Question about Steam/Valve

Other than the EQ2 forums when I play that MMO, I avoid all other forums. Most are not that friendly.

I looked at the Blizzard forums once.

*shudder*

Don't go that way! Never go THAT way!



Nah, I hang out in the Half Life, Portal and Garry's mod forum areas, sometimes drifting into off-topic, and very rarely the L4d ones. I avoid the TF2 area because, well, that's kind of the bottom of the barrel for Valve gamers...

If you need just one reason to install Steam, this is it. It comes but once a year, and each sale is more insane than the last. It's like Scrooge McDuck's pool filled with gold coins, only it's full of awesome deals.

Even better is the fact that they seem to have started to do these sales more frequently. If I recall, they had sort of a mini-sale earlier in the year that lasted about a week. Then, a couple months ago, they had the "Perils of Summer" sale, which was pretty much the Christmas sale come early.

Not sure if it's a good thing for Steam or not, but it's gotten to the point where the only time I buy something on it is when it's marked down. Since they have so many really good sales, it sort of explains why I have such a backlog of unplayed games.

Steam has released figures last year indicating they usually get an overall profit INCREASE during big sales. Some titles by four digit percentage figures when placed at 75% off. When they put Left 4 Dead on sale, profits jumped by 3000% over the usual numbers for the duration - without impacting brick-n-mortar retail sales numbers at all.


-np

It's up to the manufacturer. Some manufacturers insist that Steam keeps the DRM on the game, others allow Steam to act as its own DRM -- it checks to make sure you have permission to run the game every time you load it.

In general, I consider Steam to be less intrusive than most game DRMs. At a minimum, you never have to perform a disc check.

They're doing a weeklong Lucasarts deal this week. The Force Unleashed is 75% off today. Different deal each day.