One more day of offers to go and I’m really hoping for Football Manager 2010. They’ve had the much inferior Fifa Manager but FM10 is still sitting there at £29.99. Fingers are crossed.
Oh well, the last day is just a repeat of previous daily deals. I can’t exactly complain considering the sheer number of games I’ve bought.
Bioshock - 75% off.
Defence Grid - 75% off.
Left 4 Dead 2 - 33% off.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. - 80% off.
Killing Floor - 75% off.
Grand Theft Auto IV - 75% off.
Torchlight - 75% off.
The last day of sales is unfortunately just a rehash of some of the former sales. I guess they ran out of publishers willing to make steeper discounts.
Torchlight $4.99
STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl $2
Left 4 Dead 2 $33.49
GTA 4 $7.49
BIoshock $4.99
Defnse Grid: The Awakening $2.49
Killing Floor: $4.99
That said, it’s a good batch. Torchlight for $5, Defense Grid for $2.50, STALKER for $2 (!!!), and Bioshock for $5 are no brainers and should be bought by everyone who doesn’t have some reason to suspect they’ll hate the game.
Best sale ever. Too bad it has to come to an end.
I’m going to have withdrawl symptoms tomorror at 9PST.
Checking my list, I’ve bought 19 new games in the last two weeks…
About 14 hours to go until the sale is over. I would say the games that absolutely dictate everoyne buying them due to ridiculous cheapness for amount of content you’re getting: Rome Total War for $2.50 (and Medieval 2 for $5), STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, and the Civ 3 complete pack for $3.34. Obviously there are lots of great values other than those, but those are the games that have dozens or hundreds of hours worth of gaming in them for almost no cost. IL2:1946 for $5 is a ridiculous value if you have any interest in flight sims - it’s the best and most comprehensive WW2 combat sim there is and contains the content of like 6 expansions/sequels.
In fact if you just have a few bucks left over you want to spend, I’d use the “games for under $10” and “games for under $5” links on the front page, click view all, and then sort by metascore.
Is there a mod or something for IL2 that doesn’t make it so ridiculously complicated to do anything?
I don’t know, I’ve never tried to mod it. What are you finding complicated? A key card/chart would help because there are a lot of controls. The difficulty options probably will be adjustable so that you don’t have to worry about trim or prop pitch or that sort of stuff.
Can anyone help me to confirm if Civilization IV is on discount? I kept seeing its logo in the Steam page, but a search yields nothing.
There’s the civ 4 game itself for $13.39 or the complete edition with all 3 expansions for $26.79.
I bow down to your search-fu.
Honestly is the Steam’s search engine broken or something?
ETA: Gah: ‘This product is currently unavailable in your region’. And all is revealed.
There are some weird issues with publisher agreements (I think) that give different regions somewhat different sales, prices, and availabilities. It came up for me right away in the search so I guess it just prevents you from finding it in the first place to avoid letting you see that it’s not available to you.
Welcome to a serious flight sim. 
But no, not really. There’s a lot of options in the game itself that can tone down the harshness of the physics simulation, if that’s what you’re looking for, but the interface is always a bit clunky and the default settings have most everything turned up. Just taking off is pretty much always going to involve flaps, rudder, throttle, elevator, aileron, maybe some wheel braking, and possibly prop pitch control depending on what aircraft you’re in. And you’ll need trim once you’re in the air.
You can right-click on the games list in Steam and download a manual - probably a good idea in this case if you haven’t played many prop flight sims before.
Yeah. I was drawn to the picture for Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 in one of the packs. Searching revealed nothing but a video, a trip to the forums revealed that it’s not available in the UK.
It’s all over. I won’t get my 9am fix every day with crazy new deals.
