It is happening now.. The money drain is just like last time. All-enveloping and inescapable. A particular good deal is Saints Row The Third: The Full Package. It is $12.49 and has all the inane DLC stuff for the game. But I think this one stops tomorrow, so buy it today if you want it. It is currently 75% off the normal price. That is not bad at all. Steam wants us digging through their offerings every day for some reason. Post what you think is worthwhile. Other games I think people here will like include these: Civilization 5 GOTY. $24.99 The Witcher 2 Enhanced Edition. $14.99 The Witcher 1 Enhanced Edition Directors Cut. $2.49 There will be more added as time goes on, but these are the best deals at the moment in my never humble opinion. Certain games like Fallout 3 GOTY and Fallout New Vegas Ultimate Edition are more expensive this time than they were last time. But they are likely still very much worth the price if you do not have them yet. *Edit* I rarely login to Steam at all. So I guess I missed more than half of this sale. It clearly started on the 21st. And here, the 24th I finally found it. Oh well.
Omni promoting Steam? Things sure have changed! I bought three games yesterday: Zeno Clash (it was 0.99$ and I heard it's unique), SimCity 4 mostly for nostalgic reasons, and Max Payne 3.
I'm sad Simcity 4 isn't deluxe on Steam. I'm still waiting on Torchlight II 75% off. That would be my best deal. Also, bought Two Worlds II because the worlds look gorgeous.
I have bought nothing from the Steam sale, because I am penniless. And there is little I want that is Steam-exclusive. However, I have been spending some dollar-dollar on the GamersGate sale.
Yeah. I used to hate Steam with a vengeance. But time and lack of other options pushed me over, and to be honest, it has been pretty reasonable with me. I see Steam as a Software tax. No-one likes paying when there are ways around it, but when you pay the taxes, you usually get a good return for your money. (Just like taxes in real life.) The only thing I still absolutely hate about Steam is the license. They literally can close your account and deny you access to every game you ever bought at any time without reasons or even an explanation. And your only recourse for this is to pay for mandatory arbitration, and they can just deny that if they want to. Desura does not have so vicious a contract. And has mostly equal prices, but Steam has sales pretty often and at times they can be absolutely cheap. But Desura has support issues too. (Not that Steam does not, but Desura has worse problems in many cases.)
I briefly played Two Worlds II, and found the controls made the game unplayable, at least for me. But as always, ymmv. I did pick up Evochron Mercenary for about $14.95, because someone was extolling its virtues yesterday in the Elite Dangerous thread. I made it through the tutorial unscathed -- so far so good.
I bought Portal 2 while it was 75% off. I was going to get geneforge 1-5 for €9.99, then totalbiscuit clued me in that it was available in the 5 for $10 deal over at gog.com (which has some very nice games to pick from!), still available for 2 days 8 hours as of this writing. (Personally my $10 picks was geneforge 1-5, botanicula, torchlight, defcon and anomaly: warzone earth), if you like a lot of the game choices you could even grab two 5 for $10 deals. http://www.gog.com/pick_5_pay_10 I'm considering borderlands 2 at 50% off, and if I don't see a better deal by the 27th, I might grab witcher 2 50% off(but for now holding off on it in case it gets a greater discount).
A lot of real life is like that too, amusingly enough - if e.g. your ISP no longer wants you as a customer, they aren't forced to keep you on. I'm fairly sure, however, that any game such as dredmor (that you can run externally to steam) will work as intended if your service is removed.
Exactly. There's a risk even when the law, contracts, or whatever, are on your side. The good news is that even when there is no law or contract protecting you, it is USUALLY in the best interest of the parties involved to keep you happy (and thus a returning customer), and that, in most cases, is enough to rest easy. Certainly, not everyone is generally trustworthy, but when you are dealing with businesses, you can USUALLY trust that those people will want to continue to do business with as many customers as they can manage to get and keep. Exceptions usually come down to fly-by-night companies with little overhead who are in it just for a quick buck. If you were around back in the 1980s, there used to be tons of these small PC companies that would sell cheap, often DOA computers and peripherals, then go out of business and reopen under a completely new name. Anyone frugal/foolish enough to have purchased a computer from them would be up the creek with a worthless warranty, and without hope of repairs, replacements, or refunds Well-established companies tend not to do that sort of thing because they want your continued business. Another example are grey-ware companies, that sell cheap software that are actually from other regions. You think you are getting a great deal because you are getting a software product for real cheap. And it's true, that you are. However, what they don't tell you (and which some people are not clued in enough to realize) is that you may not be able to register that software, and you may also lose out on being able to run other software that you may have purchased, even legitimately from that publisher. It's not illegal, per se, but you technically are breaching a contract by trying to register the software outside of the proper region. So there are exceptions. But if you play nice, and the company you are dealing with is well-established, odds are that they will play nice as well.
