Jeff and Aaron offer insights about themselves and what Steam has become in light of the recent Steam Summer Sale.So, we're in the wake of yet another Summer Steam Sale, and people were getting all excited about picking up games on the cheap that they'd been meaning to get for a while. For the first time ever, I found myself not really participating in it. I got all of one game, and couldn't be bothered to go back and see what else was been on offer.
Talking with several of my friends, their stories have been the same. In years past, they gorged themselves on all sorts of different titles, going along with the running gag about Steam sales where "You can even play the games after you buy them!" And play them we did, but seldom to completion, or even to the halfway mark. Often it was a few hours of futzing around before heading off to play one of the other games we'd grabbed and tossed into our ever more bulging libraries.
Just talking with folks, there's a lot of people out there with some astronomically huge Steam libraries, often created very much on the cheap, only ever getting stuff for it when there's a sale. So, over the years, this has grown these massive libraries for pennies on the dollar in many cases. For all those who have 100-200 games at their disposal, amassed over, say, a 3-5 year period, how much time has been spent with them? How many of these games have been completed? Did these people just fiddle around with most of these games before gravitating back to old favorites like World of Warcraft, Counter Strike, Dota 2, or whatever?
These are questions that I've been asking myself of late, not just when looking at gamers' purchasing and playing habits in general, but more so in evaluating my own behavior. It got me wondering how much I value and appreciate the games that I have. Sure, I've got a ton of them at my fingertips. Great. Whatever. But how much do they mean to me? I have an understanding that the greater gaming community holds most of these titles in high regard, but I don't have the first hand experience to really drive this home. If anything, I feel like I've been cheapening and commodifying these games by mindlessly picking them up, fiddling around with them for a bit, then casting them aside for something else.
On the other side of the coin, there's the huge positive that gamers have a tremendous number of choices for what they can play, and the low prices enable such a thing all the more. This is great since it brings about far more competition, and it's nice to have plenty of options for what one can play. It's one of the the main strengths of an open market. However, I'm an individual, not a market, and I've let myself overindulge in it. Instead of giving things far more consideration, I've just gobbled up genres whole, and it's starting to bug me how I've just let that happen.
I know this just screams of First World Problems, and it's my own lack of self-control that has brought me to this, but I have found myself seriously re-evaluating Steam sales and the extent to which I participate in them. They're still a great thing for people to snap up a few titles for dirt cheap, but I do think I need to be far more discerning in my purchases. I don't really see the point in having a huge library of games if the majority of them hardly get touched and just gather dust. Going forward, I think the best thing for me to do is buy significantly fewer, but spend a lot more time with them, thoroughly enjoying what they have to offer.
- Mr. Nash
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This year is the first time I've paid any special attention to the Summer Sale. I checked the store twice each day to see what games could be acquired for a fraction of their original retail price, even though I have enough "current" games to keep me busy for a long time.
What really piqued my interest this year was the purchase of LA Noire on the cheap some months ago. I really enjoyed the Xbox 360 version but was very curious about the PC version. Faster load times, sharper graphics, and, well, I'd forgotten enough things about the game to make it worthwhile to play through again. For $6, sure, I'll experience Cole Phelps' rise and fall set in 1940's Los Angeles.
It was that $6 dollar price that got me thinking about how much I used to pay to rent games. Going from memory, I seem to recall renting games from $5 to $7, depending on how long I wanted to keep the title and how new the game was. Adjusted for inflation (according to an online calculator) in today's dollars that's $8.50 to $12. Framed that way, $6 is a great bargain!
So, when Just Cause 2 - a game I had a mild interest in when it originally launched in 2010 because of my liking for open world games - popped up for $2.99 I grabbed it. True, it's an "old" game since 4 years in video games makes it ancient, but it's new to me!
Then I snatched up The Stanley Parable ($6), the BioShock Triple Pack ($10), LEGO Marvel Super Heroes ($12), Sleeping Dogs ($10), Tomb Raider ($5), The Wolf Among Us ($8.50), and Spec Ops: The Line ($6).
At which point I realized that Steam has, for me, become a video game rental shop. But a rental shop that just let's you keep the game.
I may only play the BioShock Triple Pack for BioShock 2, which I've never played, and I may never finish it but I can remember only a handful of rented NES and Genesis games that I ever finished, which lends additional support to my conclusion above. I've played Just Cause 2 for a couple of hours total and I already feel like I've squeezed $3 worth of entertainment out of it. Hell, back in the early '90s I could drop $10 in quarters over a couple of hours on Smash TV at the local 7-11!
My Steam library of games definitely expanded during the Summer Sale, but I restricted myself to acquiring titles that I had some interest in actually playing (or replaying), even if just for a few hours to see for myself what all the hub-bub was about or see what advantages the PC version has to offer. There were plenty of titles going for less than $3 but almost none of them even caused a twinge of curiosity in the same way I used to browse through the video game aisles at Blockbuster or the local game rental shop.
- Aaron Simmer
What really piqued my interest this year was the purchase of LA Noire on the cheap some months ago. I really enjoyed the Xbox 360 version but was very curious about the PC version. Faster load times, sharper graphics, and, well, I'd forgotten enough things about the game to make it worthwhile to play through again. For $6, sure, I'll experience Cole Phelps' rise and fall set in 1940's Los Angeles.
It was that $6 dollar price that got me thinking about how much I used to pay to rent games. Going from memory, I seem to recall renting games from $5 to $7, depending on how long I wanted to keep the title and how new the game was. Adjusted for inflation (according to an online calculator) in today's dollars that's $8.50 to $12. Framed that way, $6 is a great bargain!
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| Just Cause 2, still explosive! |
Then I snatched up The Stanley Parable ($6), the BioShock Triple Pack ($10), LEGO Marvel Super Heroes ($12), Sleeping Dogs ($10), Tomb Raider ($5), The Wolf Among Us ($8.50), and Spec Ops: The Line ($6).
At which point I realized that Steam has, for me, become a video game rental shop. But a rental shop that just let's you keep the game.
I may only play the BioShock Triple Pack for BioShock 2, which I've never played, and I may never finish it but I can remember only a handful of rented NES and Genesis games that I ever finished, which lends additional support to my conclusion above. I've played Just Cause 2 for a couple of hours total and I already feel like I've squeezed $3 worth of entertainment out of it. Hell, back in the early '90s I could drop $10 in quarters over a couple of hours on Smash TV at the local 7-11!
My Steam library of games definitely expanded during the Summer Sale, but I restricted myself to acquiring titles that I had some interest in actually playing (or replaying), even if just for a few hours to see for myself what all the hub-bub was about or see what advantages the PC version has to offer. There were plenty of titles going for less than $3 but almost none of them even caused a twinge of curiosity in the same way I used to browse through the video game aisles at Blockbuster or the local game rental shop.
- Aaron Simmer
