Daily:
Dead Island GOTY $5, Franchise Pack $12.50
Van Helson $5
Dark Souls: Prepare to die $6
Papers Please $5
Xcom Enemy Unknown $10, DLC 50%
Game Dev Tycoon $5
Don’t Starve $5
Baldur’s Gate Enhanced Edition $8
Final Fantasy VII $4
Flash:
Sanctum 2 $3, Skullgirls $7.50, System Shock 2 $2.50, Killing Floor $5
Did they ever fix Dark Souls? I know the port was garbage. Is it worth buying? Papers, please looks… unique. Is dead island fun in coop?
Papers Please is so unusual that I don’t know how to classify it. Maybe it’s a RPG? Anyway, I found it worth the price, even though I haven’t finished it and haven’t been playing.
Battlefield 4 is $30 on origin, and apparently you can get it for $20 if you do this. from slickdeals. I would recommend grabbing it, SDMBers play it a lot together.
Okay, would anyone be interested in exchanging an Enemy Within steam code for $25 AUD (~$22.70 USD) transferred via Paypal?
There’s a general EA sale on origin today. Not sure if it’s today only. Battlefield, sims, need for speed, crisis, etc.
When I worked in retail, one place I was at had an official policy whereby we’d refund the price difference if someone purchased an item and it went on sale within 14 days.
Another major retailer here will refund 120% of the difference if you find something you’ve brought from them cheaper anywhere else within a month.
The customer loyalty and piece of mind those policies generate (or retain) is worth more than the few dollars they lose by honouring the lower price.
The thing is, new release computer games are bloody expensive (not far off the $100 mark here). Buying a computer game at $89 and seeing it at 75% off a day or two later represents a fairly significant amount of money. It leaves a sour taste in the purchaser’s mouth. Not everyone has the time you do to invest in learning the minutiae of Steam’s sale structures etc.
My suggestion to Steam would be to offer a short period (24-72 hours), whereby if a game you’ve purchased goes on sale, the difference between what you paid and the sale price is credited to your Steam Account as store credit.
Valve still has your money, you’ve got store credit to buy even more games off them, and (mostly) everyone’s happy.
Oh give me a fucking break. You’re calling me a loser because I know steam has had a black Friday sale for the last 4 years, and I don’t buy full price 2 year old games on a whim when there are 5+ major sites that will almost certainly have that game with a significant discount in the immediate future?
Part of the reason DD is so cheap is because they don’t have the sort of cost
Valve does not “still have your money”, because they gave 70-75% of it to the publisher of the game. Valve will be paying you back out of their own pocket. And for what? So that people who bought the game 25 hours ago can bitch about how steam should have a 2-day “amnesty” period for daring to offer a game at a discount because they missed the 24 hour cutoff? The whole idea that you’re somehow victimized by choosing to buy a game at a price you were happy with, and it later became available for sale is entitled and stupid. If you’re afraid of getting “burned” by a discount, then wait for the discount. If you’re happy about buying a game at a certain price, then be happy about it.
If Valve had to go through and say “well, 2000 people have bought this game during the amnesty period, so if we put this game on sale, we’ll lose $7500 giving them their refunds, and we definitely owe it to them because offering a game at a discount is pretty much like raping people’s family. But we won’t make as much on this sale as we’ll have to pay back in refunds, so let’s not have it”
Some of you would be happier if they never had sales, or had less frequent sales or sales with less of a discount, because then you wouldn’t have to worry about getting “burned” by having games offered at a great price. Do you realize that the games you bought for so cheap “burned” someone else at some point with this ridiculous logic? Yes, let’s not be happy that we can all get games for very cheap very quickly, let’s try to demand that we get restitution for the horrible crime these sites make of making heavy discounts so as to discourage them from doing it because it’s too costly for them.
Same goes for all the people who rage at the idea that the $20 bundle they bought with $300 worth of games is a ripoff because they didn’t get extra gift copies or refunds for games they already owned. WE GET THESE GAMES SO CHEAPLY BECAUSE OF THE WAY IT WORKS. You start adding refunds and money spent on customer loyalty and all that shit, and they have to raise the overall prices on games to compensate. The very notion that you’re somehow being victimized here is entitled bullshit, and the result of all these proposals to somehow be compensated and rewarded for this “victimization” would make prices for everyone go up.
If you still need help with this, let me know.
PM sent.
Woops, I left this thought unfinished. Part of the reason that digital distribution is amazing is that the costs of the provider are so low. They pay for some server farms, some bandwidth, and some development cost, and that’s it. They don’t have to have physical storeplaces, or hire salesmen, or offer the sort of customer loyalty programs that cost them money.
People complain constantly that they’ll buy a game pack/catalog with 30+ games in it for less than $50. They’ll say “I already bought X, I should get an extra copy!” But that’s short sighted. Let’s say you buy a catalog and you already had 10 games in it. So should you get refunded for those games? Should you get discounted on the pack? Should you get giftable extra copies?
If you got any of those, THEN THAT PACK WOULDN’T BE AVAILABLE FOR SUCH A CHEAP PRICE. The fact that it’s take it or leave it is what allows the price to be so low. If you get an extra giftable copy of those 10 games, then the publishers have to think “that’s 10 potentially lost sales for us in the future, so offering these big catalog purchases is going to hurt us in the future”, which means they’d either not have those big sales, or they’d have to raise the price. Similarly, if they had to give a discount on the already super generous discount, or even refund money based on previous purchases, then they’d have to either offer these deals less frequently or not at all, or they’d have to charge more.
