The big steam sale will start today - by the time you read this post it’ll probably be going.
Uplay is having their sale. At the moment that link doesn’t work but I assume it’ll be fixed. The store is available from within the uplay client.
Origin doesn’t have a sale up yet but I suspect they will soon.
Greenmangaming has a sale and an additional 10% off with code Winter10. They say every sale comes with a gift - not sure what that means, I suspect random throw-in games.
Nuuvem. It’s a Brazillian store but they often have the best prices on some games - the page will warn you if it’s region locked, otherwise it should give global keys. They apparently are aware of their international audience now and their page no longer requires you to use google translate and convert currency. I’m a little concerned that will stomp out some of their crazy deals, but I haven’t looked closely yet.
Gamestop/D2D
Don’t assume steam has the best price - check around on http://IsThereAnyDeal.com. The last two steam winter sales have actually been quite poor. Ever since they enacted their refund policy, they got rid of the daily/flash sale format, because they don’t want the banking costs of having impatient people buy games on day 1, see them go on a daily sale, then refund and rebuy them. There are fixes they could implement, like having a cooldown on rebuying a game, but instead they’ve chosen to make their sale format suck. Assuming they stick with the same thing this year, all prices will be fixed from the start - but they’ll be fixed at what would be the standard sale price in previous sales, not the flash/daily sale prices. End result is that there are far fewer $5 big titles than in past years, and prices for games are often higher than what the same game sold for 3 winter sales ago. Also makes the sales more boring - what you see is what you get, no new daily surprises. Much fewer super cheap impulse buys, lots more $10-20 sales. I’m prepared to be disappointed.
I’ll dig around for some recommendations later. Feel free to make your own.
Homefront: the Revolution is $15 on Steam. The game initially got poor reviews for performance issues but those have largely been fixed and it’s played fine for me.
Unlike the original Homefront which was multiplayer with a thin single-player campaign, Homefront is based around single player. It’s essentially an urban Far Cry 3/4 – take over bases, clear map objectives, fire up radios to open the map, etc. If you like that stuff, you’ll probably like HF:R. If not, then I guess don’t buy it There’s also a co-op (up to 4 players) mission mode that’s really only good if you know people to play with as the group lobby thing doesn’t work especially well. You can also solo the co-op missions if you’re careful.
If you’re buying it, definitely get the Freedom Fighter edition for $15 instead of the base edition for $12. Freedom Fighter comes with the Season Pass which never goes on sale and is $25 on its own. The SP content isn’t great but it’s worth $3.
Wow, you’d barely know there was a sale from the front page. We used to get these big events - all this custom art on the front page, some sort of contest/objective where you’d get free stuff by completing events. Now there’s not even a splash page - the front page is almost totally normal except it says “Steam Winter Sale” - no art, no special layout.
Prices are pretty bad. As an example, Shogun 2 Total War and its expansions have been $7.50 like 12 different times now. But they can’t even match the standard sale price - they’re $10.19. Empire, Napolean, and Medieval II have been $5 a bunch, now $10. So I’m not even talking about flash sale prices in previous sales, but the standard discount during sales they’ve been a dozen times.
These used to be the gaming event of the year, but it feels like they don’t even want to do it anymore. I remember being perplexed at the amount of vitriol that would get thrown around on the steam forums during previous sales. People would be absolutely enraged that steam’s awesome giveaways weren’t exactly in the format they wanted, or that steam had an awesome flash sale price on something and someone missed it and they decided that means steam was raping their mothers or something. Absolute vitriol, it was ridiculous. I almost feel like steam is saying “okay then, bitches - no free shit anymore, and no great prices anymore. Happy?” - Apparently yes. There was way more bitching on the steam forums when steam had free giveaways and great prices than there is now about the sale just being bad.
Masters of Orion is $15. Stellaris is also on sale, for $20. Anyone have experience with both games; recommend one over the other? Or are they both worthwhile?
