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[GhostTrick]

Steam sales were engineered to be greater in the earlier years so people could expand their libraries and be further entangled in the service.

I dont think it's about that. Publishers decide the price of their games. This is why some games get good discount and others arent.

 

[Deleted member 1235]

For whatever reason the golden days are over. Still smart to buy only during sales though. Just use the watchlist for things you want and grab it when it's a good price

 

[ISee]

I agree with everything but point 2. I don't have the time to check regularly for deals.
PSN sales are becoming a bit more interesting than steam sales for me.

 

[R1CHO]

For Indies steam sales are still good.

For Aaa I find PSN sales better. With PS+*

Maybe in the US. In Europe I don't think that's the case.

 

[Timedog]

Doesn't personally bother me. I already bought hundreds upon hundreds of games, so now I spend less money buying games I'll never play. I'd rather spend less money on games that I'll never play than more money on games that I'll never play. There's still enough good deals throughout the year for as many quality games as a human could reasonably play.

I dont think it's about that. Publishers decide the price of their games. This is why some games get good discount and others arent.

Publishers were pressured into lower prices so that they could become a part of the flash sales.

 

[Unknown Soldier]

Ehhh, Steam had it good FOR TOO LONG. You were too comfortable, now enjoy 20% off.

By not offering good discounts on Steam, publishers are simply driving gamers to gray market resellers like CDkeys and black markets like G2A and Kinguin.

 

[ronaldthump]

You probably own everything already.
Another complication is that most of us have game libraries already in the hundreds or even thousands on Steam already, we are reaching a point in where we are becoming quite picky on what we buy and having to shift through the all the games that some guy has made in his bedroom that nobody really cares about. It is getting harder to find gems in the massive shovel-ware of indie and low budget titles and its going to get harder and harder to find games you want.

um, this really isn't the fault of steam. Anyhow mah backlog is cray!!!

 

[Skux]

They're no longer fun because you've already bought everything you wanted.

 

[Endgegner]

I think the main driver is Library Fatigue.

If you're old like me, and were in college during the age of Napster/Limewire/iPods, you'll remember the intense enthusiasm people had about building their music libraries. We went from a situation where one you paid $10-15 per CD just to be able to listen to a couple songs you liked, to having basically every song in the world available for free. It made us giddy and irrational. You'd hear a Jackson Browne song you kinda liked, and you'd go to Limewire to download it. Then you'd think, "I may as well get the greatest hits colllection in case I like something else of his." Fine. But then you'd think "Well I might REALLY end up liking his stuff" and next thing you know you're downloading his entire anthology including Japan-only releases and half a dozen concert recordings. We were crazy. Then, once the novelty wore off, we weren't.

Same thing happened with the Steam sales. The combination of the burgeoning indie scene, people discovering Steam, and developers discovering that they could make a ton of money by selling their games for peanuts (but more than making it up on scale), led to frenzied atmosphere that drove mass over-consumption. And it's not like people didn't know what they were doing. "I'll never be able to play all these games LOL!" and similar statements were common. But there was a novelty and pleasure merely in being able to acquire so many games. People would brag about how they were going to spend beyond their means to buy games they'd admittedly never have time to play...

Then, suddenly, it wasn't so cool. These days we've got more games than we have time, they're available at great prices, and all that shit is no longer novel.

We have so many great games in our backlogs already that it feels wasteful to buy another game you're not going to play, and especially if you're not going to play it *now.* And frankly, if there's a game that's out now and I have an urge to play it over the other highly-regarded games currently in my backlog, why am I waiting to save a few bucks on a Steam Sale? If I'm that excited I should just pull the trigger now. Lord knows I've saved enough money to pay full (or near full) price by no longer throwing $2 and $5 at random games to sit in my backlog.

100% how I feel.

Those less crazy sales make me think more about which game I actually want to play (and spend my money on). And that's good because I don't have the time to try the games I already own. Buying lots of games on top would decrease the value for me becuase I feel kinda but about all those unplayed games.

FWIW, my wishlist actually has a solid amount of nice sales on it - even if some might have been 90% off instead of 75% now.

 

[Kayhan]

Valve doesn't make games anymore and even the Steam sales are boring now.

You are dead to me, Valve. Dead!

 

[Tecnniqe]

They're no longer fun because you've already bought everything you wanted.

Yeah. With the addition of Steam literally blowing up during the sale and become unusable there is little incentive to do anything with it.

I got SE4 with a friend to play coop and that's about it...

