Windows Can you run Tomb Raider?

First of all, have you actually ever been on Steam? I'm pretty sure you haven't, literally ever. I've never once seen a game on Steam for £50, unless you wanted to buy every train ever for Train SImulator...that's a pretty big dent in the wallet... second, even if a game ever was listed for £50 you'd be a monumental idiot to spend that, if you're worried about the price of gaming. You're never more than a month or two from a Steam sale which usually means at least 33% off, even CoD manages 25% every now and again.


I repeat, in what universe is a game [bold]useless[/bold] after activation? You activate it and that's the end of it, your money has been totally wasted, all for those few glorious seconds of typing in a code? Again, why exactly do you buy games? I've never once felt the need to buy a second hand PC game because they drop in price well before I've ever caught up with my backlog enough to have time for anything brand spanking new. Which is beggars belief that you would actually get enough from your second hand sales to actually make much of a dent in a new release.

Add to this the excellent points made above about the complete lack of anywhere to buy PC games these days. My local game has shut, HMV stopped selling Pc games ages ago and then it shut too, Tesco has the odd kiddie educational game and a few clipart collections, PC World has a few ancient, vastly overpriced titles and that's about it. So you have Amazon, which is grand, I've used them plenty but you do have to wait a few days. Or you have Steam.

No I absolutely don't have money to throw away right now, but when you can pick up the like of Saints Row 3 for a few quid in a winter sale I don't really need to be loaded to keep up my gaming habit. Your argument really isn't valid, and smacks of picking a soapbox purely for the craic of an argument.

 

Really, you've never bought a used game, well maybe I've been buying games a lot longer than you because for a least fifteen years I have bought and sold games in local games shops and a lot of the stock they had on the shelves were used games in fact one shop owner was appealing for used games that didn't need steam activation as he couldn't renew his used stock fast enough and it was a big part of his business

Well as you said you've never bought and traded used games so you obviously wouldn't have a clue about prices would you?
I regularly traded in games about 6 months old for £10-15, three or four of them and you got enough for a new game, done it for years mate.

Must be crap where you live, there's at least ten game shops in my area and most of them sell PC games

My arguments are perfectly valid, you just don't like them because you seem to know nothing about the used game market, when I went to local game shops most of the people especially the kids were trading games because they couldn't afford new, Meh, that's your problem not mine.

 

The only second hand game market revolves around console titles. Which do not require activation unless they have an online aspect to them.

Many fps titles require this. I remember buying Bad Company 2 Limited Edition which came with a code for map packs etc

The second hand pc market limited by drm free games which are becoming less and less.

Be it steam/ubi or origin.

 

The major console games are all one time usage ( sales wise major)

Halo4 fifa13 need for speed most wanted, bf3 call of duty black ops.

All of them have a 1 time online voucher that any second purchaser needs to buy. Game won't even let you trade in those games come to think about it. The voucher for online for ea was around £10 last I checked.

Second hand FIFA13 + voucher is probably more expensive than the game can be had brand new from amazon.

FIFA 13 new is £20 on amazon,( ps3 version)when I was last in my local games store they had it second hand no voucher for £25 so would cost you £35 to buy it and play online.

 

Wait, so you have to buy 3 £45 games in order to sell them on for enough to buy one £45 game. How is this better than buying 4 £15 (or less £) games in a steam sale?

 

Argument is futile. As the trade in value of any game makes it bit worth doing.

Plus the price offered is dependant on how many in stock nation wide.

So I go buy Tomb Raider for PS3 it bombs. I go to trade in like everyone else I get low return.

This obviously depends in whether there is a trade in discount on another title. Then the return is greater.

 

Who's paying £50 for a PC game?
According to my Steam account history I've made 38 purchases directly through Steam. Total spent is £254.10, so that works out at roughly £6.68 a purchase, and bare in mind some of those were game bundles so even better value. I have no reason to buy second hand when games are discounted 66% just a few months after release on the Steam store, nor do I feel cheated by not being able to sell them on.

