Picked up Conker’s Bad Fur Day on N64 for £20 when I was 12 in 2004. I thought it was a bit pricey for an “old” game at the time. However in the years since it’s become a rare game (in addition to being a Rare game) and it’s now worth 5-6 times as much 2nd hand.

Portal 2, bought it a month ago for 1.-

Back in the day when game bundles werent a super common thing, Humble Bundle was the absolute GOAT when it came to acquiring a massive amount of titles for cheap as dirt. The best part too was you could choose how much of your donation went to different places. I realize its like that now as well but theyre a mere shadow of what they once were. There were so many times I would see 1 or 2 titles I wanted, pick up an entire bundle, then later find 1 or 2 indie diamonds in the pack I wasnt expecting.

I’m not sure if it was the first time they ever did a free weekend for a game or not, but I played Day of Defeat: source and it never left my library. I think I lost that steam account at some point though.

I bought Factorio and Minecraft in Beta/Alpha, and still use the same keys to this day. So something like 15 years of entertainment.

Those definitely weren’t patient gaming buys, but they were good buys.

That said, I’m not a patient gamer because of cost, I’m patient because I don’t have much time and don’t want to waste it on buggy games. So I wait until bugs to be ironed out and the content to be complete before I buy.

Jet Set Radio Future, $2 Xbox disc.

First one that comes to mind was getting a used PS3 for $75 in late 2017.

I’d become a big Persona fan after liking P3 and with P4 becoming an all-time favorite soon after, but I’m mostly a PC gamer. I don’t always pick up current-gen consoles. Eventually I got sick of hearing the heaps of praise for P5 that I figured I’d take the risk on a used PS3 (getting a PS4 was way out of my budget). That’s not why it ended up being a great deal, though.

Now that I had a PS3, I figured I’d try all the games I’d been missing out on that didn’t have PC ports. I had a remarkably high hit rate with these: Demon’s Souls, Dragon Quest Builders, Journey, The Last of Us, NieR, and of course Persona 5 itself. Ended up playing through (almost) all of FromSoft’s following games and NieR: Automata because of this pickup. Still never got that PS4, though, so I’m still waiting on Bloodborne and TLOU2.

I got xcom 2(200 ish hours) and slay the Spire (500+ hours) from humble bundle.

I bought a big box copy of Quake 2 on eBay many years ago, and was surprised to open it and find not only Q2 inside the box but also a full retail CD of the original Quake. I’d never played the non-shareware version before, so I got two great games that day!

Skyrim for under 4 euro (iirc) in 2012 in a christmas sale.

Picked up borderlands 3 for $3 maybe 2 months after release. Bought 2 copies actually one for my brother.

It’s not really worthy of Patient Gamers because I bought it shortly after launch (in an actual box at Best Buy), but the Orange Box was one of the most absurdly good deals I’ve ever seen. I can’t even calculate how many hours I’ve gotten out of it because it ended up on an old Steam account, but TF2 alone is easily my most played game ever.

Got Bloons Tower Defense 6 for free on mobile (it was a 24 hour promo I believe), and I also got it for $1 on Steam. There’s cloud save between both of them and I’ve maybe put in over 200 hours into that game, what a steal that was.

I think I got Terraria for like a buck (can’t remember where) and while it isn‘t my favorite game ever, my gf loved it to death and I got dozens of hours out of it (my gf hundreds). It‘s undeniably a great game and the dev is a maniac in terms of long term support.

Got GTA 5 for free from a terrible game store no one should use or give money to.

Only take, no give