Gaming Steam Sales and Devaluation

Half Life is an excellent game and very innovative. Although is an outstanding game the full price was not an option for me, but as you said it was for other players. When the Orange Box was released you could buy it for 20€, so that is what I did. Orange box had many extras not included in the standard game, but was still less expensive.

Although half life is an outstanding quality product (bugs, extras, ...) the 50€ was a large profit margin for valve. The prof is orange box that had more extras and was cheaper. So my question is who benefits from this 50€ prices?

 

in my reply to Joe on twitter, i don't see it devaluing games, i see it as a way to gain extra revenue, that they may not of gained before.

 

Sadly for me these days there seem to be fewer "must buy" games out there than I remember in my younger days and that alone makes me feel older than I am.

There have been a handful of titles that have inspired me to pay full price for them, The Witcher and Mass Effect series (tho have held off on ME3 thus far) to name two.

I got the original Portal for free during the steam giveaway and went on to buy Portal 2 for under £4 and the sad thing is, they both felt to me that if I had paid full price for those that I would have been robbed, even with the hype and people out there that love and adore it, they still feel far short of being truly amazing games. Fans of the half life series no doubt were in their element.

Perhaps I am developing a jaded view of games or perhaps my expectations have risen far above what most game companies put out. One thing I do know is that paying £15-20 for a game that last on a couple of days or £30 for a game that last a week is only going to prove to be a guaranteed disappointment for me at least.

I love a game that has atmosphere that I can fully immerse myself in, has ambience, character and an interesting story. I love games with variety and not just an endless series of waypoints, quests or full of endless combat. Give me realism, puzzles, some combat, exploration and real sense of being in the game.

 

I feel you on Portal, great games, but too short to be even close to full price and pretty much zero replayability (for me anyway).

 

I spent ~£90 in the Steam Sale and added something like 20-30 games to my library. Without the sales, this month I might have spent ~£11 (OMD2).

I haven't spent anything for 6 months previously to this as I've been playing LoL and Tribes Ascend, both of which are F2P.

Devalues each individual game, but pumps more money into the games industry!

 

Like most, I agree that games initially are too expensive on steam. I tend to either use the likes of amazon or wait a few months and get them from high street retailers. Out of the many games I have, only dlc packs and non-genre games are bought from steam.
I will not try out a game, that are out of the genre I normally like for £40, but at £2-£10 I will. I have found games I.e SKYRIM that I really like, and so will purchase the next in the series, as indeed, I have purchased its predecessor.
At these prices, I do not find that it devalues a game, time reduces the price on all consumer items as interest wains.
If Steam didn't do these type of sales, I would stick to my comfort zone and not move out it, game demos are all well and good, (to me I find it like film promos, a lot of the time it's the only interesting part of the film), but they will have me and I suspect a few others moving to buying full price, next in series games on the back of a 'devalued' game.

 

Because the game is a downloadable file, it costs he game-makers nothing to just copy it, so they can't exactly lose money from the summer sale

 

At least you take a bit of banter on the chin

 

I used to buy games at launch at full price, I never do now I know, at most, I'm only 6 months away from at least 50% off. Often it can be as little as a month, I feel bad for anyone that bought Max Payne 3 full price.

Still, over all I guess they do better, with those that would not have actually paid for the game before at all buying it, making up for those like me that stopped buying games at launch because of the sales.

 

i spent over $150 USD during this sale.. that's probably $100 more than I would have spent without the sale, just because it was hard to NOT buy some of these games when they were such good deals (imo) .. so, no the game industry is not LOSING money from these sales.. they're GAINING money that never would have been there without them

 

Prices have to fall eventually anyway, otherwise customers like me who are unemployed wouldnt be buying games at all. Which do you think publishers/devs want, some money or no money? I have bought some titles day one at their full price off steam. I cannot afford to buy every game day 1, and therefore don't. DLC is also something I rarely buy at full price, as 90% of the time a single new level or a new gun is not worth $3, but its great at a dollar or lower. This steam sale I literally bought Binding of Isaac as the only game and the rest of the DLC maps for CIv 5 (not expansion).

These sales benefit devs/pubs because it allows the broke and tight on cash to still buy their titles. The ones who can afford and want a game badly, does buy the games full price. Some can't. It is how things go. I bought MGS4 for the PS3 on a Walmart Blackfriday sale for $9. Did I screw over Kojima/Sony with my purchase? no, they got something instead of having the game sit on the shelf not being purchased.. its business.

 

Good article, I agree that the EA guy is just trolling and it's getting boring hearing them bitch all the time.

You have to define "devalued". EA didn't consider giving away whole CnC titles to pimp the First Decade compilation as devaluation, just marketing. Neither did I consider myself ripped off when I bought CnC 95 and Red Alert full price as you had to DL and burn your own CDs to get the freebies working when I had the big boxes and manuals and enjoyed the games as new. Still bought the compilation, but Amazon did their own discount in the end.

