Fawcks said:
Topic title is descriptive!
Here are the games I wound up with:
Orange Box (14.99)
Left 4 Dead 2 (4.99)
Plants VS Zombies (3.00 ... I think. Probably never gonna play it, heh).
Amnesia: The Dark Descent (6.80, which I am now too scared to play...)
So! Big waste of money on my end. How did YOU do?
Also: People are dying in third world countries, and here I am spending money on games. Games I will likely not play to their full potential. And posting about it in an internet forum.
DISCUSS.
Hmmm, well I spent more money than I should have. I am one of those people who hates digital downloads and yet probably owns 100 games on STEAM from various sales. I buy physical copies of most games that I really want for top dollar when they come out (pre-orders and so on), I buy games I'm ambigious about from STEAM because I wind up paying $5-$10 or occasionally $20 for a title and if I wind up hating it I don't lose that much money. As a result I have a lot of games I've tried, but didn't like in my STEAM account.
This year included Divinity 2 (which cost as much as downloading just the X-pack would have), Farcry 2 (heard very mixed reviews of it, but I like sandbox games), Mafia 2 (same as Far Cry 2), Blood Bowl (has the potential to be awesome or absolutly terrible), and a few others.
I'm one of those people who has more games than they could ever play, but I tend to be picky, so a lot of them are games I'll never play seriously. Video games being a seller's market where there is no real way to get a handle on what your buying until you have it, and what amounts to a solid "no returns" policy. While disliking digital downloads on principle, I will say that STEAM's sales are useful to someone like me.
On the other hand I will also point out that I think STEAM is a lot like Wal*Mart. Albiet on a longer term scale. I have no great dislike of Valve despite not being a shooter fan, but it occurs to me that the sales STEAM runs are simply to destroy the competition and stay on top. If at some point we see the demise of physical media, and the comparitive mom and pop's operations like "Gamer's Gate" wind up bring driven out of business due to STEAM grabbing all the sales due to their periodic bargains, I imagine STEAM is going to up it's prices and stop doing sales due to a lack of competition once it's entrenched enough.
I'm a cynic, but from what I sit it seems to me like Gabe and Valve are simply smarter than most of the other guys in the gaming industry. When digital downloads were first developing one thing we the users were promised was much cheaper games due to the simple fact that there would be no need for packaging or shipping. Not to mention how it would make releasing expansions and DLC more practical, with DLC and such being able to be produced very rapidly and very cheaply. In reality as soon as the technology started to hit the market the game industry decided to see how much it could exploit the tech. All that money being saved was simply taken as extra profits, DLC became an exercise in holding back popular types of content (like Liara in Mass Effect 2) to be sold seperatly, and of course DLC is priced at the highest point the market can bear, with you seeing things like people paying $15 for a couple of multiplayer maps and maybe some weapon re-skins for a FPS game. Valve on the other hand did not do this, and in their sales and such you can see with a digital platform how low the prices can be taken while still making a profit. A shadow of what Digital Download platforms were supposed to be when the technology was first being developed and hinted at. I think in the end that's what is giving STEAM it's dominance, but also I think Gabe is enough of a businessman that if he successfully takes down all his rivals Valve is going to simply do what everyone else has been doing, except with no competition. Pretty much what happened with Wal*Mart.
Of course my cynical opinions don't matter much in the long run, and honestly from an equally cynical perspective it probably doesn't matter because at least we're getting decent deals right now as opposed to having to pay full price for everything. In the future it just mens we'll be paying what we normally would in all likelyhood, and not getting these kinds of deals anymore.
