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.

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

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!

Decades ago I bought a sealed copy of Dragon Warrior off a guy for $30. While exchanging info he said he’d throw in a sealed copy of Dragon Warrior 2 for $20 more. I wasn’t really a collector (I wanted to play them) so I said sure what the hell, nice boxes and inserts are always cool. I never got around to playing them so they sat in a plastic shell.

They’re perfect, they’re unopened, and I still got em.

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.

I don't know if this counts, but it was a trade. I won Tenchu z for the Xbox 360 and I didn't have one (yet), so I traded with some random guy for the following GameCube titles:

• DBZ Budokai
• Viewtiful Joe
• Super Mario Sunshine
• Tales of Symphonia

Years ago, probably.. 2006 or 2007, Microsoft had some kind of deal online where you could get Age of Empires 3 for 99 cents, it wasn't that old at the time. Bought it on my hotmail back in the day, but lost that when Microsoft decided they desperately needed to wipe e-mails for people.

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

Free, many times…

I got Copy of Maniac Mansion for NES for free at a second hand games store . According to the store owner the game didn't work and asked me if I wanted it because the box still looks good in a shelf anyway. I put it in my NES and it worked without issues. This was around 10-12 years ago.

Edit: Typo.

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

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.

Couple of decades ago bought a box of new ps2/1 games that had fallen off a truck... got around 300 games for 100$

Final Fantasy 13 disc-only for $0.33 (CAD). It was.3 games for a dollar from the local library when they were clearing out old stock.

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

Jet Set Radio Future, $2 Xbox disc.

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.

Just got the Lego Batman trilogy on Steam for like $5.

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.

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.

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

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.

Axiom Verge

Yeah, that's decent. Still haven't gotten through it, though.

I think that the price of a game matters a lot less than the gameplay time, in terms of value. You can have enormous differences in the amount of time you play a game, much more than the price typically varies from game to game.

looks at Steam

My top-played games by hours of playtime are:

1. Oxygen Not Included

2. Fallout 4 (the game itself is decent-sized, plus there are expansions, but this is really due heavily to mods)

3. Wargame: Red Dragon

4. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim Special Edition (also improved by mods)

5. Sid Meier's Civilization V

6. Caves of Qud

7. Fallout 76

8. Rimworld (mods, though honestly the base game is pretty good on its own)

9. X3: Reunion

10. Mount & Blade: Warband (again, mods add a lot to this)

So those are probably the best deals, as I've gotten the most time out of them.

The bad deals are games that I get and then don't like and so don't play.

Psvr (original) as an amazon prime day deal about baby ear after launch. It was about AUS150, so US100 by today's exchange.

Best full-price video game deal in history, in my opinion, was NFL 2K5 selling for $19.99 at launch. I still consider it the best football game ever and I miss it dearly.

It was such a good deal that EA shit themselves, bought the exclusive NFL license, and ruined football gaming for future generations.

GTA V for free.

A customer left a seller review on G2A stating that their provided key didn't work. They posted the key in the review and I claimed it on steam without any issue.