The good old games winter sale has begun, the first of the bunch. They’re offering some old games for free every few days, so check in on that.
Everyone will be having a sale soon enough. The steam sale usually starts around the 22nd. I figured I’d create this thread for people who had questions or recommendations.
Semi-related, the humble monhtly bundle can be bought for a year for $99, which is a pretty good deal ($8/mo). To get an idea of the sort of games you get out of that, here’s a not quite recent list of the monthly bundles in the past.
Not really starting with a bang for any of them anymore. It used to be a great time to get games just because they were so damn cheap, especially at the beginning and the end, but from what I can see today on the ones I have been keeping an eye on, I don’t see anything at a new lower price, let alone an amazing one. Most just seem to be every game is matching a previous sale price, and not necessarily the lowest one I’ve seen.
Yeah, the steam sales have been objectively bad (relative to how they used to be) starting in 2015. When they started issuing refunds, they decided to stop using the flash sale format, probably correctly predicting that people would buy a game on sale immediately, see it go on an even steeper discount on a subsequent day, and then refund it and buy it again, which is a hassle and financial burden for them.
Of course there were other solutions they could’ve applied to that situation, like not being able to re-buy a game you just refunded for a certain period of time or whatever.
But it used to be that, at the very least, you could count on the winter sale to match the best price you’ve ever seen for that game, and usually you get a new best price. But that’s not even true anymore - there are lots of games I bought for $5 years ago that are $10 or $15 now. In general, there were a lot more “eh what the hell, it’s $5” games than there are now.
We’ve got other ways of getting games cheap like humble bundles, humble monthly, steam competitors, etc. so it’s not all bad, but steam sales are just flat out worse than they used to be.
Which, personally, may be for the best - I have over 1000 games that I mostly got at very low price, and raising prices has curbed my impulse buying a lot. Now I tend to only buy humble bundles, the humble monthly, and occasionally games I’m really interested in on steam.
Not that it’ll make the prices cheaper but you can go to https://steamdb.info/sales/ and then set it to hide anything you own (after to connect to Steam) and a number of options like only showing new discounts, price ranges, etc. Plus it color codes all time best or discounts matching all time best. Much more useful than Steam’s own terrible listings for sale items.
Finally got XCom 2 expansion: with Green Man Game’s GMG12 code and a big sale, it’s down to $15 and change, the lowest I’ve seen it. This may be my only purchase this go-round.
Damn, there is just nothing to any of these sales anymore. I have only seen one price that even made me think twice, and that second thought didn’t take very long to turn into a no.
Unless they pull out some serious discounts, It’s gonna be time to stop even bothering with these things at all.
Well, the money not spent can be better put into a humble subscription I’m almost 100% thinking now.