I'm about the same now, I used to buy tons of games, now I just play free ones or demo's, I did recently buy Mount and Blade though, played the level capped version(demo/trial) like 50 times until the cap until I finally decided to just buy the damn thing so it would stop locking my character.

Xfire over steam just because you dont need to have games just to add friends and what not. Also you can configue xfire to work with pirated games as well.

yeah I feel you sorrow, I guess I should get an xfire profile set up, I'll post my info in the xfire thread asap.