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Author Topic: Steam Deals  (Read 59030 times)

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Doom

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #460 on: December 27, 2011, 12:21:04 PM »

You guys are overreacting.

Gabe Newell made fucking Skyrim and Modern Warfare games go on sale for Steammas.

Like, when Gaben steps out of his limo at Game Company Headquarters and tilts his sunglasses while glaring directly at the window that is holding the CEO + stock-holders meeting, they get the message. Or else.
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Brentai

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #461 on: December 27, 2011, 12:50:45 PM »

Sonic Gen ended up down there because it was used as a primary chip in a price war between Amazon and Steam.  Steam had it at 25, Amazon went WAY below them and put it at 15 in an attempt to out-Gabe Gabe, and Gabe shrugged and put it at 10, which Amazon could only match.

The issue isn't so much that it's on sale, it's that it's a first-party, major developer, primary mascot, as-good-as-main-series game going at a literal bin price two months after release.  You'll never see that happen to fucking Mario, or even Ezio.  It makes SEGA's very best offerings look third-tier, and they needed to control that.  It's the Dreamcast being outsold by FF8 all over again.

Mainly I'm worried that it's going to make developers even more nervous about supporting the PC platform, because at some point the distributors are going to seem like an even worse problem than the pirates.
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Rico

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #462 on: December 27, 2011, 02:14:33 PM »

The thing is, that kind of pricing scheme is rapidly becoming the new norm. The potential image hit to SeGA (which is mostly because the 'console' side of the games industry is slow to react and idiots keep buying their shit at $70 like this were a Secret of Mana cartridge in 199X) is probably outweighed by the marketing and name recognition from the now-larger playerbase. I'm willing to bet they're getting their brand out there to a lot of people who didn't grow up with Sonic, or who are from that generation but were Nintendo.
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Bal

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #463 on: December 27, 2011, 02:19:01 PM »

Not to mention that Valve have said repeatedly that games increase their profit margin every single time they go on sale. They probably sold 50k copies to people who were on the fence about it.
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Ziiro

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #464 on: December 27, 2011, 02:22:16 PM »

You guys are overreacting.

Gabe Newell made fucking Skyrim and Modern Warfare games go on sale for Steammas.

Like, when Gaben steps out of his limo at Game Company Headquarters and tilts his sunglasses while glaring directly at the window that is holding the CEO + stock-holders meeting, they get the message. Or else.

At this point we can only speculate on the number of charts, studies and hard statistics that go into setting up a lot of these sales. Valve has all the sales numbers for full retail, as well as what time of the year people are willing to spend more money, and what percentage discount brings sales up by what percent. Essentially finding the sweet spot for profit when discounting games. Good god, now that I think about it that's probably their greatest tool. Just raw information and math.

What I like to think that this all means: All they have to do is contact Activision's/SEGA's/EA's/ETC sales/marketing departments and say "We think it would be in both of our best interests to sell the game for N% off, as this has the most projected profit in our upcoming sales. Yes, it's a significant chunk, but it will also be featured on the front page of our service and everyone will see it."

There's probably a lot of negotiation in regards to the sale percentage and getting on the front page.
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Thad

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #465 on: December 28, 2011, 07:22:16 AM »

At this point we can only speculate on the number of charts, studies and hard statistics that go into setting up a lot of these sales. Valve has all the sales numbers for full retail, as well as what time of the year people are willing to spend more money, and what percentage discount brings sales up by what percent. Essentially finding the sweet spot for profit when discounting games. Good god, now that I think about it that's probably their greatest tool. Just raw information and math.

That's EVERYBODY'S greatest tool in the new century.  Valve's, Google's, Facebook's -- Amazon INVENTED this shit.

The issue isn't so much that it's on sale, it's that it's a first-party, major developer, primary mascot, as-good-as-main-series game going at a literal bin price two months after release.  You'll never see that happen to fucking Mario

No, you'll see a port of a 20-year-old remake of 25-year-old Mario games go for $30.

Selling games for $10 when they should be $40 is pretty much the opposite of Nintendo's problem right now.

It makes SEGA's very best offerings look third-tier, and they needed to control that.  It's the Dreamcast being outsold by FF8 all over again.

Mainly I'm worried that it's going to make developers even more nervous about supporting the PC platform, because at some point the distributors are going to seem like an even worse problem than the pirates.

Certainly this is a problem, particularly to Japanese developers who are wary of the PC in the first place.  For customers, of course, $10 on a just-released game seems an awful lot like a Good Thing.  And if the publishers look at the numbers and find they've made more money, then they should see it as a good thing too.

I don't see serious brand damage coming from a one-day sale (even if it's turning into something a bit longer on the Amazon end).  Users understand "sale" as something separate from "remainder bin".  This isn't a $10 game; it's a $30 game on sale for $10.

And PC gamers have different expectations.  They expect more price competition, more frequent sales, and cheaper base prices -- as a tradeoff for a platform that is fiddlier and MUCH more expensive to maintain, not to mention DRM that is frequently worse than what they'd get on a console.

(Quick tangent: finding deals, collecting games, and getting them to run are, themselves, a sort of game.  I've spent more time setting up XBMC/ROM Collection Browser, PPJoy/WiiMouse, and various emulators than I have actually using them, but getting them set up was a technical challenge that brought me satisfaction.  Same with setting up my NES and Genesis/Sega CD on an old 21" tube, or my Dreamcast on my computer monitor because my TV doesn't have a VGA port.  Hell, maybe one of these days I'll get around to injecting the driver for my graphics card so it'll work on OSX and not just Win/Lin.  ...if nothing else, these rationalizations at least make me feel better about spending money on games I haven't played yet.)

