Has anyone seen those guys on Steam that just collect games more than anything? I think it became a much bigger problem with the introduction of badges, since one of them displays exactly how many games you have. There are people who just buy tons and tons of cheap crap games just to up the number on the badge.
Steam badge collection in general, you see people with an utterly absurd number of levels which requires crafting badges that range in price from very cheap (~40c total for a level) to around $1 or more depending on normal or foil.
The level requirements also scale so people with thousands of levels require millions of XP to get there, keep in mind badges only give 100 xp per badge level, so you can guess just how much in total was spent for big numbers.
I can see how people fall into that.
Back in the early days of Steam-well, not
early early, but around '09-'13, bundles were plentiful. For a long time, Humble Bundle sold fairly remarkable game bundles with Steam keys for "pay what you want", they didn't actually have a minimum, so you could pay just a penny and get five new games every couple of weeks. Generally, there'd be something you'd actually want, and then four other games you could take or leave, but games were still wrapped together in one key. But, no harm no foul, and you could eventually hide games from your ever-growing Steam list to not clog it up.
Seriously,
look at this deal from a decade ago:
Beat the average price of $7.88 (at the time of the screenshot) for a number of games that were very popular at the time, and to a small extent still discussed today. If you didn't care about the last four, you could still get Psychonauts for a penny. Only, it was generally less than like $7.88, because the "Beat the Average" games weren't revealed until a few days later, so I'd imagine I paid no more than like $5 for all of that. What's more, this was also a time when consoles were still uncontested and PC gaming wasn't the total nexus it would soon become, so, downloadables were rarely ever discounted or given away. There was never a single sale on the Wii Shop Channel, even - the price that was listed was the price a game would always be, up until the very day the Shop Channel closed.
Humble Bundle's quality and value was so unmatched, it was very, very easy to pump your Steam account full of hundreds of games, by the notion that since they're being sold alongside titans like Psychonauts, surely there must be some value to them?
But, as time would progress, Steam slowly lowered the standards of what could be sold on Steam up to the point of today where the only disallowed games are of the ilk of like, Rapelay, Super Seducer 3
(for live-action nudity), and Active Shooter
(trashy school shooting simulator). Nowadays, there are plenty of trashy sites that'll sell you 50 games for a buck. Fifty of the most bottom-of-the-barrel junk that isn't worth the manual labor of redeeming the key, let alone playing - we're talking Indian/Chinese sweatshop junk that are just "here is literally this puzzle game but with a different skin"; very old and forgotten DOS games someone tossed into DOSBox; and ports of mobile games readapted for PC. Tossing up your game and getting no sales sucks, but I guess if you can pull in some pennies by selling off keys in ridiculous bundles, then more power to you.
I bought a couple of those retarded-huge cheap bundles just to see what was there, and that sure killed off all remaining momentum I had left from the golden days of bundles. Humble Bundle (rightfully) put forth a limit of $1 for bundle purchases, and in modern bundles, that'll just net you like, one game. The good stuff resides behind the $15-20 tiers. They're still generally good deals if you didn't have any of the games on offer, but those of us who've been around since the start just see one repeat after another.
I can't really say much about the whole badges deal. That crap just looked like achievements on steroids. Collect all the trading cards to get a badge, and that badge... makes your pee pee look bigger to other badgefags? I dunno. I know there's a whole thing with farming trading cards using bots to get said badges, but also there are "games" out there that give you a billion achievements for doing nothing, like they're intended for achievement fetishists or something. Hell, I've thought about starting a thread in Games where we laugh at achievement hunters, but that's a whole lotta cancer I'd rather not dig into myself.
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