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We picked up Journey and Star Traders Frontier. I’ve wanted to play Journey since it came out but I didn’t have the proper console. Well, I forgot I put it on the wishlist, and that’s a real good price so.
I’ve (sung? musically yelled at?) another person already.
Mass Effect legendary edition (all 3 games + all DLCs) is on for 6 Euro.
That’s a great deal IMO
On the third game myself, I can’t believe I didn’t play these sooner. I understand the hype this series generated now.
They may not have lived up to the hype when initially released, which was understandable as there were a lot of promises that weren’t keeps, but they are undoubtedly still absolutely amazing games.
No Man’s Sky is down to $23.99. I remember the launch was poor but they kept working on it and improving it. I picked it up a couple years ago on Xbox and have enjoyed it
NMS was such a mixed bag for me. I spent over a hundred hours on it yet still walked away wondering what there was to do in the game.
It is way more of an enjoyable experience now than it was on launch. I just still find it sort of flawed on a core level. The exploration is clearly supposed to be a primary focus of the game, but I just find it incredibly bland after a bit. After I finished with that, I don’t really know what to do with the game aside from… keep flying around trying to find something worth finding.
I put 40hrs into it. I don’t regret that, but I also have zero interest in continuing to play it past that.
Anno 1800 is 5 bucks. I love it, but you need to deal with Uplay as well
I have over 600 hours in Anno 1800 and highly recommend it buuuut I would advise people consider the more expensive edition that includes all the expansions.
True, but if it annoys you enough, there are tools to help you remove the requirement.
https://github.com/YoteZip/LinuxCrackingBible?tab=readme-ov-file#6-drm-stripping-guides
There are other tools too.
my reccomendation? whatever’s on gog
in all seriousness, you can’t go very wrong with games made by valve, portal especially.
gog?
Good Old Games.
Can someone explain videogames sales to me? How can a game be 12$ and 8.99$ the day after?
Can you elaborate where your confusion lies? It’s a digital good, there is no marginal cost. So they can pretty much price a game however they want. So pricing is mostly about maximising revenue, i.e. get as many sales as you can at the highest possible price.
A sale is a relatively straightforward strategy where you first sell the game at a high price to all the people who are fine with paying a lot, then you lower the price to sell more copies to the people who weren’t willing to pay the higher price. The result is more total profit. There is a time limit too to create a sense of urgency (“I better buy now so I don’t miss the opportunity”).
Can you elaborate where your confusion lies?
Real goods have a limited lifespan, they usually go on sales when they are about to reach the end of their life or when you physically have to get rid of them. Software doesn’t expire.
A price is usually set to cover the initial costs and to make a reasonable profit not to squeeze how much money you can from people.
A price is usually set to cover the initial costs and to make a reasonable profit not to squeeze how much money you can from people.
There are exceptions, but usually that is absolutely not true. Making as much money as you can is 100% the goal for the vast majority of goods produced, physical or digital.
We are talking in a platform that has not such greedy goals
Games on Steam are not usually recurring purchases, one person won’t buy the same product over and over like they need to for food. This means the market of people willing to pay the full price gets saturated over time.
Sales are a way to increase the market size by lowering the “barrier to entry” (price). Sometimes a price will be permanently lowered, however usually not because a temporary sale encourages people to buy now instead of later.
Sounds like videogames sales are made to make money and the original price has not much to do with cover costs bur rather making as much profits as people are willing to pay
Of course they are made to cover costs and make money, but you can cover more costs for future games or ongoing development the game if more people are buying the game, even if it isn’t at full price
yes you can also buy a billionare fleet of mega yachts
Yes famously all video game developers are billionaires
That’s how sales of anything works. Everything is sold at the highest possible price that people are willing to pay.
That’s not true, especially for software that has infinite supply
Basically nothing is sold to cover the cost. That’s the basic of how making a profit works. So let’s start from there. Second, when you make a digital product, you invest X and you have no idea how many copies you will sell. It’s much harder to compute the marginal cost compared to a physical item. Videogames are a luxury item, they are by no means necessary. So there is no harm in letting demand and offer regulate the price. If you feel that paying a certain amount is not worth for a game, you don’t pay it, or you wait until the price drops.
