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Steam Summer Sale 2016 |OT| It's better than nothing

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Think I'm just going with Dragon's Dogma and The Amber Throne for now. Plenty of time to pick something up later if I burn through these or go for a refund. Gotta leave room for the inevitable deals thread, too.
 
Ok what. My Steam wallet was declined, I then tried to purchase the games again but it says I already own them. Apparently I do now, but no money was drawn, and I didn't get a receipt.
 
Tertullian said:
Has anyone ever done a serious analysis on how good the deals are on Steam are now vs. 3-4 years ago? Because it really does feel like they've gotten way shittier over time, and I swear it's not just in my head.

I've never seen so many piddly 20%, 33%, 50% sales featured. You used to routinely see AAA games going for 75% off a year or two after release. Some games are still following that pattern roughly (e.g. DOOM at 40% right after release), but man, there's a lot of hot nothing. Games with no discount at all, games with worse discounts than the GOG sale that just ended, games with higher prices than earlier Steam sales, three-year-old indie games with shockingly stingy 33% off tags. Seems like we're finally seeing the end of Steam as an actual source of decent deals.
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In-depth? No, but I remember just last year sort of doing some highlights on this (at least "perceived") phenomenon:
Nordicus said:
I did a quick check on Steam Summer Sale 2012, and I would agree that at least in AAA space, discounts have lessened.

In general, the crazy discounts during summer sale 2012 that you could expect from AAA games that are 7-12 months old, essentially releasing the fall of previous year, you currently have to wait for minimum 13-18 months at least. So, the spring of previous year, or sooner. I'm not including some of the crazier sales of summer 2012 in that, here's a few examples of those:

Max Payne 3 was released roughly 6 weeks before the sale. It went 50% off

Deus Ex: Human Revolution was released August 2011, so 11 months prior. It cost 6 euros to buy, and I think the regular price had lowered already at that point.

Saints Row the Third and LA Noire were both released November 2011. 7,49€

WH40K Spacemarine, released in September, was 5€

Some crazy shit went down in 2012, lemme tell ya.
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HP_Wuvcraft said:
And it is thousand of dollars.

You would think they'd be on their shit by now.

I mean. If you can't even run Steam for what it was made for....
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So ideally I agree with you, but let's be honest, Valve does the absolute minimum with Steam. They don't do one scintilla more than they have to at this point. Too busy making VR demos I suppose.
 
Stevey said:
Nice first day, cleared a bit of the wishlist.

House of Hell
Starship Traveller
Serpent in the Staglands
Mafia II
Offworld Trading Company
STASIS
Caverns of the Snow Witch
Appointment With FEAR
Far Cry® 4
Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak
The Forest of Doom
UnderRail
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If you are expecting daily deals you are in for a disappointing day 2.
 
Anyone else having issues with purchases being processed? Bought a few games, and they show up in history as bought with my Wallet funds and are in library, but the funds haven't been deducted from my Wallet yet and I haven't gotten the confirmation email
 
More_Badass said:
Anyone else having issues with purchases being processed? Bought a few games, and they show up in history as bought with my Wallet funds and are in library, but the funds haven't been deducted from my Wallet yet and I haven't gotten the confirmation email
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I have literally been trying to buy doom for hours now.
 
More_Badass said:
Anyone else having issues with purchases being processed? Bought a few games, and they show up in history as bought with my Wallet funds and are in library, but the funds haven't been deducted from my Wallet yet and I haven't gotten the confirmation email
Click to expand...

Yeah, had the exact same thing happen.
 
Bundle Stars has an additional 5% off code right now and some things on sale for the same price as Steam before the additional 5% off.

So if you're looking for the cheapest deal possible you might want to take a glance, although there is no where near as much stuff on sale as is currently on Steam.
 
More_Badass said:
Anyone else having issues with purchases being processed? Bought a few games, and they show up in history as bought with my Wallet funds and are in library, but the funds haven't been deducted from my Wallet yet and I haven't gotten the confirmation email
Click to expand...

I purchased 5 games and have them all installed but never received the confirmation email, or even a confirmation screen after hitting purchase.
 
If I was going to pick up a recent COD release just to check out the campaign, which one would you recommend? The last one I played was Modern Warfare 2.
 
That bundle link from a few pages ago is a 404 for me, is there any other place to see what bundles there are since the steam store front page has zero reference to anything?>
 
More_Badass said:
Anyone else having issues with purchases being processed? Bought a few games, and they show up in history as bought with my Wallet funds and are in library, but the funds haven't been deducted from my Wallet yet and I haven't gotten the confirmation email
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I bought some stuff and it shows as pending in the history, it's in my library but I can't install it yet.
 
Chris R said:
That bundle link from a few pages ago is a 404 for me, is there any other place to see what bundles there are since the steam store front page has zero reference to anything?>
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One way to check is search a game that would be in the bundle and on that game's store page it should include a link to any bundle it is part of.
 
More_Badass said:
Anyone else having issues with purchases being processed? Bought a few games, and they show up in history as bought with my Wallet funds and are in library, but the funds haven't been deducted from my Wallet yet and I haven't gotten the confirmation email
Click to expand...