Curious to see how much I got during these sales vs how much I paid, between the black friday sale and the Christmas sale I got:
Burnout Paradise: Ultimate Box, Crysis, Defense Grid, Shattered Horizon, Street Fighter 4, Torchlight, Braid, Company of Heroes (+2 expansions), Evil Genius, Mirror’s Edge, Osmos, Sniper Elite, Titan Quest (+expack), Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory, Trine, World of Goo, Ben There/Dan That!, Chains, Crysis Warhead, Freedom Force, Freedom Force vs 3rd Reich, Frontlines: Fuel of War, Full Spectrum Warrior (+expack), Ghost Master, Hearts if Iron 3, Indigo Prophecy, Jade Empire, Juiced 2: Hot Import Nights, Mass Effect, Medieval 2: Total War, Mr. Robot, Obulis, QuantZ, Pirates of the Burning Sea, Red Faction, Red Faction 2, Red Faction: Guerrilla, Rome: Total War Gold, STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl, STALKER: Clear sky, Saints Row 2, Secret of Monkey Island: Special Edition, Star Wars KOTOR, Time Gentlemen, please!, Unreal Gold, Unreal 2, Unreal Tournament, UT2004, UT3, Vegas - Make It Big, Vigil - Blood Bitterness, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War (+3 expacks), Dawn of War 2, World in Conflict (+expack), Zombie Bowl-O-Rama.
Counting expansions as games, that’s 63 games (I think, too lazy to double check), for $212.08, so for around the price of 5 new games or so, or about $3.30 each. And they aren’t mostly cheap little indie puzzle games - some are, but there are lots of grade-A titles in there. Awesome. I’m set for a ridiculous assload of gaming.
I’ll keep this thread running, by the way, since there are always digital distribution mini sales here and there - we just won’t see anything as huge as this in a while. What did you guys get? I know tr0p[bunchoflettersandnumbers] beat me in the amount of games bought.
Incidentally, I’m wondering how the current super competitive market for digital sales is going to affect the future. I’ve never seen such huge gaming sales - and from multiple competing sites too. I know people get angry when they buy a game for $50 and then a few weeks later it’s on sale for $25 or $30 (or even $5-10) I wonder if the result of sales like these are going to be that people won’t want to buy a game when they’re new and full priced and they’ll just wait for the sale. Valve seems to think it won’t.
From here:
There’s an opportunity cost here that isn’t accounted for - how many of those new customers that bought it at 50% would’ve also been willing to buy it at full price? Those are lost sales. On the other hand, people who wouldn’t have been interested in the game at full price did decide to buy it at steep discount, and I guess those sales (which would’ve otherwise been non-sales instead of full price sales) outnumber the former case. That seems reasonable - I know I bought a ton of games recently that I wouldn’t have paid full price for.
And in digital distribution, the profit margin is high - there’s no retail packaging, distribution, shelf space, in the case of console games system fees etc. to pay for - bandwidth is cheap, so you can sell a game for a small price and still make a profit. And that’s a key factor - you can’t really sell a game that cheaply at retail until you’ve given up on it and just want to recoup your costs - but digital distribution is more like buying music online - the marginal cost of each new song is negligible (although much greater in the case of games that can cost 15gb+ of bandwidth). So if you can halve the price and double (or more) your sales, you’re in better shape due your costs being lower, you have a lot of freedom.
Well, obviously I hope it continues - getting swamped with quality games for cheap keeps me happy. I’m glad Valve got here first - they should be the developer/publisher model that everyone in the industry looks up to - they manage to make a profit while also focusing on quality cough EA/activision cough, their regard for their customers is high, and it’s really just a great relationship. Microsoft is getting into the digital distribution business now with games for windows live, and I’m thinking how bleak it would be if they were the dominant force in the industry instead of valve.
Personally I’m curious on what their revenue is going to look like for the next three months or so. Everyone loaded up on games during the sale and probably isn’t going to buy anything for awhile. I know personally I think I’m set for at least six months.
Well, from previous articles about steam sales, they indicate that even for a few weeks after the sale, volumes remain higher due to word of mouth and such things. I would expect that some of that may be muted by the length and breadth of this sale.
More importantly, first quarter of a new year is generally a slow gaming period. Very few big titles are released in Jan/Feb if they missed the holiday window. Normally, they’re aimed at early spring dates. Because of that, Steam may already have a built in slowdown each year based on market conditions.
Personally, I’d love to see numbers for this sale, both in terms of units and dollars compared to the time before the sale started.
It would be interesting to see how many first time buyers there were also. I know I talked a coworker into signing up for steam and she ended up getting the Nancy Drew pack for herself and a gift for her son. Those games would never have been sold if it wasn’t for the sale.