It’s a digital good, just a bunch of 1s and 0s in a particular order. The manufacturing cost of making a copy is near 0. There are license fees, but those are almost always pencentage based. Valve takes 30%, the publisher takes a percentage, and so on.
Then it’s a balance of volume vs price. If you can sell 10,000 copies at $10, vs 1,000 at $15, ($100,000 vs. $15,000), it is more profitable to sell the game at $10.
And human psychology is manipulable. Seeing the original price at $15 will influence them to value the game around $15, and so $10 would be a good deal. If they want it, they should buy it on sale. Where as seeing the original price at $10 would influence them to value the game at $10, which could mean it’s not as good as a $15 game they can get for $10 on sale.
The developers need to make enough profit to cover the development costs’ debt. Then after that, the rest of the profit goes to the next project and maybe bonuses… Probably to the executives. Part of that is also to cover the cost of past and future non-pofitable games. Not all games make a profit and developers and publishers need to offset the cost of past and future failures.
Valve ceo is thinking about the next project from his mega yachts
The same way your grocery can be selling something for $10 one day and put it on sale for $6 the day after.
Grocery deteriorates, when it’s about to expire it goes on sales and if nobody buys they throw it away. Software doesn’t rotten.
Ah, I see you’re one of those basement dwellers who’ve never done your own grocery shopping in your life.
Software often loses its value compared with other newer better offerings that come out with time. I doubt very much anyone would pay $50 in 2025 for Heroes of Might and Magic 3, a very well regarded game released in 1999, that tons of people gladly paid the full $50 MSRP price for that year because it was cutting edge.
The game is still great even today. It hasn’t changed one bit but people aren’t going to be willing to pay the same price for it today that they were willing to back in 1999 because there are more competing options with newer tech/ideas that have released since then. However it is consistently one of the top sellers on Good Old Games at around a price point of $5 today
Nobody would be willing to pay 50$ for a game released in 1999 because they know the costs to make the game are already covered
Companies often create incentives so that their customers will want to buy more of their products. Sales exist within every industry and happen for various reasons. Even with your example of grocery stores, there are other reasons for having sales. I believe it was Kmart that had the famous blue light special. Publix, a southeastern US chain has a weekly rotating sale. Costco has a similar rotating sale. Maybe items are deteriorating, maybe there is an excess of stock. Maybe an item goes on sale for the purpose of luring customers into a store in hopes that they will buy more things. Maybe the item of sale already had a huge markup and the sale brings the price down so there is only a moderate markup, which is often employed by department stores in malls. There are many more reasons for a company to put items of sale i won’t get into here.
Yes, there are videogames sales no wonder there are sales for every other product. Originally sales are made because grocery expire, you can have sales for any reason you want such as tricking people into buy more of your products but then that’s what you are doing: tricking people.
Yes my department store example was kind of alluding to that. As far as video games go, either sales are poor, or the game was never worth the original price. Also sales such as the ones Steam has are often great for advertising. I always see games I’ve never heard of. Those developers take a hit on their per unit price so that they can potentially sell more units. The fact that these are digital items means they aren’t losing money on manufacturing costs. Patient gamer communities exist for customers that smell the bullshit.
Its for the people that only buy when its a “good deal”. Its usually for old games that are well liked or for newer games that are maybe a year old now. The non sale price is for people who can’t wait for the discount. Sorta like waiting for a movie to go to video/streaming rather than go to the theater.
So what you are saying is that it is only a marketing move to appeal to poorer people?
I’m not rich but I’m definitely not poor. I only buy video games when they’re like $30 CAD or less. Only time I went against this rule was for Baldurs Gate.
Hard agree. Too risky these days but bg3 was a sure bet.
141 hours of gameplay from start to finish and local split screen coop campaign. Probably the best gaming experience I’ve had together with my wife. Absolutely worth it at full price.
You can also view it as a strategy to extract more money from richer people, without sacrificing all the poorer customers.
Frugality does not imply a lack of wealth.