I think the main driver is Library Fatigue.

If you're old like me, and were in college during the age of Napster/Limewire/iPods, you'll remember the intense enthusiasm people had about building their music libraries. We went from a situation where one you paid $10-15 per CD just to be able to listen to a couple songs you liked, to having basically every song in the world available for free. It made us giddy and irrational. You'd hear a Jackson Browne song you kinda liked, and you'd go to Limewire to download it. Then you'd think, "I may as well get the greatest hits colllection in case I like something else of his." Fine. But then you'd think "Well I might REALLY end up liking his stuff" and next thing you know you're downloading his entire anthology including Japan-only releases and half a dozen concert recordings. We were crazy. Then, once the novelty wore off, we weren't.

Same thing happened with the Steam sales. The combination of the burgeoning indie scene, people discovering Steam, and developers discovering that they could make a ton of money by selling their games for peanuts (but more than making it up on scale), led to frenzied atmosphere that drove mass over-consumption. And it's not like people didn't know what they were doing. "I'll never be able to play all these games LOL!" and similar statements were common. But there was a novelty and pleasure merely in being able to acquire so many games. People would brag about how they were going to spend beyond their means to buy games they'd admittedly never have time to play...

Then, suddenly, it wasn't so cool. These days we've got more games than we have time, they're available at great prices, and all that shit is no longer novel.

We have so many great games in our backlogs already that it feels wasteful to buy another game you're not going to play, and especially if you're not going to play it *now.* And frankly, if there's a game that's out now and I have an urge to play it over the other highly-regarded games currently in my backlog, why am I waiting to save a few bucks on a Steam Sale? If I'm that excited I should just pull the trigger now. Lord knows I've saved enough money to pay full (or near full) price by no longer throwing $2 and $5 at random games to sit in my backlog.

Hello me

 

[Jimrpg]

You probably own everything already.
Another complication is that most of us have game libraries already in the hundreds or even thousands on Steam already, we are reaching a point in where we are becoming quite picky on what we buy and having to shift through the all the games that some guy has made in his bedroom that nobody really cares about. It is getting harder to find gems in the massive shovel-ware of indie and low budget titles and its going to get harder and harder to find games you want.

It's this.

I wrote a thread about this - How many games is too many? For me 500 might be my limit. I can't play more than one a week realistically speaking. In fact this year I've only played 5 games so far cause they've been so long. 500 games would take me 10 years to complete.

At some point it's too many games. I have over 100 steam games I haven't beaten and its so ridiculous and I don't have any reason not to play them first.

 

[Alienfan]

Games are a lot more expensive to make now, they aren't exactly selling more and gamers aren't willing to pay more than $60 (with inflation, this is the cheapest AAA games have pretty much ever been). So I'm not really that upset about steam games not dropping to the price of a coffee like they did in the past, they're still more than reasonably priced.

 

[Upinsmoke]

The big games just have horrendous discounts. I usually keep an eye out for an older game that I don't have at like 75 percent off.

 

[KarmaCow]

I'm fine with sales being boring, it doesn't (or even shouldn't) need to be an all consuming event just to buy some games.

 

[CHC]

Humble Bundle / Monthly (or coupon codes for legitimate key sellers) seem to have supplanted the Steam Sale's value almost entirely.

 

[John Harker]

People were losing a lot of money in a non sustainable model and now people are making a little money and consumers are saving money.

Where the bad?

 

[Sad Affleck]

Daily deals and flash sales incentivized publishers to offer big discounts so that they would secure a guaranteed spot on Steam's front page. Prices for these games outside those dailies and flash sales weren't actually all that great even during the Steam Sales golden age.

 

[AcAnchoa]

I like how games had event related achievements, it made them a more entertaining period. Having said that and don't having that much time nowadays, I don't care that much about not having them, I just buy what I want during the first or second days and then forget about it.

 

[Real_Madrid]

It's a good thing imo that the race to the bottom is not longer going on. Games in the past got really really cheap at some point, while now even older games are mostly 5+ euro.

And I never understood why people thought that Steam sales were 'fun'. It's simply a sale for games and now we don't have to wait to buy stuff until the last day or check every 8 hours for new deals.
PC gaming got more popular, so getting rid of the daily deals and flash sales is something to make it more casual. How weird is it that you go to a digital store and buy stuff in a sale, to find out you should have waited until a certain day, in that sale, to buy it at a lower price.
Not everyone wants to check a digital gaming store every day, let alone every 8 hours.