 

Not necessary so. You have two different approaches to selling. The way items are priced in a shop versus in steam are generally different. You can't trade in your games in steam but you don't get the same kind of rock bottoms sales in a shop that you do in steam. Shops are generally more consistent in their pricing. (Look at pc world games section for example.)

I'm saying stocking up in a steam sale is better value than buying and trading games.

 

I think i ment to say a bit worthless doing.

 

Ive looked at trade in before for my games on ps3 and 360.

Been offered a tiny £10 for a game i spent £40-£50 on seemed like daylight robbery, When they were gonna resell it for £30+.

Hence i just keep all my games dont think ive traded in games since the old playstation days.

 

I don't know about EU law on the subject but a Danish court has already ruled that as insurance for companies the terms of service is pretty much useless as people cannot be expected to both read and understand these terms. How it is going to turn out in the EU is a different matter however again the terms of service has limited power as you cannot in reality change the terms of a contract after it has been made, and so people should actually be able, at the bare minimum, to sell games bought under the old terms of service. Add to this that steam does not have a "rent" button but a buy bottom and so as a consumer you are informed of a purchase of a product and not a service, that a single small line in the term of service says it is a rent does not matter if the consumer effectively is informed of something else.

However that part is somewhat difficult to predict as the EU both has cases where they clearly support the consumers and cases where they support the industries, so for future games on steam there is really no way of knowing.

 

Your assuming that a game in a steam sale is not on sale at a reduced price anywhere other than at steam, new sealed games on ebay are often cheaper than anywhere else because of all the ebay competition.

 

But that's the choice though isn't it? If you want a physical copy, you would buy it? If not, you have to get it via Steam/Origin etc.

I totally disagree with you attacking Steam. You selling games on mean that developers ultimately lose out in the long run. If you look at consoles now, you have to pay about £8 for the online pass. That is what the used market has done to gaming.

Bare in mind, World of Warcraft uses the same method of, when you have a expansion pack on a account, you can't sell it. So, why just attack Steam? Attack the whole lot.

As for the topic, I believe my PC should run it fine. Hopefully anyway

 

If we just left PC gaming up to the shops it wouldn't exist. Steam has saved PC Gaming, whether you dislike the system or not.

Do you? I don't much cheaper just to wait a few months and get the games in the Steam sale. For really special games I pay full price, but 90% of the time, the cost is offset by the huge savings I've made on the rest of the games I buy on sale.

Additionally, even for brand new games, you can more often than not get the codes for them online at hugely reduced prices.

'In your area' - is the whole of Cornwall your area? All that money you've saved by trading in games must have surely been offset by the helicopter refuelling costs?

A lot of the games you buy in the shops nowadays have to be activated on steam or origin anyway - so you are either avoiding some amazing games - which really is cutting off your nose to spite your face, or you are cheating people by selling back games that won't work.

Finally, whether you acknowledge it or not, for EVERY game I've ever bought from Steam, a proportion of that purchase has gone to the developers - in contrast not a single penny of the money you've spent buying used games has gone to the developers. I am supporting the industry. You are killing it.

 

I assume that an item in a steam sale is about as cheap as you can get it.

 

It's not in 70% of the cases.

You can pick up most of them sealed on amazon for less cash than steam has the game on sale most times even.

eBay has new sealed games as well.

 

@ShinyAli

I appreciate that steam being rubbish is your opinion and you're entitled to that. But for the record if you don't want to come across as a troll and want a decent argument/discussion it might be worth acknowledging that there are advantages to steam and reasons why people like it.

I like steam, but sometimes things annoy me about it. I used to always buy second hand games and sell on ones I'd finished as a kid, when I had little money. Funnily now though I actually have an income, I'm just far more likely to play a demo (which there are fewer of around) or wait until steam sales. The advantage of steam sales is the amazing reductions that you get, I'm sure this may bring them in line with second hand titles. As I don't get to play as much anymore, I save money and buy A LOT of games in the sale and play them when I have time. I've found this is the best way around the price issue you're not a fan of. Oh and there are of course a few game titles I don't mind shelling out full price for (XCOM for example).

