Have you ever wondered how much money you’ve truly spent on Steam over the years? Whether it’s during massive sales, impulsive DLC buys, or slowly building your game library one title at a time, those purchases add up — and Valve quietly keeps track of it all.
First spotted by Reddit user trotski94, there’s a little-known Steam support page that reveals the total amount of real money you’ve ever spent through your Steam account. The feature isn’t advertised on the main dashboard and is buried deep within Steam’s support site, but it offers an unfiltered glimpse into your spending history since the day you created your account.
You can access it through the Steam client by going to: Help > Steam Support > My Account > Data Related to Your Steam Account > External Funds Used.
A prompt will ask you to login to your account once again after which you’ll see three specific categories:
TotalSpend – The total amount of money you’ve added and used on your Steam account since its creation.
OldSpend – Amount spent before April 17, 2015, when Valve changed how it categorized spending.
PWSpend – Amount spent through Perfect World, Steam’s Chinese publishing partner (this usually applies to users in China).
This figure includes all purchases made directly through Steam — including games, DLCs, in-game currency, software, hardware, and items from the Community Market. It does not include gift purchases made for others or Steam keys bought from third-party sellers.
Here’s a total of how much I have spent on Steam over the yearsKunal Khullar / Digital Trends
The existence of this tool has been around for years but has remained under the radar, often shared quietly in Reddit threads or niche gaming communities. Now, with more attention being brought to it, users are finding themselves both amused and horrified by the totals they see. Some users report lifetime spends of several thousand dollars — not uncommon for longtime users who’ve been around since the early 2000s.
While the feature doesn’t offer spending trends or itemized breakdowns, it’s a sobering reality check for those who assumed a few sale purchases here and there wouldn’t make much of a dent. As digital libraries grow and subscription fatigue sets in, Valve’s hidden page is a blunt reminder: it all adds up. If you find yourself spending a lot on games, consider checking out how Steam bundles can help you save a ton over time.
Sony & Hisense are pioneering RGB LED tech to rival OLED displays.
RGB LEDs improve color accuracy at wider angles and brightness without burn-in risk.
RGB LEDs reduce bloom and offer large panels at cheaper prices than OLEDs.
If you ask most AV enthusiasts what the best display technology is right now, they’d probably respond with some variant of OLED panel. However, one of the best TV makers in the world has decided that OLED is not the way forward, and instead brings us RGB LED technology.
In mid-March of 2025, Sony unveiled its RGB LED technology. It’s not the only company pushing this OLED alternative, with Hisense aiming to launch RGB mini- and micro-LED TVs in 2025. So why are these companies bucking the OLED trend?
Sony’s RGB Backlight Tech Explained
Just in case you need a refresher, the main difference between OLED and LCD panels is that OLEDs are emissive. In other words, each OLED pixel emits its own light. This means that it can switch itself off and offer perfect black levels, among a few other advantages. LCDs need a “backlight” and one of the primary ways LCDs have improved over the years has been about backlight innovations as much as improvements to the liquid crystals.
Early LCDs used a simple CCFL (Cold Cathode Fluorescent Lamp) backlight with an internal reflector to spread the light around. As you might imagine, this was awful, and I still remember the cold and hot spots on my first LCD monitor being so bad that I thought there was something wrong with it.
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Since then, LCDs have been upgraded with LED backlights, which were placed all around the edges of the screen, so that it was far more evenly lit. Then the backlights were also added directly behind the screen, which allowed for neat tricks like local dimming. Now miniLED screens put hundreds or thousands of LED lights behind the screen, allowing for very precise local dimming, which improved contrast and black levels immensely.
SONY
However, so far all of these LED backlight solutions have used a white (or blue) LED source. RGB LEDs replace this white LED with an RGB LED that can be any color. This means that the LED behind a given set of pixels is being driven with the same color light as the pixel is meant to produce and removes the need for color filters.
SONY
If you take the LCD layer off completely, then an RGB miniLED backlight would look like a low-res version of the original image. With enough LEDs, the image is still recognizable!
The Sony display demoed by the company promises 99% of the DCI-P3 color spectrum, and 90% of the next-gen BT.2020 spectrum. Making these displays some of the most color-accurate screens money can buy. With fewer layers of stuff in the display stack, and much more pure color to boot, the image looks vibrant, accurate, and maintains its color purity from a wider set of angles.
Take this into account the next time you buy a monitor, TV, or printer.
More Brightness, No Burn In
The less stuff you have between the light source and the surface of the screen, the brighter the image can be. Hisense’s RGB LED TVs are slated for 2025 promise a peak brightness of 10,000 nits! That is way beyond the brightest OLED panels, even LG’s tandem OLED that was demonstrated in January 2025, which maxes out at 4,000 nits.
While LCDs can have image retention, they are far, far less prone to it than OLEDs, and the brighter you run an OLED, the greater the chances of permanent image retention or “burn-in”. So RGB LEDs will absolutely smoke OLEDs when it comes to brightness, with virtually none of the risk.
One of the big issues with LED LCDs, even the latest miniLEDs, is “bloom”. This is when light from the backlight in the bright part of an image spills over into the dark parts. Even on LCDs with thousands of dimming zones, you can see this when there’s something very bright next to something very dark.
LG
For example, my iPad Pro has a mini-LED screen, and if the brightness is turned up you can see bloom around white text on a black background, such as with subtitles or the end-credits of a movie. In content, you’d see this with laser blasts in space, or a big spotlight in the night sky.
RGB LEDs significantly reduce bloom thanks to the precise control of the brightness and color of each RGB backlight element. So you get contrast levels closer to that of an OLED, but you still get the brightness and color purity advantages.
Perhaps the biggest deal of all is price. While I expect Sony’s Bravia 10s to have a price that will make your eyes water even more than the nits rating, the fact is that RGB LED tech will be cheaper than OLEDs, especially as you scale up to larger panel sizes. While the price of smaller OLEDs (e.g. 55-inches or smaller) has come down significantly, making bigger OLEDs is hard, and when you get to around 100-inches prices go practically vertical.
So don’t be surprised if TVs larger than 100 inches are dominated by RBG LED technology in the future, because getting 90% of what OLED offers at a much lower price will likely be too hard to resist.
OLED Still Has Tricks up Its Sleeve
Justin Duino / How-To Geek
With all that said, it’s not like OLED technology will stand still or is in major trouble. OLED’s perfect black levels, lack of bloom, and contrast levels are still better and will likely always be better. So those who are absolute sticklers for those elements of image quality will still buy them. Manufacturers are working on the issue of burn in and making it less of a problem with each new generation of screen.
LG B4 OLED
$1000 $1700 Save
$700
OLED still has faster pixel response rates too, and lower latency (under the right circumstances), so gamers are also another audience who’ll likely want OLED technology to stick around. QD-OLEDs are upping the game when it comes to color vibrancy and gamut as well.
Ultimately, having different display technologies duke it out for supremacy is good for you and me, because it means better TVs and monitors at lower prices.
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