 

[firehawk12]

I've basically stopped checking Steam now. I guess they're making people show up every day to do the queues and this new sticker book thing, but there was much more excitement with dailies and flash sales. Maybe the last cool thing they've done was that clicker game that someone wrote a script for. lol

 

[hobblygobbly]

I think it's mainly because people have gotten so used to it that the initial novelty has now slipped away naturally as it happens with anything new.

When Steam started having sales like this it was completely new to people, there never were sales in such a quantity for games before.

Now it's much more common place in general even outside of Steam, consoles also began doing much bigger sales after a while when Steam started doing it as well.

 

[roytheone]

I agree with all these points except missing the 8 hour flash deals. Those suck. Missing a great deal on a game you want because the time period falls in the middle of the night was terrible.

 

[AppleSeason]

I'm not sure if it is good or not, and it's more like "35% is the new 50%"


The way it feels for me this year, The discount rate looks much closer to what you would get on PSN, or even on the eshop, where if lucky you get a 35% after giving a blowjob to Miyamoto (and previously paying it in gold coins). Publishers don't seem desperate to sell anymore, and games that have proven their popularity year after year aren't even discounted.


This has some direct effects over my Steam purchasing habits. 10€ is the limit (5€ in previous years) I have for burning disposable cash in a title that has a 50% chance of becoming backlog meat. Anything over it, like those 15€ of Fallout 4 right now (I paid 15 for skyrim with all the expansions years ago, this hurts). and I will have to ask myself if I will ask if I really want to play this game. It's not "cheaper than a latte" anymore.


In a way it's good since it's putting an end to my compulsive binge buying during sales, but it's also sad since the usual motto of "It's expensive to get into PC gaming but you recover it on incredibly cheap games" it's going to be rendered obsolete. This year I haven't been able to buy anything because of those prices, as I have to really question if the investment is worth it. So instead of having the pc downloading new games until my router starts smoking, I'm ploughing through my Winter sale stash (bought under the effects of painkillers and being grounded on a hospital).

 

[Alchemy]

Yeah I've pretty much skipped on steam sales for a long time now. I used steam sales to pick up games I normally wouldn't when they hit extreme deals like $5 but now nothing hits that mark so I just stick to buying normal games I would without sales.

 

[Soodanim]

i can't help but feel like this attitude towards games not quite being 90% off is just greedy. Yes, I've bought some GOTY editions for extremely cheap before (either Oblivion or Skryrim for 5GBP), but I don't feel upset that we don't get those anymore. It's still business at the end of the day and we're not entitled to those. It's only worse in a relative sense. If I didn't have a backlog of far too much, I would buy a few things from my wishlist that are on sale. I might do it anyway, as PayPal are doing a fiver off Steam at the moment so that's free money.

Having said that, I missed a few daily deals on wishlist games recently and now they're on sale for more than that. It only works out to be a few quid's difference on each game, but I do wonder what goes into deciding the prices.

 

[Sidewinder]

Had CoD Blops I & II on my wishlist for a couple of years now and when it gets a discount it's always just 50% and still makes it 20.-...so I'm never gonna buy it, at least not on Steam. Not that I really want these games either, was just too lazy to delete my wishlist

Made the same observation like OP in general, well I don't mind, my PC is too old for new games now anyway so I don't buy shit I can't use just because it's cheap, lol.

 

[Azure Dream]

I really miss the fun of it. I don't own everything, and those specials and gimmicks really got me to make some impulse buy decisions. And it made it a real event. Now it's just "Oh, PC Games Walmart dropped a bunch of prices for two weeks. Ok." There's no reason to rush, or even really care. The discounts aren't that much better than standard, there's no freebies, nothing to obtain or keep attention.

GOG's gotten a little worse about it themselves, but they've done a better job of having interesting hooks for the bigger sales.

Steam Sales were never fun. Playing games is fun.

The sales themselves could be games. Hell, the Clicker event game was fantastic.

 

[QuixoticNeutral]

We have so many great games in our backlogs already that it feels wasteful to buy another game you're not going to play, and especially if you're not going to play it *now.* And frankly, if there's a game that's out now and I have an urge to play it over the other highly-regarded games currently in my backlog, why am I waiting to save a few bucks on a Steam Sale? If I'm that excited I should just pull the trigger now. Lord knows I've saved enough money to pay full (or near full) price by no longer throwing $2 and $5 at random games to sit in my backlog.

