I was playing Counter-Strike competitively at the time, so the first game was CS 1.6 😀 I created my account in the first 15 minutes of registration being opened, and still rock my 4-digits steam_id 😀

There was a lot of negative feelings floating around at the time, and it's true the release and first few months were reaaaally chaotic. I didn't have strong feelings about it either way myself. It worked good enough and brought some interesting convenience, and the rest is history.

I still think Valve is one of the less evil big companies on the market, and always found Gabe Newell to be an interesting character. I am glad a public figure in a position such as his finally said out loud what was needed to be said, in essence that piracy is a service problem at its core. And that still rings true for all media (music and video streaming, etc..) and not just videogames.

Half Life 2. Signed up with the first year of operation, August 2004.

I hated the idea of steam as well, and the only game I had one it for a long time was Day of Defeat which was such a great online multiplayer FPS.
Well, one day I bought a bunch of games from a friend and the main one was Half Life 2. Well those games were steam connected so he gave me his steam account as well. Which I have been using ever since. I hated his steam account name , let me know if you can tell what his favourite bands were . The steam account was called incu_hoob.

I dont even remember what my original steam account was , but the one I have now is the one my friend gave me along with the games i got from him. That was soooo long ago. but the answer is half life 2

Law212 wrote on Yesterday, 15:19:

I hated the idea of steam as well, and the only game I had one it for a long time was Day of Defeat which was such a great online multiplayer FPS.
Well, one day I bought a bunch of games from a friend and the main one was Half Life 2. Well those games were steam connected so he gave me his steam account as well. Which I have been using ever since. I hated his steam account name , let me know if you can tell what his favourite bands were . The steam account was called incu_hoob.

I dont even remember what my original steam account was , but the one I have now is the one my friend gave me along with the games i got from him. That was soooo long ago. but the answer is half life 2

Inncubus and Hoobastank?

Shagittarius wrote on Yesterday, 15:24:

Law212 wrote on Yesterday, 15:19:

I hated the idea of steam as well, and the only game I had one it for a long time was Day of Defeat which was such a great online multiplayer FPS.
Well, one day I bought a bunch of games from a friend and the main one was Half Life 2. Well those games were steam connected so he gave me his steam account as well. Which I have been using ever since. I hated his steam account name , let me know if you can tell what his favourite bands were . The steam account was called incu_hoob.

I dont even remember what my original steam account was , but the one I have now is the one my friend gave me along with the games i got from him. That was soooo long ago. but the answer is half life 2

Inncubus and Hoobastank?

You got it

Haha. Yeah I kinda got myself as well, as I signed up back in 2003 with my first job's email address. At some point, email and account name became two different fields, and account name was automatically set to the registration email or something like that? Well what is sure is that I can't change it and my username is my first work email forever, heh...

"Can my SteamID and/or Steam Account Name be changed?
Your SteamID and Steam Account Name can not be changed, even by Steam Support staff members. Your player name can be changed at any time in your Profile Settings, under "Edit my Profile" page."

October 25, 2007
Orange Box when I was sure that the games could be played without Steam.
I continue to buy games from Steam but only the ones where DRM can be bypass or cracked, obviously other stores get priority when they have no DRM.

Currently going through all of my games and verifying the emulators and crack so I can update https://github.com/vogonsorg/OfflineGames

Current plan for most games is a folder structure with all files needed by the emulator and a link to the emulator on the site.

/EDIT October 25, 2007

DosFreak wrote on Yesterday, 15:35:

October 25, 2027

When?

There are old games on steam I can play on modern computers some with multiplayer support.
one game to play with others is rise of nations
A real classic not playable on windows 11 without steam is Final Fantasy VIII (remastered somehow but they employed stupid censorship) and you can put custom save files in it too from windows 9x muahahaha

First steam game was Doom 2016 (purchased the boxed game at Walmart and found the CD was just a steam installer).

Since then, I have quite a few steam games but 99% were free giveaways.

Goat Simulator. It was worth it.

I was also against the idea of Steam when it came out and ran the non-Steam version of various Half-Life mods for a while even after I had a Steam account. Still, between wanting to tinker with the updated engine for the original game and the upcoming Steam-only release of Half-Life 2, I was a pretty early adopter. Steam says my account was created on August 1st, 2004, and that is when I activated my first Valve product key on Steam (from the retail box I already owned).

My first digital purchase was the Orange Box on September 11th, 2007 which was the first day that the preorder was made available.

EDIT: Added pic. 😀

keenmaster486 wrote on Yesterday, 17:22:

Goat Simulator. It was worth it.

I've never played a game that put me in the shoes of a goat as well as this one does it.

I willingly use Vogons and unwillingly use gmail, whatsapp, banking and revenue collection services. Thats about the sum total of it I think... I dont have loads of accounts and dont have any subscriptions.

According to my licenses and activations, the first I got was Orange Box in 2011 December, a good 1.5 years after I made my account and Exophase lists that as the first game I played, but I find it weird. Why would I make an account if I haven't played anything for another 1.5 years? If I check my badges, the first one is for the 2011 Christmas sale. Also thing's don't check out. According to my licenses, I bought Orange Box on that Christmas sale a month after I unlocked my first achievement for HL2. Ever if I got HL2 on a free giveaway earlier, it should show up on my license activation list.

I'd have to doublecheck, but I believe it was HL2.
Generally, I prefer itch.io or gog, for the archivable offline installers, though.

Some things are only available through steam.

Even if you dont buy anything, the steam client does a decent job of managing wine prefixes with good general gamecentered perf fixes via proton, so useful as a launcher for nonsteam games, if you know what you're doing. (But superceded in this role by things like Heroic.)

Joined pretty late compared to others. 😀

Joined on 27 Jul 2010 and the first game I bought was on 4 Feb 2011 (Test Drive Unlimited 2).

If memory serves it was Empire: Total War, that had me fold. A true and pure XP-title, it kills me now that it can no longer be played on Windows XP, due to the steam requirement.

Half Life 2, but only because I got a bundled code card for it when I purchased my 9800 Pro sometime around early '04. Never liked Steam, even 22 years ago I thought it was slow, updates took too long, launching games took too long, and loathed the idea of logging into an online service in order to play single-player games.