I can't wait for full album release with bangers like Leave them Jbond, leave them!

I actually put like 10 seconds extra and reused the previous part since the song would be otherwise abruptly cut at 2:00 mark, damn AI!

First 100 cans come with unique fortix sticker.

Damn, forcing me to answer honestly to so many questions, but promise is a promise, alright!

Why have you collected 10K games? Describe the satisfaction/happiness it gives you.

Actually I wouldn't say I actively collected them, they just kinda amassed on their own whether due to bundles, giveaways, or, very rarely, single purchases. I've never bought a game purely to have it, but indeed, there is a story to tell here, since I never had many games as a kid, barely a few single titles, and I've always dreamed of having a library full of things to play. I think I reached that goal around 1000-2000 games owned, at that point I realized I'll never finish/play them all, since that point onwards it was more the joy of creating and winning giveaways and buying bundles where usually only one or two games sparked my interest, other just got in along the way, since I'm the guy who has the "activate everything" mindset, where the giveaways are always made out of dupes. I bought a lot of duplicated bundles in the past for giveaways though as well.

I'd say that my happiness comes from the fact of having my childish dream fullified, regardless how stupid or irrational it is.

What tips/advice do you have for the countless prospective Mega collectors of SG?

Drop the game you're not going to win - that'd be my advice. Collecting stuff is cool, but everybody can simply "buy a game" - I made myself a promise back in 2015 that I'm not going to spend a single cent of real money on Steam again, and to maybe your surprise, I actually hold strong with that stance today in 2024, a decade later. It pretty much means I never load Steam wallet with real money, I also never buy single games from other third-party stores like indie gala or humble bundle. Only bundles are allowed for buying (and with a significant discount, minimum of 80%+), and only Steam wallet money I got from trading, selling cards and likewise, is allowed for Steam purchases. My last PayPal transfer of real money into Steam was back in 2015. If you analyze the games I own, I don't think you'll find a lot of those that were never bundled, maybe a few titles tops.

Do you value collection of games to reach a certain number over playing of games one collects/buys?

No, I don't even classify myself as a collector like stated above. I kinda agreed with the reality that I won't be able to play/finish even majority of games I own, but it doesn't mean that I'm not trying - playing games still gives me satisfaction and happiness. I don't have much spare time nowadays but finishing new titles nonetheless, on my private list of things, I have right now 150 things in the backlog (stuff that I actually want to play), around 50 more games in the "I'd play it if it had Steam cloud support", 36 in "perhaps consider for finishing", 56 in "dropped and not considering going back to it" and finally 210 in "finished with a final save in steam cloud" and 32 in "finished but without steam cloud support". So overall I have more finished games than backlogged ones, that's something I'm semi-proud of, but those are rookie numbers for people that aim to e.g. have their whole library played, I already realized I'll never get to that point, not even sure about those 150 games waiting for me.

In short, I don't believe buying games for the sake of buying them alone is a good thing, but it doesn't mean I didn't do it in the past myself, people and their priorities change, especially once they start third decade of their life, like me.

What is your opinion on prioritising idling of good games rather than having the intention of playing them first?

I'm doing it myself. I find it completely and utterly irrational to not idle some good games you want to play yourself. I rarely switch to newly obtained games, this doesn't mean I'm not going to play them though. Idling the game as fast as possible doesn't only give you card drops that you're eligible for, that is free money - it also makes you eligible to receive booster packs in the future, something you will NOT get if you don't fully idle the game first. My ASF is set to idle everything as soon as possible, even the games I'm actually playing right now - simply because it does not hurt me and increases my chances for getting more free money in the future, even if we're talking cents of "profitz".

Do you equate IRL collection hobbies(unique coins, pencils, comics) with collecting digital games or even trading cards in a 3rd party site(steam, gog, epic)?

It depends on the person, I don't collect other stuff so it's hard for me to put equality sign between both activities, to be honest I don't even collect Steam games, at least in my view, but if I had to answer this I'd say that yes, I wouldn't glorify physical assets purely because they're physical, it doesn't however mean that every virtual asset makes sense, for example I have very negative opinion about various NFTs that are usually used to scam foolish people out of their money, with zero or next to zero real value provided.

What is your opinion on some SG users using tools to enter for GAs?

It's against the rules and they should be banned. Almost a decade ago I voluntarily signed up for helping to code SG, for free, but cg never really cared to even get back to me, let alone agree to that. Coding a solution that would easily and without false positives catch such auto-joiners is easy as cake, not to mention majority of features people ask for are, and I'm stating that as ASF creator, software developer with 15+ years of experience, currently employed by one of the biggest Norwegian telecoms, so I might know a thing or two about that. On the other hand, instead of putting hours of free work into SG, I put that effort elsewhere, and I'm somehow glad cg turned down my offer, since otherwise I'd never make awesome things like ASF happen, sadly SG lost in that process a lot I'd say.

What advice do you have for gamers with less than or around a) 500 games b) 2000 games ?

No specific advice, if you want to collect games on massive scale, bundles are probably the most efficient way to do it. Back in my "days", before Steam learning, you could simply buy some crap off DIG or IndieGala group buy for a dollar or two and get, sometimes even 10+ games at once, so a guy who had 1000 games or even more, could actually spend less money than somebody with 50 games but all bought for full price, especially if you account in giveaways, trading groups and alike. In fact, I think you'd be surprised how little I spent on Steam, zero if you account for real money in the store, and if you account for bundles, I think it'd be less than $2000 for whole this decade, $100-200 yearly sounds about right. Today I dropped it even further, I don't buy anything other than HB choice, and only if they give a coupon along the way, all my purchases from the USD -> EUR converstion were around 4.50 EUR for me, so much less than that $100 yearly.

