There are over 130,000 games on Steam, and most of us own a tiny fraction of them. But according to a viral video doing the rounds online, one lucky player owns every single one.
In the clip, a content creator calls it one of his favourite facts: there’s only one person on Earth who owns every Steam game. He says he looked into it, and that this person’s library now holds around 133,000 titles.
Where it all started
The story goes back to Steam’s 2011 Holiday Sale, which Valve ran alongside an “Epic Holiday Giveaway”. Players took on daily in-game objectives across a range of games, earning free games, coupons or lumps of coal. Every piece of coal left in a player’s account on January 1 counted as an entry into the prize draw.
The prizes were huge. A thousand winners got a Valve Complete Pack, 100 got the top five games on their wishlist, and 50 got their top ten. One grand prize winner received every game in Steam’s catalogue.
That winner is reportedly a user called “cool frog”, whose profile ID is psychomantis. The creator half-remembers the name in his video, saying the guy’s name is “like Cool Frog or something”, and the same name came up on gaming forums when the prize was handed out in early 2012.
Putting the library to good use
The best part, according to the video, is that the winner actually plays the games. The creator claims cool frog has played over 13,000 of them and finished around 700, which suggests the prize is being put to good use.
He also does some quick maths. If the average game costs about $20, a library of 133,000 games would be worth around $2.5 million, which would make cool frog a multi-million dollar winner. He finishes the video with a message for the man himself: “Let me game share. Please.”
A pinch of salt
The giveaway was real, but some details in the video are harder to confirm. Valve has never said publicly whether the grand prize includes games released after 2011, and forum users at the time put the winner’s library at around 2,245 games. Steam’s catalogue has grown enormously since then, so if cool frog’s library hasn’t been kept up to date, the real number could be far lower than 133,000.
Cool frog’s public Steam profile shows more than 5,000 achievements earned, but it doesn’t show how many games he owns, so the exact figure is still a mystery.
Either way, it’s one of the most famous prizes Valve has ever given away, and it’s hard to imagine anything like it happening today. With thousands of new games released every year, owning everything on Steam would be a dream for some players and a backlog nightmare for others.