There’s a fun little website called SteamDB. Now, since you need to volunteer your data to them to use the website, I’m not advocating for it. Use it at your own peril. However, I did and it did give me interesting information.

Considering that there’s a company that buys gold that keeps trying to contact me despite me blocking their numbers, apparently there is now – once again – a growing market for buying gold from private individuals. This is always a bad sign for the economy. So, if you hadn’t realized that we are fucked in that regard, now you do. While I am pretty well protected from this, it is still a good time to think about personal expenditures. Of course, if everyone thinks this way, it will definitely cause an economic downturn, but, you know, it’s still good to have a plan even if you don’t put it in motion right now.

Well, during my lifetime I have spent a fuckton of money on gaming. We are talking video games, RPGs, Magic: the Gathering, other CCGs from the 90s (quite a few actually), boardgames and just gaming-related junk. On top of that, I’ve traveled to Magic tournaments and just for gaming purposes, then there’s the snacks and so forth. It’s hard to say how much money I’ve actually spent, but here’s the thing: Doing this right, you can actually use very little money.

This is where the SteamDB comes in. You just make your Steam account public and let it tell you how much the games in your library would cost, how much they are worth (whatever that means) and how much have you paid for each hour of gameplay. Now, I don’t think this calculation is completely accurate, but it is close enough. And according to this website, I have spent 0.05€ or five cents per hour of gameplay.

Huh.

I go to movies a lot. I usually pay 13 euros for a ticket to the local arthouse theater or a little bit more to the local chain (if I buy a bundle of tickets, as I usually do). That’s about 6.5 euros per hour of entertainment or 130 times more than the games. On top of that, I need to sit through about 20 minutes of trailers and ads in the chain theater.

Huh.

And this is even though I apparently have over a hundred games in my Steam library I have never played. These are often various bundles or deep discounts during sales, but I have done that less and less in recent times. This does mean that the 5 cents per hour might even be more than I really spend, because I hardly ever pay a full triple-A price.

The big problem here is that when I like a game, I tend to play it religiously. I want to learn all about it. Even if my reactions speeds have been ravaged by age, I still often 100% the achievements from games I enjoy. Of the games I’ve played, I’ve played more than 90 hours on average.

But yeah, if it ever happens that I need to save money, I can always fall back on my library of unplayed games. While games can be expensive, they are still relatively cheap. I’m not advocating for higher pricing, since I am an outlier. Most people don’t go for every possible little nook of the game to find every Easter egg like I do.

I will still gladly pay 50 euros for a good RPG book (meaning, not D&D) or a boardgame, even if I know I will never get a similar amount of entertainment out of them, but there is also a difference between doing something by myself and doing something socially. The latter does hold value and facilitating that by having those games is also a good idea. However, people tend to stick with the games they know in this regards, so there isn’t necessarily a need to buy more. Also, apparently buying American RPGs has become more complicated with the fear of tariffs looming over independent companies…