Steam Early Holiday Sale

[Super Jamie]

Steam are putting a different set of games on sale each day for the next 5 days. Discounts seem to range from 25% off to 80% off. There's a timer so you can check when the next bunch of games go on sale.

http://store.steampowered.com/early-holiday

[Shaikoten]

Some of those deals are insane. Sometimes it's very, very hard to hate Steam. I mean come on, $50 for 15 THQ games, many of which still retailing for $40?

You save: $339.83

$339.83.

W.
T.
F.

Win.

[Technician]

But, But, Steam is gay!

[Patrick]

SHHHHH DONT TELL ENJAY!!!

Also, I have been using steam for over a year now and had no problems with it. It works like it is intended.

[Graf Zahl]

Patrick said:

SHHHHH DONT TELL ENJAY!!!
It works like it is intended.

Which is the problem many are having with it! :D

[Doom Marine]

Sick deals. I would've loved to grab some of those but I still have half a dozen Steam games I haven't even had the chance to finish.

One of the biggest bang-for-the-buck deal was Overlord, Overlord: Raising Hell, and Overlord II for $9 bucks a couple of weeks ago.

[negke]

Yes, nice deals... unless you live in a Euro country. >:(

[Gez]

neg!ke said:

Yes, nice deals... unless you live in a Euro country. >:(

Their "$1 == €1" policy is very annoying. For example, their Dragon Age 25% off is still more expansive (€37.49) than buying the disc version of the game from Amazon.co.uk (£24.99 -> about €28.50), even after adding shipping costs.

But they're not the only merchants who assume that parity between euros and dollars. That game's official retail price is $50 in the USA, and €50 in the Eurozone -- but £35 pounds in the UK. For those who don't know the exchange rates between the currencies, they're about around these values:
£1.00 = €1.10 = $1.65
€1.00 = £0.90 = $1.50
$1.00 = €0.66 = £0.60

A price parity between € and £ would make a lot more sense than this price parity between € and $. Oh well, at least it validates my choice of getting the original English versions of the games. My original motivation is avoiding the atrocious dubbing and horrible translation choices you usually find in localized versions; but this way it's cheaper too!

[Enjay]

Shaikoten said:

Sometimes it's very, very hard to hate Steam.

I still seem to be managing. ;)

[destx]

Enjay said:

I still seem to be managing. ;)

Uh-huh. When's the last time you used it?

[Enjay]

destx said:

Uh-huh. When's the last time you used it?

I don't. However, I'm not judging a book solely by its cover. I have friends who use it and whilst it may run more efficiently than it used to, it still has at its core the fundamentally offensive (to me) principle of the user still needs to ask it for permission to play a game that they have bought, it forces updates on the user, monitors what is being played and is an advertising portal direct to a person's desktop.

It may be offering sweeteners to its user-base but, just like being slipped some Rohypnol, your still going to get fucked. :P

[Sharessa]

Shaikoten said:

Some of those deals are insane. Sometimes it's very, very hard to hate Steam. I mean come on, $50 for 15 THQ games, many of which still retailing for $40?

You save: $339.83

$339.83.

W.
T.
F.

Win.

It's not hard to make a profit when you're not selling anything physical, though I suppose you can argue that they're losing money due to bandwidth.

Anyway, I actually installed Steam again and this time it didn't assrape my computer, so I guess it's here to stay. Seems a pretty good way to buy games without losing them, though I prefer just getting physical games.

[Doom Marine]

Osmos is a fun game, $2 is a steal.

[LexiMax]

Oh god, Left 4 Dead 2 25% off. The 4-pack apparently got a deep discount too.

There goes my resolve...

[Zafbot]

i love steam :D

than again the only multiplayer game i play on steam is cs

[Creaphis]

Selling games this way, even 80% off, actually makes a lot of economic sense. First of all, bandwidth is cheap, and second, low prices such as these encourage people to buy your games who didn't buy them when they were new, and never would have bought them otherwise - so in this way, fresh profit is pulled out of thin air. This even combats piracy to an extent, because this demographic of people who want to play a game but not pay full price for it may turn from piracy to legal sources if they're made economical, and Steam definitely does this. What would you rather do: Pore through torrent sites looking for one that actually has seeders so that you can slowly download some crude hack-job of a crack that may not crash your system and definitely won't work for online multiplayer? OR, search Steam, pay a few bucks, download your game from dedicated download servers, and play? Getting cheap games through Steam is a better return on your effort than piracy.

[Reisal]

Dead Space for $15? That's a steal! *purchases*

[Zaldron]

Enjay said:

I don't. However, I'm not judging a book solely by its cover. I have friends who use it and whilst it may run more efficiently than it used to, it still has at its core the fundamentally offensive (to me) principle of the user still needs to ask it for permission to play a game that they have bought, it forces updates on the user, monitors what is being played and is an advertising portal direct to a person's desktop.

It may be offering sweeteners to its user-base but, just like being slipped some Rohypnol, your still going to get fucked. :P

# It doesn't stop you from playing games if you don't validate against their servers (it tends to do it if you're online but it won't forbid you from playing in offline mode). It's no more complex (albeit slower to startup) than a cd-check.

