For me the answer is 847 USD over 14 years …
£600 in 21 years apparently and most of that is from the first 10 years too. It’s not my go-to store anymore.
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.
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”
If you had them downloaded yes. But if you didn’t and they disappeared?
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 And many of them will be out of date in a few months.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.
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
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.
@64bithero
4771 € according to SteamDBApparently about $1000, which feels like a lot until I see some of the bananas-ass responses here.
If it helps, my total spend is listed at 7964 USD
So, that’s fun!
It all depends how old the account is. $1000 in a few years is definitely bananas… over 15, that’s a damn cheap hobby honestly.
I believe it’s over 20 years now. I got the account when half life 2 came out. But I don’t game all that much since 10+ years ago.
Wow, that’s really good! You’ve definitely got your money’s worth, I’d guess.
SteamDB puts my account at $2400 “at lowest prices”, but I’ve definitely spent way more than that, and I own dark souls prepare to die, which a new key for that is up on cdk4g and g2a for $400-$500 alone.
I’ve been thinking about buying a bunch of hard drives and downloading my entire library and cracking it all and stashing the drives in long term storage just in case. That’s been a thought for a very, very long time though…
Your Steam purchase history can be found under: https://store.steampowered.com/account/history/
I think purchases from other shops are not included (such as Humble Bundle), which makes sense. I have no total spent money calculated yet, so don’t know.
Every insteresting game I “bought” on Steam is backed up (including a crack if required).
Probably over 10k CAD. Not sure how old the account Is but it’s quite old.
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
Total spend says 12k, not bad for 15 years considering how often I buy games for my friends lol
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
Less than I thought! About 1,900, can’t tell if that’s USD or EUR I’ve used both. Saved over 3,000, supposedly. For over 17 years, 112 bucks a year for a hobby shared nearly the entire time between 2 - later 3 people - that’s pretty good I’d say. Not a lot of hobbies come in that cheap.
Yeah, that’s about what we used to spend on board games
Yeah same, less than I thought : 1445, but I’m pretty sure that includes my OLED steam deck. Savings a little over 2k.
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.
Shut down or not it’s already lost.
Like 20$ i guess.