Probably everyone. Valve never implements the needed enhancements to guarantee smooth operations during sales. I haven't bought any games but I'm having the same issue with buying some trading cards.
 
Here's what I'll most likely buy this year:

Banished - £5.09
Dying Light: The Following - Enhanced Edition - £19.99
Day of the Tentacle Remastered - £6.59
Monkey Island: Special Edition Bundle - £2.74
The Long Dark - £5.09
SOMA - £11.59
Stardew Valley - £8.79

Total - £59.78 (from a budget of £60)

Any objections, GAF? I've played none of the games before and I've got two months of time off to get through them all.
 
M3U6jul.jpg


Ok. First time that ever happened.
 
How is Steam having this many issues after so many years of having big sales? They should know what to expect by now in terms of volume and bandwidth.

I mean, if they don't want my money I probably shouldn't be buying Doom right now anyways..
 
Tertullian said:
Has anyone ever done a serious analysis on how good the deals are on Steam are now vs. 3-4 years ago? Because it really does feel like they've gotten way shittier over time, and I swear it's not just in my head.

I've never seen so many piddly 20%, 33%, 50% sales featured. You used to routinely see AAA games going for 75% off a year or two after release. Some games are still following that pattern roughly (e.g. DOOM at 40% right after release), but man, there's a lot of hot nothing. Games with no discount at all, games with worse discounts than the GOG sale that just ended, games with higher prices than earlier Steam sales, three-year-old indie games with shockingly stingy 33% off tags. Seems like we're finally seeing the end of Steam as an actual source of decent deals.
Click to expand...

Well there are a few big differences between now and then. In years past, publishers (who set their prices) were on-board with limited-time super-discounts such as Daily Deals because it was a good way to promote their product, promote the Steam sales, and not lose out on much because their discounts were only active for a day. If you missed the price, too bad. If you bought that game the day before for full price before it went on sale, too bad. This means the publishers would get to keep all their revenue, and I'm sure they got more than a few "Hey go buy the new Max Payne game on steam, it's on sale!" after it had already ended, from people that didn't know any better.

Now, we have refunds. Which are great from a consumer protection standpoint. This means if you bought something yesterday (or two weeks ago) that's on sale today, you can refund the game and repurchase it at the lower price. The downside to this is that "daily deals" and "flash sales" have been entirely phased out because publishers weren't willing to discount their games for a limited amount of time. If they did, they could potentially lose a lot of their previous two weeks worth of revenue for that game as people refunded and repurchased at the lower price. Because there are no daily deals, Valve has publishers set the same price for their games for the entire 2 week duration of the sale. Most publishers don't want their games to be super-discounted for an entire two weeks, so we end up seeing the somewhat mediocre-feeling deals we've had the past few sales since refunds have been around.

In addition to all this, Steam is bigger now than it ever has been. Publishers don't need to attract buyers with a 75% discount, because they've worked out the math and know that they'll make more money putting something on a 50% discount even with a lower percentage of Steam users purchasing their game. While in the past they would have been fighting for a slice of the 50 million user's wallets, now they're content on a smaller percent of the 150 million (or more) users buying at a lower discount.

Even then, it wasn't ALL great and we still had daily deals where 33% - 40% were common. This example is from the Summer 2014 sale.

Uzbzr0L.png


As others have no doubtably mentioned already, the sale will also seem more enticing if you don't already own a large number of the games on offer.
 
Finally got to check out.

4 hours of work, $25 spent. That's about the price:dollar ratio of some games, so... decent game. Three out of five.
 
Homeworld Remastered & Homeworld Deserts of Kharak are an absolute steal at the current prices!

If you enjoy RTS, go grab those games!
 
Cozmogramma said:
M3U6jul.jpg


Ok. First time that ever happened.
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Check in the purchase history, you will see under the games you just bought a "Pending".

Never happened to me either, considering that this is clearly an issue they are having, I dunno what will happen, if they will fire the request later automatically or just delete the requests because of the server (or whatever) issues.
 
Cozmogramma said:
M3U6jul.jpg


Ok. First time that ever happened.
Click to expand...

I have been having a lot of these issues on Steam lately. Whenever I buy something and the process is about to be completed, it freezes and keeps doing like it's updating, then an hour or two later I get the confirmation email and only then is the game in my library.

It happened since the start of 2016. Before that I got a confirmation in 1 minute.
 
First post should make it clear that dailies are no more in a massive red, bolded font, with caps lock on. Maybe some anime next to it to grab people's attention even more.
 
Speevy said:
Wait, so nothing is changing prices at all during this sale? I thought it was just the flash sales that were gone.

That sucks.
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What you see is what you get for the whole sale which is a bummer.

I've been doing steam sales for years now and this is the first time it's ever been this bad usually the store will be wonky for 10-20 minutes maybe even up to an hour for some but 4 hours later and people still having massive problems? I just wanna buy Doom :(
 
Interesting.

There's a section on the store front for content of games you own, and it's showing me DLC and additional episodes of games I've removed from my library.

I'll never forget these purchases with how they're thrown in my face.
 
Tempted by the metroidvania bundle. I don't have momorrada, shantae, or axiom verge and all 3 are on my wishlst...but at the same time the discount is only so so and backlog...
 
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