# Updates are bad?

# It only advertises its own deals.

[DuckReconMajor]

i bought doom on steam and it is all retarded

[Enjay]

Zaldron said:

# It doesn't stop you from playing games if you don't validate against their servers (it tends to do it if you're online but it won't forbid you from playing in offline mode). It's no more complex (albeit slower to startup) than a cd-check.

My friend had problems with it allowing him to play a game in offline mode - it wanted to go online to give him permission to play. On another day, his ISP went down and eventually Steam went apeshit because it couldn't connect and do what it wanted to do and it brought his system to a standstill. It just kept popping up messages every little while and then eventually hung. What's more, he didn't even need it to be running at the time. It was just doing it because it was running in the background as part of its default install setting.

Slower to start up is a problem for me, especially when slower to start up means it's using my particularly slow internet connection to do it. That makes it very slow to start up. And I'm sorry, it still comes down to asking a remote computer for permission to play. I find that far more insidious than a game just checking if you have a disk in the drive. And slower to start up can mean very, very slow if the remote servers are down. It doesn't happen often, but it can, and does, happen.

Zaldron said:

# Updates are bad?

They can be, yes. Huge downloads you don't want. Changes to game content that you don't like etc etc. I have seen a game on Steam refuse to start until an update was downloaded. The download was a few hundred megabytes and it was an unnecessary update for the user concerned and got in then way of a "I think I'll just fire up and play for a few minutes" gaming session.

Zaldron said:

# It only advertises its own deals.

I don't care. I don't want it to advertise to me. I find tailored advertising of this type more offensive in many ways than the random type. Also, it's a lot more than deals. A lot of "news" that it gives you is just advertising in sheep's clothing. If its unsolicited, it's no better than spam mail.

[TheeXile]

Doom Marine said:

Osmos is a fun game, $2 is a steal.

Oh awesome. Thanks for pointing that one out.

Shame it's not 2$ anymore.

[destx]

DuckReconMajor said:

i bought doom on steam and it is all retarded

What? no it isn't. it's just plain old doom being run through DOSBox. You can copy the wads and other files and do whatever you like with them. It's the same as installing the game from CD or floppy.

Enjay said:

I don't care. I don't want it to advertise to me. I find tailored advertising of this type more offensive in many ways than the random type. Also, it's a lot more than deals. A lot of "news" that it gives you is just advertising in sheep's clothing. If its unsolicited, it's no better than spam mail.

You can turn advertising off. It's not hard. I actually turned it back on because it's nice to know when a new game is available.

While I understand your immense frustration with Steam (When I first used it I was on dialup too) but it really does shine when everything works as intended - which it usually does, I haven't had any problems in the past year and I've been playing more games with my friends than ever. I think it's inevitable that one day you will see the light and you will joooiiinnn ussssss

[Patrick]

uhh, DRM is making a joke about when you register on the Doomworld forums. See for yourself

And what did I just tell you all about asking Enjay about Steam???? Sheeesh, this shouldn't just be a custom title, this should be a forum rule.

[DuckReconMajor]

destx said:

What? no it isn't. it's just plain old doom being run through DOSBox.

Well, I was making that joke, but seriously, it is pretty screwed up. The Steam version of Doom comes with no Setup.exe, so you can't easily change the key bindings. I still have yet to find out how to make the mouse behave normally. Choosing between games is done with autoexecs at the end of a bunch of config files that are a pain to go through. You're much better off downloading DOSBox yourself and getting it to run.

[destx]

Whoops. :B I didn't know about that registration thing, haha. Derp.

But you're right, DuckReconMajor. It is pretty pathetic that they didn't include setup.exe. I must have just grabbed the wad and ran, I think I only ever ran it via Steam once.

[TheeXile]

Why didn't they just use some decent source port instead?

Not that it's hard to do it yourself, of course.

[Zaldron]

Enjay:

1) No game I own ever did this to me. Besides, "slow" internet connections have no bearing on this transaction. We're talking about some kind of tunneled TCP encrypted challenge, I'm pretty sure a Wireshark capture wouldn't yield more than 10KB of data. But, if you prefer asking "permission" to a piece of plastic via a rootkit/driver, I guess that's ok. Myself, I dont't even own an optical drive any more.

2) No game I own ever did this. Are these impressions up to date? I agree it should let you skip on patches, but it seems a bit of a no-issue, what game would you rather not patch? I can't think of a single one.

3) I loathe ads too, but it's just a small window that shows up after you quit the game, if at all. Can be closed even before it downloads the offers. It's ten times less offensive than your typical unskippable EA/nVidia/Ati/Developer binks.

[Super Jamie]

Zaldron said:

what game would you rather not patch?

Diablo! OMG need my item dupe bug :P

[Creaphis]

Patrick said:

uhh, DRM is making a joke about when you register on the Doomworld forums.

Haha, I knew I'd read that somewhere. Good work DRM.

[Zaldron]

Super Jamie said:

Diablo! OMG need my item dupe bug :P

Not even in Steam!