Yeah. As I said, Steam has been good to me. The only worrying thing is that I have heard of people getting their entire account busted for "Hacking" by doing something to change memory values in a single-player game. This is something I do regularly. Back when I started the Borderlands Co-Op thread I stated that I was making new characters since I had cheated with my single player characters. I do not anticipate anything I do to cause trouble for me. But if it does I will be ranting and raving like a 'flipped-out 'loon.
I have not read the Eula (I'm sure I'd fall asleep before getting to the end of it). But I bet that there is something in there about editing memory values. You may actually be doing something quite innocuous, but they may either assume that anyone willing to break their Eula over something so innocuous, would be equally likely to do worse -- they may not be able to catch every perpetrator, so they are erring on the side of computer security. And they simply do not want to go to the time and effort to establish the details of each and every incident. I'm not saying that they are right and that there is anything wrong with your actions (even if I believe what you are doing is not sensible). I just have to put myself in the position of someone doing computer security. They are not necessarily going to simply say, well, no harm was done THIS TIME, so we'll let it pass. They are simply the best they can to act in the best interests of their employer. FYI -- I worked in Ohio for this company. They hired this programmer, who was probably very smart, and might very well have worked out well (but he was a bit of a jerk, but ok, no one is perfect). But he managed to get himself fired after about a week or so, because he had hacked into and was messing with all sorts of root-directory, systems kind of stuff that people who had been there a lot longer than he had would not be trusted with touching. He may have just been curious, had no malicious intent whatsoever. But he was fired just the same. BTW, when he was hired, he had latched on to me, largely because some idiot figured we'd get along because, after all, I was Jewish, and he was Jewish (there weren't a lot of us in the company, two of us in the entire Columbus office). So they made it a point of introducing him to me, I'm sure because of some stupid idea about that. Just like when they AVOIDED introducing me to a muslim programmer who happened to be working on stuff on my system. People can be such idiots sometimes. Of course he had to consult with me -- he was working on stuff that I had either written or at least, was the expert on.
On that last note, offtopic as it may be, I recall several times in my brief decade or so of working that Vietnamese residents worked with me, and they were intentionally kept apart from anyone with military service in their records. It was stupid beyond words. Understand that these were legal residents seeking citizenship. When they actually met the ex-soldiers working there, they got along just fine. And in fact the issue of being excluded from polite introductions offended everyone involved. And even myself who was not involved. Managers pretended it was an oversight, but the fact was they were caught and exposed. Both groups got together and drafted a letter to the CEO of the company asking for no such segregation to ever happen again. He agreed, but I was working elsewhere before I could see if he kept his word. Back to the topic, anyone know if Gal Civ is worth playing? I hear good about pretty much everything made by Stardock, but I am sadly inexperienced with anything they make besides SoaSE. (Sins of a Solar Empire)
There is going to be another sale on Steam December 20th through January 4th. If there is anything on there that doesn't go down by at least 75%, I would suggest waiting until then and getting it sometimes then. I've found that most the games that I want will go down by at least 75% on the Thanksgiving sale or the Christmas sale. (Note: I am christian so it is the Christmas sale to me because that is what I call that time of the year. Please do not take offense at what is just basically a term to me.)
Way back when I played it, I enjoyed it a lot. Though it's been so long since I last played it that I know that my memory of it is screwed up -- a kind of a conglomeration of it, and GC 2 and Stars and so on (a lot of similar games that I also haven't touched in ages). So I can't really give you any details other than that.
Guys ... there are literally always heavily discounted digital downloads of indie and AAA games across a wide variety of online stores, some of which don't even abuse regional pricing or force you run a client every time you want to play (almost) any game. I do not feel that Steam deserves as much individual attention as it gets for this.
