It's not really worthy of Patient Gamers because I bought it shortly after launch (in an actual box at Best Buy), but the Orange Box was one of the most absurdly good deals I've ever seen. I can't even calculate how many hours I've gotten out of it because it ended up on an old Steam account, but TF2 alone is easily my most played game ever.
this post was submitted on 16 Apr 2024
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Same story, 1400 hours in TF2, and traded enough hats to sell em all for an Index. Great deal!
Okay thats a level of crazy I never thought Id see. Trading in digital items for enough cash to buy a freakin VR set. Madness. Congrats!
Thank you! I got wrongfully terminated in my early 20s and got a bunch of money. Took a year off from working and played like 40-60 hours of TF2 a week hahaha
I didn’t gamble a ton on hats, but I had a “key guy” who would sell me 2.50 keys for 1.20. Probably spent 200 total on keys and one single unusual I pulled sold for 450! A bunch of others sold for 100-200.
I quit like eight years ago with tonnns of crates in my inventory. One day there was a glitch that made all old crates ONLY drop unusual hats. I logged on and had like 40 of those crates, usually selling for .03. They went for like 8.00-12.00 that day… spent all morning at work listing them on the market!
I was really hoping for an Orange Cube around the announcement of Half-Life: Alyx.
I bought this for the 360 and it blew my mind at the time. I had never played a Half Life game before, and that coupled with TF2 led me down the path to PC building for the superior gaming platform. I owe a lot to The Orange Box!
Dang, Valve stealth indoctrinated console gamers to Steam with the Orange Box lol.
I think I got Terraria for like a buck (can’t remember where) and while it isn‘t my favorite game ever, my gf loved it to death and I got dozens of hours out of it (my gf hundreds). It‘s undeniably a great game and the dev is a maniac in terms of long term support.
I got it in exchange for a slice of pepperoni pizza because an old school friend wanted me to join him.
Wow, what a value.
Got GTA 5 for free from a terrible game store no one should use or give money to.
Only take, no give
I bought a big box copy of Quake 2 on eBay many years ago, and was surprised to open it and find not only Q2 inside the box but also a full retail CD of the original Quake. I'd never played the non-shareware version before, so I got two great games that day!
Decades ago I bought a sealed copy of Dragon Warrior off a guy for $30. While exchanging info he said he’d throw in a sealed copy of Dragon Warrior 2 for $20 more. I wasn’t really a collector (I wanted to play them) so I said sure what the hell, nice boxes and inserts are always cool. I never got around to playing them so they sat in a plastic shell.
They’re perfect, they’re unopened, and I still got em.
I don't know if this counts, but it was a trade. I won Tenchu z for the Xbox 360 and I didn't have one (yet), so I traded with some random guy for the following GameCube titles:
- DBZ Budokai
- Viewtiful Joe
- Super Mario Sunshine
- Tales of Symphonia
I bought Factorio and Minecraft in Beta/Alpha, and still use the same keys to this day. So something like 15 years of entertainment.
Those definitely weren't patient gaming buys, but they were good buys.
That said, I'm not a patient gamer because of cost, I'm patient because I don't have much time and don't want to waste it on buggy games. So I wait until bugs to be ironed out and the content to be complete before I buy.
I bought Minecraft a month before Beta came out and man what a deal that was. Only something like $10. I got thousands of hours out of that over the following 5ish years. I don't play it as often any more, but I still think it was worth it
Yup, I don't play anymore, but my kids do. I ended up buying a second license so my two boys could play at the same time with MS accounts, but that original licence has gotten a ton of use.
Years ago, probably.. 2006 or 2007, Microsoft had some kind of deal online where you could get Age of Empires 3 for 99 cents, it wasn't that old at the time. Bought it on my hotmail back in the day, but lost that when Microsoft decided they desperately needed to wipe e-mails for people.
Picked up borderlands 3 for $3 maybe 2 months after release. Bought 2 copies actually one for my brother.
Free, many times…
Final Fantasy 13 disc-only for $0.33 (CAD). It was.3 games for a dollar from the local library when they were clearing out old stock.
I got Copy of Maniac Mansion for NES for free at a second hand games store . According to the store owner the game didn't work and asked me if I wanted it because the box still looks good in a shelf anyway. I put it in my NES and it worked without issues. This was around 10-12 years ago.
Edit: Typo.
Reading the title was enough to start the soundtrack in my head. Good shit.
