Confessions of a Steam Sale Junkie

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.

Editorial: And The Score Is...

For many gaming sites, being listed on Gamerankings.com or Metacritic is the be all, end all of writing about video games (or at least reviewing them). Being included on the Metacritic listings lends an air of authenticity and authority. It's an honour to be included among the websites that carries weight with review scores. It makes that site's opinion count for something. After all, bonuses for developers are often tied to attaining a certain Metacritic score. Suddenly that 5.5 / 10 review has some real world consequences.

But is it really an honour? Is it something a game site should hold as the end point for having "made it" even if the owner of said gaming site doesn't really know how it all works?

To be honest, I hadn't given it any thought until a few weeks ago when The Armchair Empire's review scores stopped having any influence. Any review after our review of BlazBlue: Calamity Trigger have not been factored into Metacritic averages. (The 2,200+ previous reviews are still included.)