Hey you. Yes you. You saw the sales. You were tempted, but you stayed strong. Your wallet remained firmly wedged in your pants and you moved on with your life like a healthy person. Now prepare to be tempted all over again.
Steam is a cruel beast. For its final day of sales here’s what’s happening: it’s taking all the most popular sales from previous days and bringing them back. Tripling, nay quadrupling the temptation to buy all these games.
It’s just flat out sucky/awesome. Dark Souls for $9.99, Tomb Raider for $9.99, The Stanley Parable for $8.99. It all sucks. All of it.
Okay, consider this my last post about the Steam Sales. I fully recognise that I am part of the problem.
Comments
45 responses to “Steam Brings Back The Big Guns For The Last Day Of The Sale”
So much wasted government welfare payments..
Servers seem to be struggling. Can’t get to store.steampowered.com
Getting DDoS’d by DerpTrolling because they think they’re “kewl”
This year I managed to control myself, all up I got 5 games (I think). From Steam I only got Arma II for $2.99. From Green Man Gaming, Grid 2 ($10), Mortal Kombat Komplete ($6). From Get Games, The Bureua XCom ($7.50) and Shadow Warrior ($7.50). From Oz Gameshop AC4 for $35 and loving it.
Some how I fit a week and a half long road trip to Melbourne. Man I love that city.
I win. I managed to hold myself back and bought zero games (from Steam). It’s a good thing too since close to half of the games on my steam library is completely unplayed and a good 75% is unfinished.
Aciv for what console? How did you get it so cheap??
AC4 for PC.
Its that cheap because Oz Gameshop sell the email code version for $40 normally, plus I got a 10% off voucher. http://www.ozgameshop.com/pc-games/assassins-creed-iv-4-black-flag-code-by-email-game-pc
Steam is great, it has essentially been paying me to play my games because i just sold all of my trading cards and made enough to purchase 2 more games \o/
store.steampowered.com webpage seems to be down, probably the universe telling me to stop buying games I’m never going to have time to play.
I didn’t purchase anything at all during this sale. What is wrong with me.
Yeah I’m the same, I think I have bought/played just about all the triple A games that they put in each sale, whether it be on pc or console.
The next big sale I might drop some cash as hopefully all these TBA games will have been released by then.
I bought a few super low price things that have been sitting on my wishlist but every day was pretty much “I have this already.” for the things I’d have wanted to buy.
I’m kinda harping on about it but I think I’ve noticed something interesting with the bouncy price of bioshock infinite. It seems to be $100 base price when it was a daily sale but not when it was a flash or voted sale.
@markserrels, any chance of some kind of article investigating how steam sale prices are set? It’s odd enough to make me suspect it might be a bad system rather than flat out pricegouging. Eg: perhaps publishers have to input a base price for sales rather than just approving a discount level on whatever the base price is at the moment. That would make me think they’re just slack at keeping information in synch rather than actively malicious.
Something I found was weird – Alice: Madness Returns was a daily sale at one point, 75% off which brought it down to $12.50. I set my browser to jump to the store page via the US and it had a different percentage off, but as the game was only USD$20 to begin with, it was still cheaper.
So either way – either by initial price or discount – we’re getting screwed. Thanks, EA!
The worst part is that there’s every chance that we’re being screwed by negligence rather than intent, I’d lay odds that a game that old was discounted in America and they just plain forgot that they gave us a different price and never updated it. Modern Warfare 2 is the ideal example of this, $20 in the US, still $90 here and it’s almost certainly because they set the different regional price and immediately forgot it existed.
In a way I feel that’s even worse, active exploitation is bad enough but just being forgotten is more of an insult
Here is a “leaked” email from a developer regarding the sale. This was leaked over 2 months ago and has predicted everything correctly. There is a section that goes into the pricing for Steam sales.
http://i.imgur.com/BazPkxO.png
Note though that this was an indie developer. I imagine for bigger companies it would go through the publisher.
And the source: http://www.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/1ps7si/steam_holiday_sale_start_date_leaked/
That’s a rather optimistic view.
This leaked email was pretty accurate regarding these holiday sales. http://i1-news.softpedia-static.com/images/news-700/Steam-Autumn-and-Winter-Holiday-Sales-2013-Get-Leaked-Start-Dates.png?1383552575
As you can see there is nothing in there regarding changing the base price during the sale.
But Bioshock Infinite had it’s base price put up to $99.99 on Steam AUS just as the big 81% discount came into effect, and that base price is higher than the game was upon it’s launch. http://www.steamprices.com/au/app/8870/bioshock-infinite
Similar base price switching has also happened with other games published by 2K Games during the sale. It happened with Borderlands 2 and maybe others, the game’s base price going higher than it was at launch when the high discount percentage comes into effect. http://www.steamprices.com/au/app/49520/borderlands-2
It looks like the publish has to set a percentage discount for all countries but then changes the base price here in Aus so that they can still keep the discount price up. It’s a dick move by 2K.