So how do I own so many games then? Contrary to first expectation, people rarely just give me something for free. Majority comes from my Touhou Giveaways and BundleQuest SG group times, good times by the way, where I've participated with other group members and had a lot of fun exchanging my leftovers for games I wanted to play, or at least didn't own. A big share also comes from trading and selling trading cards, probably nobody will believe me but at some point I sold more than 13k trading cards in order to buy a Steam deck, and succeeded in doing so, I got my Steam deck completely for free from selling trading cards alone, and yes, it took me WEEKS to put it all on the market.

I told my group members that as soon as there will be animated Cirno avatar in the Steam points shop, I'll change to it. And to my surprise, it took a while, but it finally happened - and I liked it, so why not.

Avatars also grow on people, considering I've just last year started third decade of my life, and the previous avatar was with me for the previous one, it made sense to put some fresh air onto my online activities, especially considering this Cirno looks far more badass, which better represents the person I've become over that time.

It's only avatar bro, why you heff to be mad

Oh my gosh, how is this song so ridiculously good?!?

I'm surprised myself how good results AI can make, and I'm saying that as somebody who knows a thing or two about programming and computers. I don't know what to expect, but I wouldn't be so sure that I don't start a real Archi's Steam Corn Farm at some point in the future.

As for my question, I'll keep it on topic, who's your favorite Touhou character?

I don't think I ever told this anyone, but before Dota 2 I played a game that probably nobody recognizes, called Heroes of Newerth, that was back in 2010. I went so deep that I've became official moderator, back there called "game master" who was responsible for suspending people for griefing in games and stuff like that. Almost whole staff of game masters back then had nicknames and avatars from Touhou Project, I had no frickin clue what Touhou Project was, but I looked it up, and felt in love with the music - not the original beep boops from ZUN, but custom songs from big bands like Demetori, A-One, GET IN THE RING and alike. For people that don't have a clue about that, songs like this one or that one.

I asked what touhou character is left for me to take, they said since I'm new but so eager to discover Cirno would be best, so I followed up on that. You can thank that one person who went by "Suwako Moriya" nickname by then, I have no clue who they were, I had them on Steam for a while but it seems they're not using the platform anymore, or changed nickname, at least I can't find them on my friends list anymore.

I never liked the games though, feel free to roast me if you have to for that. But I loved some fan games created. Even played one on Steam.

Haven't seen you around here in the forum in a while, why? (my memory can be terrible sometimes so if it was some drama feel free to skip) And what brings you back to these parts? Planning to stay?

I got into argument with staff here, with one mod that apparently couldn't think straight, and when prompted that they're acting irrational and maybe should consult stuff with other mods and cg first, of course I got suspended for a week or two, I even mentioned it in the song.

The story ended in a way that of course nobody cared and didn't have balls to unsuspend me first. Long after my suspension lasted cg, of course, made update to the rules and admitted the mod acted wrong and I was right, nobody apologized to me though, nobody cared much, and the response was more like a response to the ticket I made rather than some active resolution which should come without me bringing this up.

I lost my willings to contribute in any way to SG since then, I've stopped doing events as part of Touhou Giveaways, I've stopped visiting forums, I closed all my threads, including ASF one, where people could get support on same rules like on Steam and GitHub. All group tasks I've delegated to other staff members, while my focus shifted entirely off SG, since it effectively killed any remaining motivation for me to make this website a better place.

That still stands today, nothing much changed, I just felt like creating the first invite-only gib since years. I do not really plan to participate much since I'm persona non grata here apparently, where common courtesy doesn't apply, and the staff is only looking for a reason to suspend me again since I dared to start a crusade against brainwashed mod. Not like I care much either, it seems this place only got worse since I left, to no surprise of mine, since it takes some extra level of stupidity to act against the people that actually care about this place.

I'll likely close this thread in a few days and come back around 2029, if the server is still up, lol.

I've had this doubt in my mind since Valve announced they were dropping W7 last year, how possible would it be for someone to develop a minimalist (as in just downloading, installing/uninstalling, and launching games) Steam client replacement for old versions of Windows in order to run those old games that refuse to run properly on modern OS's? And would that break Steam's rules?

Possible, but would require extraordinary effort and might be against Steam ToS. Best part is you could quite easily implement ASF plugin that enhances ASF with "games downloading" capability, that's the easy part, the harder part would be to re-implement Steamworks API, the one that games use in order to communicate with Steam client, in order for games to work properly: unlock achievements and stuff like that, and start in the first place of course.

I'm not using Windows myself since years, Steam is very well supported on Linux with majority of games running excellent on that platform through Proton, as Steam deck showed us already in the past. I continue to recommend people with old hardware to simply consider jumping to Linux which not only receives security and other updates, but also is supported by Steam as it is. I'll never understand people that apparently care enough to yell how not satisfied they are and how Valve will now go bankrupt for not supporting 0.5% of its userbase, but at the same time are stubborn enough to not even consider making their lifes better for them. Windows is shit, it only gets worse with every update, and I have better use of my hardware than paying in electricity, CPU and RAM purely to put my data patterns on Microsoft servers. But that's me, I'm the guy who says "this is shit and I'm not going to participate", like with SG, and I actually move on with my decisions, rather than complaining how unfair the world is. Don't like something - don't use it, and don't support companies you don't like with your money. Sadly people are always bunch of hypocrites, so nothing is going to change in this regard.