Just getting the thread started a bit early to give people a heads up if they somehow don’t know that you can get great games at crazy cheap prices on black friday. The black friday sale isn’t as good as the Christmas sale, but there’s usually some awesome.
Other sites may try to copy steam and have their own. I know I got a popup from origin saying they’d have a hundred games at “up to 60% off”, which doesn’t really sound that impressive considering what steam does. But we might as well look at all sales on all sites.
One downside (?) to these things is that once your games list is absurdly full like mine, you start finding less to take away from the sales. Which is good, I guess, since I already have more games than I’ll ever need and won’t have to spend much more, but you lose the kid in a candy store sort of feeling. There will be a lot of great games for $5 or less, but stuff that’s already been through the sale cycle a few times so you probably already have it. But there’s always more recent stuff that hasn’t been discounted yet, and occasionally you see even crazier than usual deals like 3 year old AAA games for $2.
There’s usually some sort of theme or gimmick to the sales too which can be fun. Last black friday they had a “give and get” sale, where they gave away a bunch of games on people’s wishlists randomly, and the “give” part was that there were gift packs of like 6-12 copies of games heavily discounted that you could give away to your friends (or split the purchase costs as a group buy). No idea what it might be this year.
I still haven’t gotten Dragon Age 2, and though it seems to have been a bomb I’d still pick it up if they have it cheap enough. Other than that, I’ll have to play it by ear really. My game queue is rather full atm with Skyrim. I noticed a huge update for Stronghold 3 as well, so perhaps I’ll get back into it and see if they fixed some of the glaring problems. Same with Rage…I noticed it updated a week or so ago, so perhaps it actually works now.
I would say that Skyrim has weeks and weeks, if not months worth of play time left for me…and that is discounting any DLCs they are planning or mods I might bolt on. I’m not even planning to touch the Star Wars MMO because I just don’t want to cut into my Skyrim time right now.
I’ve got a bunch of games on my list that I’m waiting to go on good sale:
Skyrim
Arkham City
Portal 2
Deus Ex: HR
LA Noir
Assassin’s Creed 2
Civ 5
…and some others that I don’t want as much but still wouldn’t mind. If any of these break the $20 mark, I’m likely to get them.
Is there any website where you can list the games you want and the pricepoint you’d buy them at, and get notified when they reach that pricepoint? Or even a way to get Steam to contact you when a game goes on sale?
Call of Duty Black Ops - $29.99
The Oddboxx - $3.74
Portal 2 - $10.19
Risen - $14.99
TDU2 - $4.99
Duke Nukem Forever - $6.79
Orcs Must Die $3.74
Sam and Max Complete Pack $12.49
Men of War Vietnam $8.74
Mass Effect 2 $4.99
1… 2… 3… Kick It $9.99
Renegade Ops $7.49
No. There’d be no way for them to - the console makers have an exclusive market for downloadable content, which is why you very rarely see any sort of good deal or sale like you do on steam.
So… sale started early. And it’s an “autumn sale” rather than a black friday sale. I wonder if that means it’s going to last longer, or be bigger. Interesting.
The usual way of these things is that everything in the store is decently (25-66%) discounted, but every day a new batch of even steeper discounted games appears. You should not buy any non-daily sale until the last day of the sale. If you buy a game for $10 today and then find out it’s $6 on daily sale tomorrow, you’ll have no one to blame but yourself.
Also, a general tip - load up your steam wallet with $25 or $50 or whatever you think you might spend. That way your credit card company gets one purchase instead of a different on each day, which occasionally gets cards locked for suspicious activity. Which is REALLY FUCKING STUPID by the way, since credit card companies are supposed to have fancy computer analysis to figure out suspicious behavior, and yet frequent spending that very closely matches the spending that millions of other customers are doing at the same time sometimes triggers an alarm.
Trope already covered the games today.
I heard Orcs Must Die is good, and for $4 what the hell. I wanted TDU2 to be good because the persistant world thing seemed cool but I hear it’s pretty bad. Mass Effect 2 is one of the highest rated games of all time so it’s a steal at $5. I might grab Portal 2 for $10 - anyone want to do the coop with me?
Damn it. I paid full price for that game when it came out not too long ago.
That wouldn’t bother me so much except for the fact that I was incredibly dissappointed in it. The learning curve is way too steep – I never got past the first mission. Also, there are no map or battle editors and no tutorials. And … the first set of missions you have to play as the Viet Cong.
Ok so Dungeon Defenders is apparently some cartoony coop tower defense game that people seem to love. It’s pretty wildly popular for an indie game, and they just released a bunch of new content today - so they’re apparently continuously adding to it.
It’s 50% off ($7.50) currently, but you can also get a buy 3 get 1 free 4-pack for $22. And it also may have a steeper discount on a daily deal.
Anyway, I’m going to get it one way or another, but this seems like a game that SDMBers can get together to play, so I’m going to recommend - first, wait to see if it’s a daily sale, and if not, organize a group buy (one person pays, dishes out the copies, everyone else paypals their share back to that guy) or just buy it on your own.
Any more opinions on Men of War: Vietnam? I’m curious about it. I have some other games in the franchise, but life got in the way of me continuing past the tutorial - the games seemed like great fun, although tricky and time-consuming. This one might be worth it for the Vietnam setting.
Also, just how terrible is Duke Nukem Forever? I mean, obviously it’s bad, but I’m curious if it at least has camp value or something.
Not sure how much I’ll pick up in this sale - the Christmas sale is coming soon, and I won’t have much time to play until then (…or even sufficient bandwidth to download much!).
That’s another one that irritates me. I bought the game for PS3 for full price, and it is an awesome game! but what is more awesome is that it came with a code so you can activate on your PC too … and it didn’t work. When I punched in the code, it came back, “Invalid - Code already redeemed” or something like that.
I think I might be becoming too crotchety for video games.
