We know we spent $19 Billion on unplayed Steam games… But it’s the Summer Sale.

It was no surprise to me that recently it was discovered that Steam players have $19 Billion worth of a back log. I’ll admit I’m a contributing member of that group myself. Oddly it’s a Nintendo Switch backlog that is putting my others to shame. I should have never turned on notifications for the Switch Sale Reddit thread.

But backlog be damned both Steam and Switch are having sales through mid July. I’ll have to admit I’m a relatively new Steam Deck owner and have found myself mostly searching out games I haven’t had time to play yet that are Deck Certified. I’m finding there are so many.

I know I teach people how to retro game in the modern era but I’ll be honest I didn’t know before searching for $5 on the and under games on the Steam Summer Sale how many were right there. I spend a lot of time setting up emulation handhelds to play these same games arguably not as performatively . On the flip of that however the Steam Deck just doesn’t feel as good while playing them. I will save all that for the review I was going to make a couple of weeks ago on the Steam Deck.

Where they get me is the bundles. My thought was “Steam Deck… I should probably play Half Life 2 on here”. Half-Life 1 is a game I’ve played through many times through Portmaster on Retro Handhelds. So I look it up figuring it to be part of the summer sales which it is and then it happens. It has a bundle. Half Life 2 is listed for $0.99 during the summer sale. But for $14.79 I instead got 27 games. I didn’t mistype that. So now in addition the Half-Life 2 which I intended on putting in my back log I’ve also added: Counter-Strike Condition Zero, Day of Defeat, Day of Defeat Source, Team Fortress Classic, Deathmatch Classic, Half-Life Opposing Force, Ricochet, Half-Life, Half-Life Blue Shift, Counter Strike Source, Half-Life 1 Source, Half-Life 2 Episode 1, Portal, Half-Life 2 Episode 2, Left 4 Dead, Left 4 Dead 2, Portal 2, Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, Dota 2 and The Lab.

I’ll have to admit not all of these games are great and yet there are some real bangers in there. Let’s also pretend this was the only game I did this for. For $50 I added over 60 games to my backlog in about 15 minutes. That’s just on Steam because even though I have a hard modded Switch OLED I still buy my games and Nintendo is having its summer Sale as well.

I’m not really sure where I was going with this article other than to say it was no mistake that report was published right before these sales. I’m just not sure if it was made to prevent us from adding to our backlog or give us permission. Everybody else is doing it.

GameOn

CellPhish