Steam Christmas Sale Dec 22 - Jan 4

MiskyBoyy

Wtf did you really go back through all the old threads to post that? More the power to you lol

Monotype

MiskyBoyy wrote: »

Wtf did you really go back through all the old threads to post that? More the power to you lol

I can quote it again next year when someone moans about the 2016 sale not being as good!

Kiith

I also don't think they've gotten worse over the last few years. It's a mix of us owning a lot of the titles that we wouldn't have bought at full price, and having access to key selling sites that offer games at really low prices all year round. Even with that, there were 5 or 6 games i was seriously looking at.

Links234

strelok wrote: »

good

pc gamers can't just lurch from sale to sale only buying games when they're 50% off and then expect developers/publishers to give a **** about them when releasing or even designing games.

They make more from selling games cheaper. This is a little old, but you get the idea. More discounts, way more people buying.

“The sale is a highly promoted event that has ancillary media like comic books and movies associated with it. We do a 75 percent price reduction, our Counter-Strike experience tells us that our gross revenue would remain constant. Instead what we saw was our gross revenue increased by a factor of 40. Not 40 percent, but a factor of 40. Which is completely not predicted by our previous experience with silent price variation.”

This doesn't translate into people not buying games on release either, consider that how well Fallout 4 sold.

We knew it sold at least 1.2 million units on its first day of sale PC alone, and after 10 days, Fallout 4 has reached over 2 million units sold, according to the latest Steamspy numbers.

PC gamers generally are still buying day 1 releases, pre-orders, what have you, but they're buying games that are on sale as well. The discounts don't eat into the day 1 sales because the people buying at a discount wouldn't have stumped up the cash for a day 1 release in the first place, they're widening the demographic of people who are buying their games.

nesf

strelok wrote: »

good

pc gamers can't just lurch from sale to sale only buying games when they're 50% off and then expect developers/publishers to give a **** about them when releasing or even designing games.

But they clearly don't do that. For every game that comes out there are a group who'll buy it full price and a group who will only buy it discounted. Publishers know this and go through several stages of pricing for games with both PC games and console games because they make more money this way. They were doing this long before Steam was a thing, though it was far more awkward with physical copies. They just know that if a 50% discount is six months away at least a lot of people will buy Fallout 4, Witcher 3, XCOM 2 etc at full price rather than wait. This isn't even something restricted to gaming, it's a pretty common marketing strategy.

Mr. CooL ICE

Although I've had a steam account for years, I really only started buying games in general and through the sales since I gave up WoW in 2013, which I pretty much played exclusively. The 2014 sales were feckin brilliant. I bought so much stuff that I still haven't played yet and was making up for lost time (the irony...). 2015 sales weren't as good and I put it down to me having everything I want.

My anecdote kinda backs up Monotypes point above. Steam sales aren't worse. Just different.

Links234

One thing that kinda messed up this sale was Ubisoft ****ing around, the discounts on a lot of their games were quite poor, and they seemed to have set their own daily deals. Another argument could be made that the change in format has just taken a lot of excitement out of the sale for people, but again that's different and not necessarily worse.

bpb101

There's a group of people who won't buy games on consol and just buy it pre-owned. If they sale a game on pc at 80% off. Then at least they get 20% of what they normally would get.better than nothing

J Mysterio

I bought 'Her Story' and 'Hard West'.

Fairly dissapointed in Hard West to be honest. Seems quite shallow and theres no continuity in it.

I did start playing a few games in my backlog though. Had fun with Knights of Honour for a while. Surely must be the basis for Total War and the Crusader Kings games.

muppetkiller

This is my first Steam sale ever that I didn't buy something. And it's purely because I think I must own everything on steam at this stage. And I've probably played 20 of them

Links234

J Mysterio wrote: »

Fairly dissapointed in Hard West to be honest. Seems quite shallow and theres no continuity in it.

Pity you didn't enjoy it. Did you get a refund on it?

sirboby

i know alot of people are complaning about the steam sale, but for me this is my second steam sale were i had some money to spend and it was easily the better one. it might be down to me buying alot of cheaper games this time rather than a few dearer games.

J Mysterio

Links234 wrote: »

Pity you didn't enjoy it. Did you get a refund on it?

No. I heard you had to play less than 2 hours or something?

Links234

J Mysterio wrote: »

No. I heard you had to play less than 2 hours or something?

Yeah, that's the general rule.

Robert ninja

I think the idea of refunding because it wasn't what you expected is if you got the genre wrong or something crucially misunderstood when you bought it. Like maybe you didn't think it was turn based, multiplayer or story-heavy. Becayse beyond those kinds of things it's hard to really say you want your money back after 2 hours of a game... for most games, anyway.

LFC CONNAUGHTON

I hope they can somehow implement a better refunds system so they can return to daily deals and such without having their returns system f**ked over. Without them, the discounts are definitely worse in general and I felt no real need to return to the store daily.

Links234

The lack of daily deals seem to have worked out for valve financially speaking, https://steamdb.info/forum/790/