Skyrim for under 4 euro (iirc) in 2012 in a christmas sale.
Got Bloons Tower Defense 6 for free on mobile (it was a 24 hour promo I believe), and I also got it for $1 on Steam. There's cloud save between both of them and I've maybe put in over 200 hours into that game, what a steal that was.
Couple of decades ago bought a box of new ps2/1 games that had fallen off a truck... got around 300 games for 100$
"Fallen off a truck" niiice.
Back in the day when game bundles werent a super common thing, Humble Bundle was the absolute GOAT when it came to acquiring a massive amount of titles for cheap as dirt. The best part too was you could choose how much of your donation went to different places. I realize its like that now as well but theyre a mere shadow of what they once were. There were so many times I would see 1 or 2 titles I wanted, pick up an entire bundle, then later find 1 or 2 indie diamonds in the pack I wasnt expecting.
Just got the Lego Batman trilogy on Steam for like $5.
Axiom Verge
Yeah, that's decent. Still haven't gotten through it, though.
I think that the price of a game matters a lot less than the gameplay time, in terms of value. You can have enormous differences in the amount of time you play a game, much more than the price typically varies from game to game.
looks at Steam
My top-played games by hours of playtime are:
-
Oxygen Not Included
-
Fallout 4 (the game itself is decent-sized, plus there are expansions, but this is really due heavily to mods)
-
Wargame: Red Dragon
-
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition (also improved by mods)
-
Sid Meier's Civilization V
-
Caves of Qud
-
Fallout 76
-
Rimworld (mods, though honestly the base game is pretty good on its own)
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X3: Reunion
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Mount & Blade: Warband (again, mods add a lot to this)
So those are probably the best deals, as I've gotten the most time out of them.
The bad deals are games that I get and then don't like and so don't play.
I don't see Factorio on this list! Why is the factory not growing?
I played it for a while, but never got that into it. Ditto for Mindcraft and Satisfactory. They're all fine, but..I dunno. Oxygen Not Included just has more stuff going on.
Portal 2, bought it a month ago for 1.-
Ooo nice
Jet Set Radio Future, $2 Xbox disc.
Mine came with my Xbox. That game rocks.
I'm not sure if it was the first time they ever did a free weekend for a game or not, but I played Day of Defeat: source and it never left my library. I think I lost that steam account at some point though.
First one that comes to mind was getting a used PS3 for $75 in late 2017.
I'd become a big Persona fan after liking P3 and with P4 becoming an all-time favorite soon after, but I'm mostly a PC gamer. I don't always pick up current-gen consoles. Eventually I got sick of hearing the heaps of praise for P5 that I figured I'd take the risk on a used PS3 (getting a PS4 was way out of my budget). That's not why it ended up being a great deal, though.
Now that I had a PS3, I figured I'd try all the games I'd been missing out on that didn't have PC ports. I had a remarkably high hit rate with these: Demon's Souls, Dragon Quest Builders, Journey, The Last of Us, NieR, and of course Persona 5 itself. Ended up playing through (almost) all of FromSoft's following games and NieR: Automata because of this pickup. Still never got that PS4, though, so I'm still waiting on Bloodborne and TLOU2.
Picked up Conker's Bad Fur Day on N64 for £20 when I was 12 in 2004. I thought it was a bit pricey for an "old" game at the time. However in the years since it's become a rare game (in addition to being a Rare game) and it's now worth 5-6 times as much 2nd hand.
I got xcom 2(200 ish hours) and slay the Spire (500+ hours) from humble bundle.
GTA V for free.
A customer left a seller review on G2A stating that their provided key didn't work. They posted the key in the review and I claimed it on steam without any issue.
Kind of weird to admit to stealing someone's purchase. Dick move, really, regardless of how dumb that was of the buyer.
They publicly posted a key that "didnt work". How is that stealing? It would be like me leaving a piece of equipment in my front yard with a sign that says "free, doesn't work" but a mechanic picks it up and fixes it in a matter of minutes.
Was it the buyer giving it up to anyone who wanted it or were they under the impression G2A customer support would be refunding it?
Best full-price video game deal in history, in my opinion, was NFL 2K5 selling for $19.99 at launch. I still consider it the best football game ever and I miss it dearly.
It was such a good deal that EA shit themselves, bought the exclusive NFL license, and ruined football gaming for future generations.
Psvr (original) as an amazon prime day deal about baby ear after launch. It was about AUS150, so US100 by today's exchange.