TheFightingFish said:
These sales have actually changed the way that I think about my backlog. With console games I used to try to always keep my backlog down and quickly trade in stuff that I wasn't using any more. There was a bit of a feeling of guilt watching the trade in prices tick down on games that were just sitting in my cabinet.
But with a gaming PC and Steam sales I now just considers about 60-70 bucks a year an investment in my PC digital library. I don't pay more than about $15 for any one game so that 60 translates to about 10 or 12 games which I can pull up anytime from Steam when I'm in the mood. It's true that for some games that I don't play I might have been able to buy them cheaper, but with $15 starting prices and the fact that you can't trade them in it seems like less of a deal with Steam games. It more like a "Steam subscription" like Zune or Rhapsody for music where I get a whole convenient catalog at my disposal for a fee of X bucks as opposed to individual game purchases.
I also feel a lot less guilty not sinking lots of time into games. Pickup something for $5 playing it until it gets boring in 8 hours or so and then kicking it to the curb is way easier with a big Steam catalog to browse through. I end up getting way more gaming experiences in one year when I play this way.
Sorry, kinda random long post there. This last sale just got me thinking about how Steam changed my gaming habits over the last year or so.
steam* is the true blue ocean strategy. with the fiscal barrier to entry at ankle height, and all the weird and wonderful gaming delicacies of the globe brought right to your dinner plate, there's an entire generation of gamers whose tastes have had a nuclear bomb of eclecticism dropped on them.
when you see a collection of dirty no-name upstarts flying high above 3-month old aaa blockbusters in the steam charts, you can almost feel the heat from the perspiring brow of those who wish to condense the industry into a boy's-own-club of publishing juggernauts.
this sort of eclectic growth is a one way street, broadening and heightening your expectations, honing the critical faculties. there's nothing inherently
masterful about dropping a grand on an i7 powered dragster, filling it with cheap steam games and photobombing threads with upscaled console ports. but to step out of your immediate comfort zone and embrace the daunting diversity, diving head first into games you have no prior facilities to master or even maneuver your way through, to become -- in essence -- a well traveled gamer, the plane tickets have never been cheaper or easier to come by. and if you come across a little elitist while debating the finer points of this world with people who refuse to drive their pickup past the borders of their deerfuck nowhere town, so be it.
*using steam as shorthand for the broader digitial-downloadscape.