I know, I have no idea what came over me being even mildly optimistic. The only reason was that they didn’t fuck with the price during the flash sale which made me think it was possibly an automated system applying changes based on certain conditions rather than an active user who may have acted on the flash sale
I got Skyrim, Left 4 Dead 2, Mass Effect 1 & 2 in this sale. I spent more on Stream Trading Cards than I did on games. Didn’t really want to spend more money on games that I have on consoles.
Downloaded Mass Effect 1 and Huzzahhh it won’t start at all. Any and all support information is useless and did not work. I don’t really want to waste another 7gb of downloads just to download it again….. Wonderful!!!
Are you getting any error messages?
Can you launch the game from the install folder rather than through the steam shortcut?
It might be worth trying to set the game exe to run as administrator and possibly in compatibility mode for XP (right click it, go to the compatibility tab)
You tried turning it off and on again? Some Steam installations don’t complete until the PC has been rebooted. Also try disabling your virus scanner and launching the game, especially if you’re using Avast.
I haven’t bought anything the whole sales, I already have a fair bit of gaming to catch up on. Also, I’m a cheapskate 😀
I wonder how the console gamers feel like reading these articles?
Bitterly jealous I imagine with a subconscious acknowledgement of the superiority of the PC Master Race. Plenty of places to buy console games cheaper but they’re almost never going to hit the “AAA game from 2 years ago is now $2.50” level
PS+ gives me more AAA games than I have time to play for “free”, so I don’t feel jealous at all, actually.
Console gamers feel just fine, I picked up Bioshock Infinite on 360 for $12, Mortal Combat for $13, The Last of us for $46 on PS3, and Batman Origins for free on 360.
Plus got a 360 for $49 last week due to MS cashback.
So plenty of console gaming to keep me busy at bargain prices.
50 bucks for a 360? Is this cashback thing still going on?
Ran out on the 31st of December.
Well bugger, so much for getting a cheap replacement 360 then. Oh well.
Metal Gear Solid 5
GTA5
Uncharted
Last of Us
… enough said…
So is Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition standalone, or do you need to buy Dark Souls as well to play it?
Prepare To Die Edition is just Dark Souls with the DLC packed in. Think “GOTY” edition.
Its the only version of Dark Souls on PC
It isn’t all that clear from the description, and Dark Souls is the ony PC game that interests me at the moment.
It’s been $5.99 on Amazon a few times the last few weeks. I picked it up for that this morning from them. I probably got more games from Amazon than directly through Steam this holiday sale.
Thanks, everything seems cheaper on Amazon actually, and steam keeps crashing at the moment.
http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Souls-Prepare-Edition-Online/dp/B00917DBUE/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1388731912&sr=8-1&keywords=dark+souls
I bought a couple of Indie games that otherwise would not have been brought to my attention; i’m sure we will see more of these in future sales. I got Snow, 7 Days to die and Nether.
Extremely sad that my debit card is frozen and im not able to get anything! 🙁
I found it amusing that DayZ remained on the top of the best sellers list throughout the entire Christmas sale, and it was never offered at a discounted price.
30 bucks for DayZ, it doesn’t really need to be. It’s just that good.
Not in its current state… :p
Even in its current state. Get some mates together and have some fun.
Yeah, already have… the whole thing is just severely lacking at the moment.
It’s pretty much this:
– Run straight to military area
– Gear up
– Hunt people to kill/hold up
Purely because there’s nothing else to do.
After you’ve spent hundreds of hours on the mod, it comes off really boring.
I’ve actually stopped playing it at the moment because I don’t want to get sick of it before it’s more fleshed out.
I grabbed Bioshock Infinite ($9.99), Max Payne 3 Complete ($6.99), Far Cry 3 Deluxe ($7.49), Dishonored GOTY ($13.59) and Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition ($5.99) from Amazon.
Borderlands 2 GOTY ($14.99) from Get Games Go
Bulletstorm ($4.99), 3DMark ($2.49), Red Faction Guerilla ($3.99 was the only RF I was missing), Shadow Warrior Special Edition ($12.49), Borderlands 2 Ultimate Vault Hunter upgrade 2 and the three Headhunter packs ($11.96), Rise of The Triad ($2.99), Far Cry 3 – Blood Dragon ($6.09), Incredible Adventures of Van Helsing Complete ($6.79), Doom 3: BFG Edition ($7.49) and Half-Life Complete ($9.99) from Steam.
I found Amazon to be better for AAA titles this sale while Steam was better for older and more niche titles.
Finally picked up xcom on pc.