In the early years of flashy discount extravaganzas on Steam, we didn't see the ubiquitous chatter about "backlog" as it just wasn't acknowledged as a common, burdensome phenomenon while everyone was still excited about building their libraries. Now that so many players have reached library saturation, they all know to be more cautious and that whatever they don't pick up in this sale (for lack of time to play it) will just be discounted again later on.

These days I don't even bother dropping $1 on pay-what-you-want bundles even if there's something there I might want to play someday. It turns out that having "ownership" take the form of a digital license doesn't reduce the overall sense of clutter.

I've developed a tremendous respect for the developers of games like Factorio and RimWorld, who just state up front, "Our game costs $20 and will never go on sale." Combined with a consumer-friendly refund system, I buy what I play, no more and no less, and the developers don't get trapped in a race to the bottom. I've wound up paying more per game but buying far fewer titles, such that I'm paying less in aggregate and getting way more bang for my buck in terms of actually playing the stuff. Driving the value perception of games down to mobile levels and living or dying by volume is not at all sustainable for PC game developers in an overcrowded market.

 

[meirl]

so Publishers want Money? oh No so SAD.

 

[Nickle]

I haven't bought a Steam Sale game in years. I miss getting great games for $5.

 

[ArjanN]

It's guessing honestly it's 90% down to you having a large backlog now.

Someone newer to PC gaming can still pick up hundreds of great games they don't own yet for ridiculously low prices.

 

[Earthpainting]

For me it's that Humble Bundle has replaced Steam Sales. Whenever I'm actually interested in a game and have time to play it, I just get it regardless of the price. The allure of discounts by themselves do very little as a result. What I would love Steam Sales for though, was that it would throw together weird bundles of games I either didn't know about, or didn't seem quite interesting enough to buy on their own. These bundles stroked by impulse-buy senses, and I've discovered so many cool things this way. Over time though, most bundles have slowly been morphing into DLC collections, which just don't appeal to me.

Humble Bundle on the other hand still gives me these quirky collections I wanted. Humble Bundle also does this pretty much all year round. It's hard to be excited for Steam Sales when it barely does what I want, and another service does it better and more frequently.

 

[ultraJosh]

For me it's just the prices. The discounts just aren't good enough on anything I'm interested in for me to jump on. It also really doesn't help that I'm short on disposable income this week.

 

[texhnolyze]

The problem with sales is that people buy in bulk games that they won't ever play. The fact that you can hold on for this long to buy games proves that you're not really interested in playing them in the first place.

Nowadays, I just buy games that I know I will be playing right now, full price or not.

 

[Bradach]

I agree with all points in the OP. For those reasons and because I haven't upgraded my graphics card in some time I won't be getting anything in the sale.

I remember the excitement of steam sales past fondly though

 

[HP_Wuvcraft]

Why do people even directly buy from steam? It's a rip off compared to most digital stores such as cd keys.

You do realize that those reseller sites don't pay the devs at all, right? They are mostly all community based.

 

[FloatingDivider]

Steam sales are dead to me. Super dead. Didn't buy shit last winter sale, won't buy shit this sale. The discounts are terrible across the board, and the skeezy shit that goes on prior to steam sales with publishers raising the base price to offer a larger perceived discount is disgusting.

It's essentially at the point where there is nothing on the store homepage below 9,99€ and there isn't a single game I want below 14,99€ which is miles above my impulse purchase point. I'd take a chance on a game I might only play 30 minutes of for 2.49€ but now I only purchase shit I'm super certain I want to play. But if I'm certain I want to play it I might as well pick it up at release from a random internet store when the price is actually lower than it will be 6 to 12 months later on steam.

This is further compounded by the fact that virtually every game on offer has dlc that can double, triple, or quadruple (hello paradox games) the purchase price. And as a completionist type player I generally want the DLC but they make purchasing these games even more economically unfeasible.

It's not that I own everything because I sure don't, or that I don't want to add to my 600+ game backlog because I do, it's just that steam has priced me out. I enjoyed the flash sales and that entire period of steam sales a lot more than I enjoy clicking through bot compiled lists looking at games I'll never buy because they're too expensive and never get cheaper.

At this point I just buy new releases I'm interested in off of a third party reseller like gmg, and give humble somewhere between 12€ - 24€ a month to keep my supplied with a curated list of indie games I might be interested in.

 

[His Majesty]

Bought nothing last sale. Will probably buy nothing this sale.