Origin sale is up. Battlefield 1 is fantastic and worth the $36. I’d like to say Star Wars: Battlefront is worth $10, but with their console-style matchmaking and DLC-fragmented community I’m not sure how easy it is to actually find a game with just the base game.
There’s less bitching about the sale prices now because anyone who has been paying attention has seen this coming over the last year and a half. While others said “actually, no daily sales is great”, people keeping track saw discounts fade from 75 to 66 to maybe 50% if you’re lucky and games that used to be on sale for $5 in 2013 now go on sale for $7.49 in 2016.
The people who were being called whiners aren’t complaining because they saw the new normal coming and are already used to it.
One funny side effect of all this is watching the gaming sites sadly try to drum up interest as thought it were 2011 – “Is your wallet ready for these 33% savings from GabeN???”
Question–is there an easy way to see a friend’s Steam Wishlist? I’d like to buy my brother something from Steam for Christmas, but I can’t figure out how to get to his wishlist.
Edit: never mind, realized his profile’s private and that’s why I can’t find it.
I know I posted something similar regarding a previous sale this year, but I’m still troubled by the way what used to be a GOTY edition game would go on sale for like $20 with everything included, but these days it goes on sale for like $20 (at best), yet all of the DLC is still only 25-40% off, and selling for $10-15 each. So where I used to be able to buy an excellent 2-year-old game with everything for a good price, now I’d be shelling out $60-100 bucks for the same experience of not missing out on anything.
Not to mention the Season Pass bullshit which usually, but not always, means all of the DLC is included in that package, except of course for one or two DLCs - and good luck figuring out which is what.
It was easy for me to choose games I wanted on sale from about 2010-2014, but every sale since then has been a serious struggle for me.
This Winter Sale I’m running into an additional problem: The glut of small indie games that all seem to have “overwhelmingly positive” reviews, but almost all of them look to be like 10 hour borefests made with RPGMaker. I’d love to try out that delightful indie gem that transcends its milieu, but, seriously? Even the obvious iPhone pay-to-win ports sell themselves as the rare indie gem. And then I look at Reddit threads for such gems, but I swear many of the the top recommendations are bought and paid for by those same iPhone port bullshit games (paranoid? Man, you’re just not paranoid enough).
I dunno. Maybe I’m just an aging old-school gamer curmudgeon who’s lost the plot, but get this shit offa my lawn!
PS: So, uh, anyone have a no-bullshit recommendation for some must-have games on sale this year?
It’s on the Playstation 4, but The Telltale Games collection is currently £22 (£17 if you have Playstation Plus) down from £80, and is a lot of top-rated storytelling for that price. It’s the first 2 Walking Dead seasons, Wolf Among Us, Game of Thrones and Tales from the Borderlands. It even appears to include those episodes of the last two that haven’t been released yet.
Both Origin and GOG are having their holiday sales too, along with Steam.
Origin’s got Battlefield 1 for $36, Battlefront for $9.99 or $13 for the deluxe version, Titan fall 2 for %50 off and Dragon Age Inquisition for $9.99. Crysis 3 is $7, and just for the sheer graphical goodness it’s worth that price.
GOG has the Double Fine collection for super cheap.
The new Doom is very good, if you like the style. It’s as true to the original Doom formula as a game can get these days. Fast paced action, no reloading, double jumping, crazy weapons, tons of gore, just enough story to hold things together. I had a blast.
Yeah, DOOM was a lot of fun. First couple big fights I got tossed around until I realized the basic principle to killin’ stuff: Never stop moving. Nice change from all the scoped headshot shooters out there.
Steam is experiencing a DDOS attack which has it all shut down: Store, community, game services, etc. So if you can’t connect, that’s what’s happening.
There’s also a co-op (up to 4 players) mission mode that’s really only good if you know people to play with as the group lobby thing doesn’t work especially well. You can also solo the co-op missions if you’re careful.