So, in seven days.
Can you feel the excitement?
I might have to keep an eye on this one-- A friend and I are planning on getting Don’t Starve Together as soon as it goes on sale.
How long do individual items usually stay on sale? I know there are some 24-hour sales, but are they the rule or the exception?
It depends, really, but most games are on sale for at least 24 hours. The ones that are the featured deals of the day will usually last for 48 hours, and the flash sales that they have, ongoing, throughout the whole sale, will usually last about 12 hours.
Oh, and then there’s the voter’s choice ones, which I think are about 12 hours too, but I may be mistaken (it may be longer).
On the very last day, however, they usually always have a resale of all of the things that were on sale (as featured, daily ones) for one last chance to get them.
24 hours seems to be the minimum these days. People got all feisty before when they did rolling 2/4/8 hour flash sales so now the “flash” sales are 12 hours on the “new” board and then drop down to the bottom half of the screen for another 12 hours when the new ones rotate in. The “Dailies” are actually 48 hours; 24 hours featured and 24 hours at the bottom of the screen.
In any event (since they keep changing it), they put a timer up on the game’s store page these days so it shouldn’t be much of a surprise.
Found this alleged leak from Steam:
If that’s true, then there’s only one discount for everything and you can see what that is right on 25th when they flip the big SALE!!! switch on.
If the best price is going to continue through to the end of the sale, is there any reason not to wait until the last day or two and then buying everything all at once? It’s not like they’re going to run out of anything…
This wouldn’t be the holiday sale, it’d be the black friday sale, which is much shorter and less significant.
Here we go.
That’s what she said!
I’ll let meself out 
NO I am not excited about this at all ! I hate the holidays !
I think they’re making a significant mistake by getting rid of the idea of daily/flash sales. That brought excitement back of checking the store again regularly and brought some focus to the best deals. Now it’s a big lump of 5000 discounted games, which is great, but it’s overwhelming.
There’s nothing wrong with what they’re doing, but it’s going to cost them money - it’ll lower impulse purchases by people who feel like they have a narrow window, reduce the amount of people repeatedly checking the store page, reduce sales on the game that aren’t featured as a daily/flash sale. I suspect they’ll learn from this and the Christmas sale will go back to the daily/flash sale format.
I must be strong; I will not succumb to the sale…sorry, but even I am not strong enough to pass up Fritz 14 on sale for $30.
The problem with flash sales is that now that they allow automatic refunds, people would just use that every time they buy something that goes on a flash sale later. Also the Winter sale discounts are already locked in by now. They’ve asked every publisher for just a single discount rate per game and are applying it for both this sale and the Winter sale.
So? Those would still be the people who are willing to watch for the flash sales. Before the refund policy, they would have just waited until the flash sales, and bought it at the end if they needed it.
The big different is impulse purchases. The impulse purchases are the people who had no intention to buy something until they saw it on a flash sale. The time limit forces them to think quickly and creates artificial scarcity. That extra pressure be missing now.
I also strongly suspect the deals won’t be as good. You can afford steeper sales the more limited they are in duration. For example, imagine a $40 game that normally goes for $20 during the sale but drops down to $10 for flash sales. And let’s assume, for the sake of argument, half of everyone buys at the flash sale. If they sold it at the flash sale price of $10, they’d make an average of $20/$30 = 67% less.
Now of course, you’d have more people who would have missed the flash sale and would be unwilling to buy it at $20. But do you really think there would be enough to overcome a 67% gap? And they’ll be offset by those would have bought the game in the excitement of a flash sale but not if they had longer to think about it–the impulse buyers I mentioned above.
Unless you hadn’t already been offering it at the cheapest price under the old conditions, it makes no sense not to charge more under the new conditions. I’d expect a price closer to $15.
These are good points but I want to add another in the “negative” column: I’m trying to browse the games and there are 26 pages of Mac OS X games. I’m going thru page by page and it doesn’t take until page 4 that I notice that I’m seeing games that I already saw on page 2 and page 3. This continues until by about page 10, approximately 25% of the games are ones I’ve seen on previous pages. This causes me to stop browsing. There’s no point in trying to even see what’s on sale since the website’s own listings are redundant and it’s therefore wasting my time.
I liked the Flash sales because I’d rather be lucky than good.
Let me try to be diplomatic here…
All due respect, but I couldn’t give two wet farts about whether Steam is making a good business decision in the cancellation of Flash sales. This thread’s title makes it look like it’s gonna be about which on-sale games are worth getting excited over. Is that something I should be expecting here?
Shit, I just fumbled my diplomacy check, didn’t I.
If it’s gonna be more fantasy insider baseball about what people think Steam’s beancounters are looking at when they count the beans, I’m out. But if folks want to talk about games on sale, I’m all eyes.
Frex, I just got Invisible, Inc., for $10. It’s by the Mark of the Ninja people, and so far looks a helluva lot like Shadowrun, only with robust stealth mechanics. I’m not sure what I think of it so far; hopefully I’ll get more excited as I play it, since MotN was a fantastic game.
I’m eyeing Endless Legend. On the one hand, I love 4x fantasy games. On the other hand, I didn’t much care for Endless Dungeon. Do folks have opinions about Endless Legend?
What other games are folks interested in?
The thread title looks like it’s going to be about the Steam sale, starting Nov 25th.
Wolfenstein: The New Order is $9 on Steam which is a good price for the game. Steam’s discount on The Old Blood isn’t so great but you can get it for $5 from GetGamesGo. I’d direct link except I’m on vacation with only my tablet.
Witcher 3 is on a flash sale for $30 at Green Man Gaming plus another 10% off with the voucher shown on the main page. Think it’s only for a few hours. Not a Steam key, activated via GOG.
Evil Within is on sale at Steam but the season pass is not. But it is on sale for $5 at Gamersgate. In fact, buying the base game at Steam and the season pass at GG is cheaper than the Steam bundle.
GMG is having a sale too - and Origin and every other site I’m sure. Battlefront is $45 on GMG in a flash sale, so that’s 25% off if you were looking to grab that. Lot of overlap with the steam sale obviously but check both places before you buy anything, since GMG mostly (but not always) gives out steam keys.
Origin has Battlefield 4 premium (game + all 4 expansions) for $20. It’s a good game and they were still adding content to it very recently.