opinion I have a confession to make: Like most outwardly normal middle class Australians, I have a dirty little secret that I can't seem to expunge, despite my best intentions and numerous attempts at breaking its filthy addictive hold.
It's a hidden problem which I have only admitted to my closest friends and family, something which keeps me up at night, moaning about 'my precious', wondering whether I will ever get free of its vice-like grip, or whether I will remain slave to its dominating power for ever, locked in thrall and unable to escape.
Yes, it's true. I am absolutely addicted to cruising Valve's Steam service looking for bargains on games which I will probably never have enough time to play.
As I'm sure many of you fellow addicts out there well know, Steam is a digital platform which lets you download video games to play on your computer. But it's not just any digital platform. In fact, it is nothing less than a massive repository of almost every sort of PC video game that has ever been created, and publisher Valve is constantly adding both new and old titles to its library.
There are two reasons the service is so addictive.
Firstly, it appeals to the pack rat in me. Valve has an immense back catalogue of games listed in Steam '” if you loved a PC game in your childhood, odds are the company has already added it to its list, or is talking with the game's publisher to do so. And many of these titles regularly go on sale, especially around Christmas time, when, like a cackling evil Santa Claus, Valve conducts a massive series of sales designed to bankrupt every PC gamer and fill its pockets with fat stacks of diamond-encrusted thousand dollar bills.