Similarly, the boxed GTA from the 90s was something collectible with the music on the game disc as well as the game and the map but 15 years later you naturally wouldn't buy the same thing for the same price (though with Blu Ray they gave it a go). Hardbacks go to paperback, Cinema films go to £3 DVD and then they're on TV, and games are no different for having the budget option when there's no further sales to be made at the full price.

Example 3: MW3, they're so desparate for sales they let you play for free for a whole weekend twice a year on Steam, clearly more people buy it than wait for the next free two days at a time, or Actiblizz wouldn't have done it for the past two MWs.

Finally, only £3.74 of the money I put into Tribes Ascend went through Steam, that EA bod is forgetting about the times that people decided to buy an item in a F2P game. None of that is lost revenue due to Steam if the publisher doesn't charge for the base game to begin with.

 

I don't buy ****. Honestly. The last steam purchase I made was probably portal. The few new games I have are usually gifts from other people. Why? Honestly, I never find the time to really complete all my games. I don't even have that large of a backlog. Couple it with the fact that so many older games (which are still playable) exist and the great thing that is PS2 on PS3 emulation and I honestly never really get around to playing it.

It's been 5 months since I got Witcher 2 on GOG and Dead Island for cheap. And I've put in a total of 2 hours for Dead Island on 0 for the Witcher 2. Simply said, there's just not enough time.

What does irk me is the monumental cost of BF3. I paid full price for the Limited Edition only to get whomped on by an extra $50 US for map packs. (That of which I still haven't bought despite me putting in many hours into BF3).

But in terms of actual devaluation though, I would say that these sales do somewhat devalue the games, but in the end isn't it still up to the developer how much the game gets sold for? Arkham City for example has been out for quite a significant amount of time (2 GPU iterations is a good indicator for age of game) so it's no surprise there would be a sale. What's baffling about steam sales is how there are still massively expensive games that have been out for years. (I'm looking at you COD:WAW, I love you as a game, but you are still $30) So despite some IPs being somewhat "devalued" you still end up with many that retain their value owing to people's reliance on Steam.

 

This pretty much. Steam are normally overpriced compared to their competitors, and lets not forget 2nd hand games muddying the water. Steam sales and owning a few steamworks games are the only reason I have it installed.

 

Every industry does sales. No problems. They help sell products. Don't overthink it. Most games coming out will be crap (just like most movies/books/telly shows etc etc). There will be great ones. There will be good ones. Stop worrying. Stop buying crap games. Stop giving 9/10 to overhyped pieces of tripe.

 

Im one of those who wouldn't buy unless it was on sale. Simply I don't have the disposable cash. This sale I spent £35ish, and got 9 or 10 games. Do I buy one game or spread the profit around? The removal of packaging, middlemen (game, HMV), shipping and even burning to disk probably saves half the normal price anyway, there is no way I would pay over £15 for a game unless
a) I want it hands down (Fallout new vegas)
b) I want to support the developer (dustforce, skyrim, portal 2)

Heck Im on my 3rd copy of mass effect since DRM screwed me over. My mate managed to get the disk working on his PC so he has my first copy, my second copy still works but im terrified of it happening again so I bough ME from steam. I done the same with far cry 2 (DRM screwed me over again) but only at sale price. Do you really expect me to pay full price case those assholes have software that breaks the game? The only other game I rebought was fallout 3 since I wantedit in my steam collection rather than just the disk. I don't mind it since Ive already sunk 300+ hours into it and dont have a DVD drive on my laptop so steam was the cheaper and easier way of doing things.

/sarcasm on ..... sure PC gaming is dead, its only a handful of people buy games, all the rest pirate them. They can earn the mega bucks from console tards

 

After a bit more thought, it occurred to me that I honestly don't make many game purchases at all. Thanks to digital distribution, there really is no need to make purchases in case they go out of print. That and honestly, by the time I'm done with one game about 50 more have come out. I just don't simply have the time.

 

I spent almost £50 on games in the Steam Summer Sale entirely on games that I would never have bought otherwise, how's that devaluation?

 

Super sales are, IMHO good for the industry, for a number of reasons.

They discourage price motivated piracy. If a person can't afford a game, they won't buy it. If it takes 2 years for the price to drop to a more affordable level (say about 50%) the game will already be off the customers radar. That's a sale lost to piracy.

It allows experimentation. I can try a new genre or publisher that I wouldn't have considered at $20, because $5 doesn't feel like real money. If I like it, I will be more likely to buy more of their games.

The sales bring in new users. Hearing about a great sale at a local store will bring in new customers, and some of them will become return customers. This is even bigger with steam, as the product is the store.

The sales act as advertising. If I like the new game I bought on sale, I'll tell my friends about it, they now have exposure to that game. And if my friends have a game I'll need to get it to play with them. I read somewhere that this is a big factor in steam sales. Sales go up during the sale, and stay higher for some time after the sale ends.

 

I now pretty much wait for the steam sales to buy games but only because thats about the only time they are a similar price to buying a disk version from amazon.
If they were always similarly priced to the physical media then there would be no need to wait until the sales.