There's a web tool that estimates the value of your Steam account by looking at all the games you own, but it can't tell you how precisely much you've actually spent on Valve's wallet-plundering platform, microtransactions and all.
That potentially startling number is buried in Steam's help menus.
The relevant Steam help page was pointed out recently on Reddit by user trotski94. You can find it in the Steam client by navigating to: Help > Steam support > My account > Data related to your Steam account > External funds used.
Once we'd been clued in to this feature, we of course all went off and looked at our own totals, some of us with Steam accounts that date back to the debut of the Source engine. Our lifetime Steam receipts ranged from a few hundred dollars to, and this was an outlier, over $16,000 at the top. ("Oh god," said the owner of that account before sharing his number.)
Most of our totals fell somewhere between $2K and $10K, and our $16,000 team leader is a small fry next to the truly big spenders.
A poster in that Reddit thread shared a total over $26,000, and there'll be people who've put far more than that into Counter-Strike skins alone. (Last year, a Counter-Strike streamer estimated that the person who currently has the highest Steam account level spent $500,000 to get there.)
My total is in the thousands, but the number itself doesn't communicate the real shame of it, which is how much of that total was spent opening Rocket League loot boxes before they were retired. If you want that kind of detail, you can get your entire Steam purchase history here: Help > Steam support > My account > Data related to your Steam account > Purchase history.
PC gaming isn't the cheapest activity in the world (especially when you factor in hardware), but despite our appalled reactions to our own spending histories, I don't think any of us are actually regretting our relatively small contributions to Gabe Newell's yacht fund.
Add up any category of non-essential spending over a long enough period of time and you'll always get a number that gives you a jolt. I guarantee I've spent more money on Red Bulls than on videogames in my lifetime.
I think we're just staggered by our own numbers because we're imagining what it would be like to suddenly receive that sum of money, and it would always be good to suddenly have more money. But it's harder to imagine a hypothetical version of yourself who has never spent any money on PC gaming, and there's no reason to believe they'd be more financially secure than you. Maybe they blew that money at the horse track, who knows?
And when you consider your total playtime, games usually turn out to be pretty cost efficient as far as entertainment goes. There have been long periods when I didn't watch anything on Netflix while stupidly paying for a monthly subscription anyway, and I'd really rather not know what that cost-per-minute calculation comes to—I could've spent $20 per Squid Game episode for all I know.
Let us know how you feel about your total Steam spend in the comments.
