12 years a slave and lvl 7

well.. i heard and used steam before for counter strike 1.3 on friend's computer and PC caffee never seen the need of it to install for myself...

one day ... i see a new XCOM game! since i am such a big fan of original X-com.. i just have to get it.. and guess what.. it's a steam key involved that i need to activate though steam.. soo.. i installed steam and 1.6 years later.. i am close to 3000 games...

As for steamgifts.. i always thought the site is a scam that i only join when my trading card group post a giveaway that's among it's 3000 memebers. And while joining those giveaway.. i spent all my 300 on other random GA and i happen to win a game.. So.. this site is not a scam indeed!

8 month later.. i am now level 10 with close to 7k in CV... 3k for over 1200 game won....

I had to activate a key i got in a magazin on steam

I enjoyed playing Dota 5.84c map on Warcraft 3 , heard that valve was announcing Dota 2 with a whooping 1M prize Invitation,so I joined steam for the hypu :D

im on my mobile so i cant check for sure but i think i joined steam in late 2009
me and my friends wanted to play some game together
and one of them said that the whole battlefield 2 package was on sale. pretty sure it was 5 bucks.
so we played the game for a few days before most of my friends got tired of it and we stopped playing.
but i kept coming baxck buying and playing some games.
then i joined SG about a year ago and since then i got pretty much adicted

I got basement full of Physical Boxes i just dont have more room for games in my house so i decide to join steam 3 years ago and collect more 1000+ games so fars on steam...Why i join steamgifts mainly for trading and share stuff with other community members.

I made my account on curiosity! :3

For me it all started over 8 years ago with Counter Strike: Source, which required steam. Years passed and i didn't really use steam for anything else until i discovered Humble Bundle, which started a game collecting addiction. I searched for more and more free steam games and somehow found steamgifts :D

Well, first of all, congrats on the level!
Why did I join Steam? I can't even remember, it was so long ago (8 years)...
Steamgifts, on the other hand, I joined for one simple reason - free games! However, as many other users have experienced this as well, it turned out that giving away games feels equally awesome as winning, if not more. I don't really have much time for gaming these days, so I try to make up for it by making someone's day with that crazy cat gif in space. :)

Friends is the answer to both questions.

I bought the very first humble indie bundle and it had a Steam key.

I bought Portal 1 at Future Shop (Now called Best Buy) and it forced me to install Steam. For the longest time it was the only Steam game I had. Then World of Goo was added because I got it for a penny.... then The Humble Bundles came out after that.... then the other bundle sites.... now it is so entrenched that I barely use DRM free games anymore.... I have lost my way... blinded by the allure of cheap games.

Steam: I got some hardware that came with game codes that were redeemable on Steam so I joined it.

SG: I had started trading and made a few pretty good trades. I initially joined thinking that I could win games to trade, but I read the FAQ before winning anything and realized that I couldn't do that, so I instead became a normal member of the community. I also largely stopped bothering with trades.

Received Football Manager 2009 as a Christmas gift in 2008. It had a code in it that asked me to activate it on this thing called Steam that I'd never heard of before, so I did!

It was certainly nothing to do with friends as I stayed friendless on Steam for over 4 years :p

Because they were giving away Portal. I knew there was something called "steam" and was made for Half Life 2, but I had no idea how that worked or what really was. So... I made an account, started playing portal and... well, summer came. Woa, sales :P

TLDR
Steam > DoW 2 then sales, ohhhhh!
SG > Free games???? Is that even possible? And also the community forum seemed full of interesting info. And from it discovered great gaming communities on my language and some awesome sg groups.

Before 2012 I had a crappy internet connection, so almost all of my games were physical copies. I knew Steam but I had no use for it, since only one friend had an account and played games I don't enjoy. In 2013 I preordered Grim Dawn and received an early access key, so I created an account, but I started using Steam more towards 2014 summer sale, after which I joined SG. After about a year of lurking and leeching, I started using the forum, participating in some discussions and giving away more games. Now I'm almost level 4 here and level 36 on Steam.
I really wish I had a 12 years old account! and level 7 here :D
Congratulations!

