply to cobysev
Ah, I remember. Thanks for explanation. I remember this functionality, just forgot about it. It will really come in handy when I dive into Collections again. Its a thing on my todo list, so thanks for the reminder for this. Some lists were ugly with their "wrong" sequence. The inconsistency of the original names annoys me too, especially so in a series.
in reply to thingsiplay

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.

Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 21:20)
in reply to thingsiplay

Supreme Commander 2.

I bought it from Target for like $15. I put it in my CD drive, had to install this Steam thing, watched it install, clicked play, and watched a black screen crash to desktop immediately. An entire weekend of research later I learned there’s this thing called a graphics card, the game requires DirectX 9 and pixel shader 3.0 support. Mom took me to Microcenter for the first time, bought me a $40 Zotac 9500GT, and the rest is history.

in reply to jaycifer

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?"

in reply to thingsiplay
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. 🤡
in reply to Buffalox

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).

Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 23:28)
in reply to thingsiplay
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.
in reply to thingsiplay
I perfectly understand not caring for the hassle to get games top work back then.
I remember when the humble indie bundles were new, it was absolutely amazing to get a couple of games that were actually playable and fun. World of Goo was by far the best game I had played on Linux when that arrived.
in reply to Buffalox
That reminds me, my favorite Linux game I played before Steam on Linux was an Open Source game Teeworlds. I don't remember if I played anything proprietary on Linux at that time (besides emulation off course).
in reply to thingsiplay
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.
in reply to thingsiplay

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.

Esta entrada fue editada (ayer, 22:32)
in reply to maxsettings
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.
in reply to thingsiplay
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.
in reply to thingsiplay
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.
in reply to thingsiplay

Technically, my parents' copy of the physical Elder Scrolls Anthology set, which came with free Steam keys for Morrowind through Skyrim so long as I made an account, which I did. I wouldn't have known about Steam otherwise and was, when I couldn't find physical copies of my games, a loyal WildTangent user 💀

The first game I bought myself was LISA: The Painful, then a friend bought me the whole Valve Complete Pack and I was hooked from there.

Esta entrada fue editada (hoy, 2:22)
in reply to thingsiplay

Oh god! Now I need to check my purchase history from maybe 12-13 years ago and hope it isn't a cringy game! BRB!

Edit:

Good new! It isn't completely cringe, but it's Garry's Mod, with the next game being Goat Simulator. So I wasn't a complete cringe lord... just halfway cringe!

Esta entrada fue editada (hoy, 4:06)
in reply to thingsiplay

Half Life 2 retail standard. August 18, 2005.

I didn't even know that this list was available. There's a ton of games on there that I've never played because I bought them to play after I upgraded my computer and forgot about them. I have a steam deck now and really should go back and try them out.

Esta entrada fue editada (hoy, 4:51)
in reply to thingsiplay

Skyrim. I was forced to download Steam to play it. I was on dial up and had just explicitly purchased a single player game not dependent on the internet, and yet..

Then it forced me download the game through Steam even though I had the physical disk right there. I couldn't complete the download, it was too large.

in reply to thingsiplay
watch dogs 1 for $5. Couldn't (didnt want) to play it on mouse and keyboard it was annoying and not made for that at all. Waited a year till i could afford it and got myself an oled steam deck to play it (way before it got expensive). Great decision now addicted to my steam deck.