The greatest risk is that publishers will see cases like this and the takeaway will be that they need to sell more $10 games.  Far as that goes, I'm not sure it's a bad thing -- is there any reason Sonic 4 couldn't have been as good a game as Sonic Generations?  I don't think it's their budgets that made the latter a better game than the former.  If Sega decided the lesson was to make games that looked like Sonic 4 but played like the side-scrolling levels of Sonic Generations, well, there's probably a downside but I'm not seeing it.
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Smiler

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #466 on: December 28, 2011, 08:43:06 AM »

Speaking of really low prices, Serious Sam 3 is 12 bucks on GetGames. A lot cheaper than any sale steam will be having if any on it.
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Thad

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #467 on: December 28, 2011, 01:00:40 PM »

At this point we can only speculate on the number of charts, studies and hard statistics that go into setting up a lot of these sales. Valve has all the sales numbers for full retail, as well as what time of the year people are willing to spend more money, and what percentage discount brings sales up by what percent. Essentially finding the sweet spot for profit when discounting games. Good god, now that I think about it that's probably their greatest tool. Just raw information and math.

That's EVERYBODY'S greatest tool in the new century.  Valve's, Google's, Facebook's -- Amazon INVENTED this shit.

Verging on threadsplit here, but I just noticed Stross posted about this yesterday:

—So suppliers are trapped in a race to the bottom, unless (a) they can find some clear value-added proposition to attract consumers other than low price, or (b) they can work out a way to reduce price transparency in order to impair the accuracy of consumers' pricing decisions.

—luxury goods and designer brands adopt strategy (a). Some other well-known organizations go this way, too: Apple is an obvious example in the consumer electronics sector. (Underlying Apple's value proposition is simplicity: a simple, easy to understand product range, pared-back industrial design, "easy to use". Also underlying their success is "easy to fix": if it goes wrong you take it to the Genius Bar and it will be fixed. Or, for a fee, they'll uplift it and fix it for you.) But what about strategy (b)?

5. Algorithmic pricing of airline tickets has been around for decades. Flights are scheduled up to a year in advance, between known end-points, with a well-known number of seats in each class. So why are there so many airline ticket types, and why do prices for a given ticket type on a given route vary depending on when you book them? The answer is that airlines have an incentive to ensure that there is a paying fare in every seat, but they also have an incentive to not discount seats if they can possibly sell them at a higher fare. So they've developed complex pricing algorithms that balance supply and demand internally and offer potential customers the highest spot price that the airline thinks the market will bear. More recently, mobile phone companies, cable TV companies, and other service suppliers offer us the "freedom" to build our own package of services, but the underlying pricing information is highly opaque. [/url]
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Ziiro

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #468 on: December 28, 2011, 01:07:07 PM »

I wish Revelations was even cheaper. More people need to play the multiplayer for that game. Seriously.

I'm on the fence about SS3. When I get home I'm definitely buying Titans, S.P.A.Z, and Dead Space 2 however.
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Bongo Bill

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #469 on: December 29, 2011, 10:56:57 AM »

The Binding of Isaac is available for a pittance. Hands up, everybody who wants a copy.
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TA

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #470 on: December 31, 2011, 11:05:11 PM »

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Shinra

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #471 on: December 31, 2011, 11:09:05 PM »

As much as I love the games I bought I did find this event to be kind of stupid. The biggest complaint I have being that most of the rewards were coupons for games that were already on sale, that we can't use until they stop being on sale. I would have preferred a setup where we trade coal directly for prizes rather than craft them into a random chance to get something that is basically useless.

Just to show how bad the odds were of actually getting anything; I completed 29 objectives, traded a game to someone for extra coal, and after 4 crafts and all of the different objective completions, I ended up with 11 coupons and a copy of a 5 dollar valve game. (Day of Defeat: Source) Of those coupons, seven of them are for valve titles. And none of the coupons apply to future valve releases. And I have every valve game that costs more than 20 dollars.

 ::(:

Anybody want a 50% off valve games coupon?


Edit: Combing through the steam coupons faq: Any coupons you have will apply to items already discounted. So there's that at least. If you got any coupons for anything good, save them for the next time those things go on sale! They all become active on the 2nd.

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Brentai

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #472 on: January 01, 2012, 01:07:22 AM »

And deactivate in March, so don't expect anything attached to a coupon to go on sale in the next three months.
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Ziiro

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #473 on: January 01, 2012, 01:27:14 AM »

I don't suppose anyone has a 50% off Ubisoft?
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Shinra

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #474 on: January 01, 2012, 01:47:10 AM »

coupons? for games people actually want to play?

 :glee:

how novel.
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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #475 on: January 01, 2012, 01:48:56 AM »

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Shinra

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #476 on: January 01, 2012, 03:17:02 AM »

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Beat Bandit

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #477 on: January 01, 2012, 03:44:09 AM »

On a related note, attention should be given to BongoBill and Detonator, who proved their bro-a-tudes by giving random game gifts off my wishlist during the sales.
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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #478 on: January 01, 2012, 01:17:33 PM »

I may have one or two useful coupons

jesus christ did you trade a million tf2 items for coal

People kept dumping their coupons on me and I crafted coal.

Winning the contest was not something I wanted. I already have more games than I could play on Steam and there is nothing I really want.
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Thad

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Re: Steam Deals
« Reply #479 on: January 03, 2012, 09:19:50 AM »

I may have one or two useful coupons

jesus christ did you trade a million tf2 items for coal


Remember Lyrai's Pyo-quisition on the old forum?

She was the one who found out the "buy an admin position" item didn't actually work.
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