Keeping all your games electronically though is great for me, so I don't dislike the fact I can't sell them on as the price I have to pay for that. The server costs for me to access my digital copy do have to be maintained. Also I think you saying £50 for a game on steam is a bit wrong to be honest, they're not that expensive! You may want to be less provocative or perhaps do a little homework first

But the best thing for me about steam is that the devs get more money (more likely to see future releases from them), the patches roll out more easily (and steamworks for online play is great) and so more importantly I've realised that getting rid of the second hand market could be a good thing.

Shops like Game etc make a killing out of second hand games, which the devs see nothing of. Have you given any thought into how much this affects the likelyhood of future games/sequels or how many indie devs it could do over? I can also remember how easy it used to be to buy a secondhand game, get a key gen, image the disc and sell it back on. People hate restrictive DRM, so I think steam offers a fairly good compromise with having to be logged in.

There's several more facts about why they're getting rid of it and I completely agree that shops shouldn't be making money out of second hand game purchases. And don't say it's ok to do it with board games etc because that's a different ball game altogether.

At the end of the day, if steam was so terrible, it wouldn't exist and people won't be using it! I think that you're just annoyed that you're having to spend more on games each time you wish to make a purchase. I wouldn't attack steam for that, they've just enabled devs to actually make money on their titles.

 

Its not a different ball game. Someone develops intellectual property, mass distributes it as a new item and sees no income from it if its sold second hand.

It's the same for any industry which has an item which can be sold second hand.

 

From an intellectual property point of view, yes, you're spot on.

But PC games have a much shorter playtime, whereas boardgames are usually kept in storage until christmas or other mass gatherings. You don't often see them being sold secondhand and if they are, it isn't that detrimental to new sales relative to the development costs to make it in the first place. Also nowadays how often do you see new mainstream board games? They've been milking the same cow for many years now with the likes of monopoly. I can honestly say that I haven't seen second hand board games on sale as much as second hand games. Remember that some new board games can be the same price as new PC games. This is my point with respect to it not being the same ball game, not with how intellectual property works.

 

I've been buying games for around 15 years myself, never saw any second hand PC games except in charity shops, and those were never anything to get excited about. Perhaps my area did suck... Although, really, you would drive 80 miles to a game shop?

Anyway, let me try and understand your economics. You say you trade in 6 month old games for £10-15. Fair enough. How much were they in the first place? I'll assume you didn't buy them immediately on release for the sake of argument, so shall we say £25 being generous? Even if they were second hand when you bought them there wouldn't be much reduction in 6 months or there would be no upside for the retailer. Anyway, you spent let's say £80 on those games. You trade them all in, get one brand new game. Lovely. You play it for 3 days (or 6 months, whatever), trade it in. I would imagine you'd be lucky to get much more than half it's value, maybe things were different 10 years ago. If we take Steam out of the equation and say you're doing this today you certainly wouldn't get much more than £20 for it at an absolute maximum, probably less as the retailer would need to sell it for about £30. Now you have £20 and no games. How on earth is this sustainable?? That's a straight up loss of £60. Quite a steep rental for four or five games wouldn't you say? Repeat that cycle twice a year and you're spending £120 to play maybe 10 games. If you never want to play them more than once that's fair enough.

Having just added up what I've actually spent on Steam, it comes out at an average of £2.61 per game (not including the 18 Steamworks games I've bought, mostly from Amazon because it was cheaper than the Steam price). That's an outlay of roughly £120 a year, granted. But I still have over 200 games. Your system has you spending the same amount (in a very rough approximation), but with nothing to show for the money spent. Just because lots of kids do it doesn't make it the smart way to do things.

I fail to see how any rational person can think this is a good way to buy games in a world where Steam exists, not to mention all the above stated developer benefits. Again, all this points at (to me) is someone picking an issue for the sake of it, you think that you should be able to sell your games so reasonability be damned. Perhaps you'd be better off on the type of sites we can't talk about here, no money required whatsoever. While it's lovely that you're supporting some local business that's all you're supporting, and it's pretty much the same situation as if you had to pay for a torrent.