I joined steam becos of Dota2 and noticed SG after spammed by few groups with SG links.
I like both CS and Dota, but prefer Dota if have to choose one
:)

I had a gameless period of about 10 years and when i wanted to pick it up again the world seemed to have changed. Steam? What's that? Soon i found out you can't do without anymore. .

Had to create Steam account to be able to play Magica, when it was released. It was torrented copy of the game, which I'm not proud of. But to get irony I was student of Computer Science, aka. future software developer, at the time. I have played it for the while, never passed chapter 3 due poor optimization and toaster-rig I was using. After that I didn't touch Steam till EA and HB didn't make amazing offer, and got me back to Steam. Eventually I bought Magica, and played it till the end XD But, thankfully to HB I stopped playing torrented games, and to Steam sales I don't mind waiting for games to drop in price for my affordable level.

As for joining SG, I stumbled by accident, while searching for free game giveaway, for certain game that I couldn't wait to play, but didn't want to torrent it. Finally got permanent job position, still some paperwork to be done, and steady income, and hoping to to repay to community with cheap games, and games that I personally enjoyed. XD

To Xeeran: Not interested in the game, just wanted to tell a story, and still have Asylam and City untouched, in my Library, and crying because I cant give it to someone who will enjoy it.

I created my first steam account 12 years ago, because CS ^^
That account got locked when a friend of mine gave me a Half-Life 2 key that was generated.
Foolish mistake and after that I bought Half-Life 2 and Half-Life Blue Shift, which gave me 2 CS keys, so I now have 3 steam accounts.
1 for me and 2 for my kids ^^
my first account got reopened, but when I noticed I had already started using this account as primary, so my oldest son(7y) now have the 12y badge :P I'm still at 11y badge

I'm rather new at SG, I got extra copies of Rocket League when I bought my Steam Link, and wanted to trade it since I already owned it.
Traded it for Broforce which was a game I wanted, then I saw the giveaways section and I started to clean my list of duplicate keys that my friends didn't want.

Got into puzzles, and more puzzles, and trains and puzzles
I think I hit my head somewhere around reaching level 5....

I played Half Life back in the days on Valves old WON servers when they closed them and switched to there new service IE: Steam I just followed suit as I had to. Not looked back since, Steam is damn near perfect imo. Only thing that could make it better is if EA would start selling there shit on it more rather than there retarded and shit Origin.
I am respectable lvl 20 on Steam

Came on Steam 2 years to play Stronghold Kingdoms and exploit the rest free games. When i reached the 50 games i said i would stop at 100. When i reached the 100, i said i would stop at 250. More than 300 now and i doubt i will stop at 350.
The sad part is that the more games i get, the more time i play! It's sad for my social life and eyes but definitely comes cheaper than going out for a coffee.

Another story regarding Steam is the following: i quit LoL because it had become an obsession. I used to play at least 4 ranked games every day in addition with the games i was playing daily on Steam. My resignation from LoL was successful. However, i am now stack with CS:GO...

Help! :D

Decided to start playing the real game (read: skyrim) to support the dev and get the achievement to brag about, instead of playing the pirated version in forever alone mode..

Anyway, finally got decent income that I can spare for getting some game to play and to share..
And finally get the chance to leech more game here.. :p

I actually joined Steam because my friends were doing it and I wanted to join in. I was more into console gaming at the time so I quit and let my steam account collect dust. Then one day I saw a huge sale (last years thanksgiving sale) and it was the first time I'd seen a huge steam sale. Once you see a steam sale, its instant addiction lol. I wasted all my money on games that I could have easily gotten in bundles, but I didn't know that SG, bundlestars, or Humble Bundle existed at the time. Then the Christmas sale came. After consoles started to really get on my nerves I switched to mainly PC gaming. My PC runs horribly though so I still rely on console for AAA games.
I joined SG purely through luck. I stumbled onto it, didnt take it to seriously, found out how awesome this community was when I asked a question and got lots of great answers back, and stuck around ever since.

Well... As i see from my game history i recieved copy of half life 2 from my brother in law. Yes. Not too long after that i've bought mount&blade warband which was also for steam and since that year (2010) i'm a part of steam community. Yes.

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