1 Year, 368 New Games, $0 Spent - How I did it!

June 8th, 2013. My financial situation changed quite a bit so I decided that I was not going to spend any more "real" money on games. At the time, I had 646 games and this was more than enough that I couldn't justify using my bank account or credit cards on buying more.

I decided that from that point forward I would use "free" online money to buy games instead. This was also an experiment to see how viable this method was; after all, what did I have to lose?

The result? I recently cracked the 1000 game mark, obtaining a total of 368 new games in the span of 1 year!

In case anyone was curious, in a similar situation or simply doesn't have the money for game - these are my current methods:

• Cards. Steam Trading cards are a staple in my virtual cashflow. Having a decent amount of games to start off with helped quite a bit in having lots of games to obtain card drops from. Making sure you always have more cards coming in is key, more on that in a bit. Here's an idea of how much cards can earn you.

• TremorGames. Tremor is useful in two ways when going the "online money" route. First and most obviously, the tasks earn a virtual currency that can be used to buy games. Pretty simple, trade some time for some games like any other job. The key to getting the most bang for your buck, however, is taking advantage of their bundle splits. They buy most bundles and allow you to cherry pick the games you want from them. This means you can use it to only grab the 1-2 good games from a bundle or to grab only the games that have cards! Keeping a constant influx of card dropping games into your library helps a ton. Note: Some users have noted that depending on your country, you may have more or less offers available.

• Playfire Rewards. It doesn't get much easier than this. Play your games, get GMG credit to buy more games!

• FreeMyApps. So easy and simple, it's hard to believe it works. Download free apps to your phone and get rewarded with Amazon gift cards. A $5 card is earned so fast that I always have more Amazon credit than I know what to do with. Note: Some users have noted that depending on your country, you may have more or less offers available.

• Apptrailers. Similar to FreeMyApps, except here you watch videos on your phone. Easy to just glance over, hit a video and look away - repeat as much as you'd like. Pays in Paypal which is very useful for buying bundles. Note: Some users have noted that depending on your country, you may have more or less offers available.

• Trading. Trading with other users can really help stretch that dollar. Use the money from card sales to buy TF2 keys instead of games on Steam. $10 games can often be obtained for 3 Keys, which works out to about $7 when buying from the Steam Market. As well, your spare bundle keys can often be traded for Trading Cards, further boosting your total card sale profits.

• Patience. Never buy anything that isn't 75% off or more. Skip the BTAs in bundles, the BTA games will show up in the $1 tier of some other bundle down the road. Pinch every penny, when earning them comes much slower you need to really make every dollar count :)

And that's about it. I want to stress as well that I spend about 5-10 minutes a day on the things listed above (besides Playfire, which I don't count as "work"), this isn't a full time job by any means :) Do note, some users have noted that depending on your country, you may have more or less offers available from a few of these services. These are just the methods that worked for me, your mileage may vary. Thanks for reading (if you bothered to do so) and I hope I might have helped at least one of you get some new games! As one last thing, here is a Wayback Screenshot of my account 1 year ago and a link to my profile as it appears now!

https://web.archive.org/web/20130311060816/http://steamcommunity.com/id/ageofarmageddon

http://steamcommunity.com/id/ageofarmageddon/

Feel free to ask any questions below! I'm happy to answer them :)