The absence of all of these stupid gimmicks is why gaming is so amazingly cheap in the first place. I have hundreds of games, lots of AAA titles, and I’ve paid less than $5 per game on average. That’s amazing. I probably pay less than 1/10th as much for games as console/retail gamers do. Digital distribution gaming is amazing, and you should be marveling at how fucking amazing it is, not getting such a sense of entitlement that you think you’ve been wronged when you stupidly buy a game at full price right before it’s predictably discounted.
All of these proposals to somehow pay restitution for this absurd sense of entitlement and victimization would change the nature of digital distribution and make it more expensive on average.
Steam has had 3 major sales per year for the last four years. If you’re going to buy a game in summer, autumn, or winter do a google search for the expected sale date. This should take at most a minute. Do you really not have that much time?
Senorbeef captures my feelings on this. I do shop at Steam, and I don’t shop at Nordstrom, because that service you get at Nordstrom? I don’t need it.
And the thing is, you pay for that service at Nordstrom. That discount they give you doesn’t come from magical money fairies, it’s something they build into their pricing structure. They charge everyone a little bit extra so that they can afford to offer customer satisfaction discounts and still make a profit.
Steam? They don’t do that. Their pricing structure is based around being bottom-of-the-barrel, without any bells and whistles built into it.
And that’s what I want. I want the no-frills shopping that Steam offers, because it lets me get games at Steam prices, not at Nordstrom prices.
Hijack about Nordstrom’s service continued: [spoiler]The cost of keeping customers fucks over the Nordstrom clerks, as abuses of the return policy get deducted from their commissions. I also know someone who used to be a department manager at Nordstrom’s, and people would do the most horrible things to abuse that policy, including treating the fancy dress section like a free gown rental service - “buy” the dress, wear it to some event, return it the next day claiming it didn’t fit but with deodorant and wine/food/whatever stains on it.
REI finally changed their once-generous return policy due to abuse. I shopped at one of their members-only “garage sales” and saw a backpack that had obviously been used for a kid their whole school year (judging by the wear and tear, and the huge number of pen marks inside the pack), then returned. That was just one of the examples of stuff that had obviously been well-used and then returned as if this was a clothing and gear exchange service instead of a store.
[/spoiler]
Remember, daily deals are good for a full day following their initial offering! (Scroll down the page to the “Yesterday’s Big Deals” section.) And also, it’s generally best to not buy anything during the Steam big sales unless it’s a current Daily/Yesterday Deal, or a Flash Sale deal. Even if it’s just sort of discounted, it might turn up as a Flash/Daily and you’ll kick yourself later. And don’t forget about the massive return of various previous discounts on the final day!
Also, Steam once refunded me $75. I meant to buy Arkham Asylum for $7.49, but accidentally clicked on the “bundle” for $74.99. When I realized what I’d done, I sent an abject apology email begging for a refund and pointing out I hadn’t downloaded any of those games, and they wrote back saying, “We shouldn’t do this, but…” and refunded me.
So they do have a return policy of sorts, even though they don’t advertise it; they just don’t want to allow any abuse whatsoever, and I go in there knowing that they’ll probably never refund anything to me again, so I’m more careful these days.
Seriously, this is the business model I want to support. I would be very unlikely to shop at a place that jacked up their prices sufficient to support the generous refund policies some of y’all want.
And not only that, but Valve can’t win. No matter what they try to do, people rage at them. Oh, Valve has a generous 3 day sale discount refund policy? Oh, well fuck them, I bought the game 4 days ago. It just moves an arbitrary deadline to give people a new place to rage against.
When steam used to give away games completely for free during the holidays, there would be literally thousands or tens of thousands of posts on the steam forums complaining about it. It was just a free bonus, no one was hurt by it, and yet I see more bitching about that than I do about all of actual evil companies like EA. It’s ridiculous. It seems like the cooler and nicer Valve is to its customers, the more they rage against them. I actually think if steam implemented these policies, people would find even more reasons to get angry.
Tropico 4 is on a flash sale at 80% off; both the base game and DLC. I highly recommend them if you’re a fan of city builders.
Which of the DLC are worthwhile? All of them? All the DLC is $14, I wish there was a complete pack or something.
I also enjoy the game. Its a little formulaic, but its humorous and does scratch a little bit of a city-building itch if you have one.
Best ones I’ve heard of are Quick-Dry Cement & Plantador out of the cheap ones as far as actually enhancing game play. And Modern Times if you’re up to spending the $4.00
Yet in Australia, games on Steam cost as much or even more than buying them from a bricks and mortar store, for some reason. So yeah, having an incredibly awesome sale a couple of times a year doesn’t make up for chronically overcharging most of the rest of the time.
Do you work for Valve? You seem to be taking the suggestion Steam should at least consider working something out for people who feel they’ve missed out/been hard done by rather personally.
Ah, but there will be fewer people raging about it because there will be lots of people who purchased in the 3-day window who’ve suddenly got some store credit to play with and are subsequently even happier than they were before.