Last October I did something I probably should have done years ago. I opened a spreadsheet and started logging every game purchase. The price I paid, the store I bought it from, and what I would have paid if I had just bought it from Steam without thinking.
Six months later I have the numbers and they are not pretty. In the first two months, before I started comparing prices, I spent £312 on games. In the four months after, buying the same number of games, I spent £187. That is £125 I did not need to spend and would not have noticed spending if I had not started writing it down.
Here is what I learned.
The Steam default is expensive
I am not saying Steam is a rip off. I am saying that buying every game from Steam at whatever price it shows you is a choice, and it is usually not the cheapest one.
Steam is brilliant for a lot of things. The library management, the community features, the workshop, the review system. As a platform it is hard to beat. But as a shop it is competing with dozens of other stores that sell the exact same product, often for less.
Take Resident Evil Requiem as an example. Steam price at launch was £49.99. I found the same Steam key at an authorized retailer for £31. That is a £19 difference on a single game. The key activates on Steam. The game shows up in my library. Updates work the same. There is literally no difference except the number on my bank statement.
I used to think deals like that were sketchy. They are not. These are authorized retailers who get keys directly from publishers. The same way you can buy a Sony TV from Currys or John Lewis instead of the Sony store and pay a different price for the same product.
What actually changed my spending
The single biggest change was just checking a price comparison site before every purchase. That is it. No coupons, no loyalty programs, no waiting for sales. Just a quick search to see what the same game costs across different stores.
There are a few sites that do this but the process is the same everywhere. You type in the game name, it shows you prices from official stores and authorized key retailers side by side, sorted from cheapest to most expensive. The whole thing takes about ten seconds.
I started using PC game deals aggregators and the savings were immediate. Not because I was finding obscure discounts or gaming the system. Just because different stores charge different prices and nobody tells you that unless you go looking.
The numbers month by month
October: £168. Four games, all from Steam, no price checking. This was my baseline month.
November: £144. Three games from Steam, one from a comparison search. I saved about £12 on that one game.
December: £52. Two games. Steam Winter Sale helped, but I also checked third party prices against the sale prices and found one cheaper elsewhere. Even during a Steam sale you can sometimes beat it.
January: £48. Two games, both from authorized retailers found through comparison. Neither was on sale anywhere. Just regular price differences between stores.
February: £41. Two games. One was a day one purchase where I saved £16 by not buying from the default store. The other was an older title I picked up for about half the Steam price.
March: £46. Three games. One was Crimson Desert at launch, which I got for about £15 less than Steam by buying a key from an authorized store. Another was Resident Evil Requiem which had dropped even further since launch. I managed to buy Resident Evil Requiem for under £25, compared to £49.99 on Steam. Same key, same game.
Total before comparing: £312 in two months. Total after comparing: £187 in four months, buying more games. If I project the before spending over six months it would have been around £936. I spent £499.
Things I stopped doing
I stopped buying games on impulse from Steam’s front page. Not because I have more willpower now, but because adding a ten second price check creates just enough friction to make me think about whether I actually want the game or just want the dopamine hit of clicking buy.
I stopped waiting for Steam sales as my only strategy for saving money. Sales are great but they happen on Valve’s schedule, not mine. Third party retailers have their own promotions running constantly and sometimes the regular price at one store is lower than the sale price at another.
I stopped assuming that the first price I see is the right price. This sounds obvious when you say it out loud but it is genuinely how most people buy games. You go to Steam, you see a number, you pay it. The same way people used to just walk into the nearest travel agent and book whatever holiday they were offered.
Things I started doing
I check prices before every purchase. Every single one. It takes ten seconds and saves an average of about £8 per game based on my tracking. On a big release the saving is more like £12 to £18.
I look at price history before buying. Some comparison sites show you what a game has cost over the past year. This tells you whether a current discount is genuinely good or just the normal price with a percentage slapped on it. Useful for older games especially.
I buy keys from authorized retailers without guilt. It took me a while to get comfortable with this but once you understand that these are legitimate businesses selling publisher authorized keys, the anxiety goes away. The game ends up in your Steam library either way.
The honest truth
I am not going to pretend this changed my life. We are talking about saving maybe £40 to £50 a month on a hobby, not paying off a mortgage. But it is free money in the sense that I get the exact same games for less effort than it takes to make a cup of tea.
The bigger realization was how much I was spending on autopilot. Not because games are expensive but because buying without checking is a habit, and habits are hard to notice until you start measuring them. Six months of spreadsheet data made it impossible to ignore.
If you buy more than a few games a year it is worth spending ten seconds checking prices before you click buy. That is genuinely the entire takeaway here. Ten seconds. Every time.