Sad times. I used to be excited for Steam Sales, check the story every day at multiple times.

 

[SPCTRE]

I thought this was going to be about buying games and not playing them.

you mean about NeoGAF

 

[Lemstar]

You do realize that those reseller sites don't pay the devs at all, right? They are mostly all community based.

what is this post

 

[SeeNoWeevil]

that would be much better for consumers - but of course that's not what happened.
And it takes all of 30 seconds to check the latest deal on the mobile app. It's not some huge inconvenience.

You have got to be kidding if you think the dailies were consumer friendly. For normal people outside of the gaf bubble they would be a massive annoyance. People REALLY do not like buying things and seeing them get reduced even further shortly after. Who else even does this? Which other retailer has a big sale and then drops items even more for one short time period during that sale? There's a reason they don't. It's anti-consumer and it's annoying. And yes, checking the store all the time is a big inconvenience.

 

[Shiggy]

I haven't bought a single game directly through Steam yet, always Amazon, Humble Bundle/Store, some other bundle website, a retail code, or Kinguin. Was always cheaper elsewhere, or had some other bonuses at the same prices.

 

[ramparter]

Why buy a game at launch if it's gonna drop 75% at a sale? What happens now is healthier for the industry. If you really wanna play something and are actually going to, it's usually worth the price. I remember those ridiculous sales a few years ago, people were like "lol I got so many games I'm never playing" "rip wallet I bought another 10 games today" "someone stop me I bought x game 2 and I didnt even like the first one". It was like flea market buying crap you dont need.

 

[gelf]

I feel if your looking for the best deal on a specific game your better waiting for it to be in one of the regular weekend sales or for it to be in a humble bundle or similar. Most of my impulse spending happens outside these major sale events now.

Like was pointed out earlier in the thread it is weird when you see a game turn up in a bundle for less then it was ever on sale on it's own.

 

[Zepp Twofist]

You do realize that those reseller sites don't pay the devs at all, right? They are mostly all community based.

This isn't true for anything but the auction sites where it's user to user. Greenman, Gamesplanet and so on buys keys at reduced rates directly from devs/pubs and sell then at a lower rate which is possible because Steam doesn't charge anything for games activated through their client.

Everyone wins, even Steam because it pushes more people to their platform.

 

[Widge]

Fine with the format now. I can decide day one whether or not I want to buy. Discount levels seem fair too. Would I rather pay that or full price? The sale isn't the game for me.

 

[Reineldinho]

I think the main driver is Library Fatigue.

If you're old like me, and were in college during the age of Napster/Limewire/iPods, you'll remember the intense enthusiasm people had about building their music libraries. We went from a situation where one you paid $10-15 per CD just to be able to listen to a couple songs you liked, to having basically every song in the world available for free. It made us giddy and irrational. You'd hear a Jackson Browne song you kinda liked, and you'd go to Limewire to download it. Then you'd think, "I may as well get the greatest hits colllection in case I like something else of his." Fine. But then you'd think "Well I might REALLY end up liking his stuff" and next thing you know you're downloading his entire anthology including Japan-only releases and half a dozen concert recordings. We were crazy. Then, once the novelty wore off, we weren't.

Same thing happened with the Steam sales. The combination of the burgeoning indie scene, people discovering Steam, and developers discovering that they could make a ton of money by selling their games for peanuts (but more than making it up on scale), led to frenzied atmosphere that drove mass over-consumption. And it's not like people didn't know what they were doing. "I'll never be able to play all these games LOL!" and similar statements were common. But there was a novelty and pleasure merely in being able to acquire so many games. People would brag about how they were going to spend beyond their means to buy games they'd admittedly never have time to play...

Then, suddenly, it wasn't so cool. These days we've got more games than we have time, they're available at great prices, and all that shit is no longer novel.

We have so many great games in our backlogs already that it feels wasteful to buy another game you're not going to play, and especially if you're not going to play it *now.* And frankly, if there's a game that's out now and I have an urge to play it over the other highly-regarded games currently in my backlog, why am I waiting to save a few bucks on a Steam Sale? If I'm that excited I should just pull the trigger now. Lord knows I've saved enough money to pay full (or near full) price by no longer throwing $2 and $5 at random games to sit in my backlog.

Fantastic post

 

[Haunted]

Mr.Orange and Fabtacular with the cold hard truth.

 

[Robot Pants]

Yea when obduction can't even get below 20 bucks you know the sales have lost their magic