I would think it usually implies the opposite
We cannot get it because we are not rich but rich people aren’t frugal they don’t wait a videogame to drop 5$ in price to buy it
They don’t have to, but still can purchase the lower priced game, to get the same sale as you or me. Hence, frugality.
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Noita is currently 60% off and is hands down the best game I have ever played (kind of). It is ridiculously brutal and you will die very often but you have the potential to get ludicrously powerful as well. The game will cheese you so don’t be afraid to cheese it back. In has so much content that beating the final boss for the first time is considered beating the tutorial.
Also if the some aspects are too bullshit for you there is a variety of mods to fix these, and there is absolutely no shame in using them.
I use the mod that respawns you at the last checkpoint. It’s SOO nice to have.
I got myself and can recommend:
Returnal (29.99€) (Rogue-like shooter),
Wisper (6.99€) (Open world exploration) and Crossroads OS (3.74€) (Puzzle game).
I can further recommend:Studio System (8.84€) (Horror),
With My Past (6.59€) (Puzzle),
Signalis (13.99€) (Horror).I fucking loved Returnal on ps5 and it’s a steal for the sale price right now!!
Rain World and its DLC Downpour are 50% off (just above 11 bucks)
I went to check it out and it’s already in my library. Must have snagged it in the last sale.
This is my son’s favorite game. Seems to have decent replay value.
Going to vouch for this game. I’ve been really enjoying it.
Best experienced without spoilers. Don’t even look up the creatures if you can resist.
You are not a hero, you’re are a small animal in a living ecosystem.
Love this game conceptually but I’m going to have to try again when I have mental bandwidth to get absorbed into it
Rain World is very, very niche in its appeal, but it’s perhaps the best argument for games as art that I’ve ever come across. I’ve never had to rethink what a game even is in order to engage with something before.
Elite Is a space flight economics simulator.
Fly around buy here sell there look at stuff for fun and get into battles
Great game but you will want a hotas set up if you really get into it
Hotas?
“Hands On Throttle And Stick;” i.e. flight sim gear
Like el_psd said flight sim gear.
Ideally one with rotation in the stick too.
I have the A10 Warthog set up but have to screw around for side thrusters because they’re replicas of the A10 warthog controls which obviously doesn’t have side thrusters.
You can play without it all but it does make flying more fun and imersive and afterall thats what it’s all about
I keep trying to get into Elite but it never clicks for me. I was flying around earlier trying to dock into a station but everyone was refusing me so I closed the game. I’ll probably look up a new players guide before giving it another attempt later.
Was it Elite Dangerous? Stations grant docking clearance if you’re within range when you request it; I think it’s about 7500 meters. Check out the in-game the tutorials. One of them teaches this.
If they were playing online, it’s likely all of the pads were full. You can either wait for someone to leave, or super cruise out and back in to load a new instance with available pads.
Good point. I forgot about that possibility because I don’t spend much time playing in Open mode.
The same thing tends to happen on stronghold carriers in Solo mode, I suspect because Frontier programmed the game to spawn a bunch of NPC ships eager to dock with those carriers when a mini-instance is created. You can be the only player within light years, and still have to wait several minutes for all those NPCs to leave before you can dock.
*facepalm*
Unfortunately it was due to being “friends only.” Player fleet I guess? I just couldn’t figure out how to filter them out before I got there and kept coming across them.
That range one caught me out once but I figured that one out since it tells you to come closer. I’m going to take that tutorial suggestion though. Cheers!
Ah… Yes, it was most likely a fleet carrier, then. Those are owned by players, and not always open to the public.
I picked up civilization VI (for my PC), hades and outer wilds for my deck.
There’s a truly great indie beat-em-up RPG with Brian David Gilbert that just released called: INK INSIDE and it’s on sale for $15.
He’s from Pink Floyd, right?
From polygon, and now on Dropout. He’s the new fact checker on Um, Actually.
Undertale is at a new all time love at $0.99. It’s not really my jam but it’s the time to pick it up if you always wanted to play it but never did.
The inability to resize the Undertale window without using a third-party program like Sizer continues to be INFURIATING to me.
Undertale is a good game, but it just makes me so goddamn angry every time I open it to not have control over the sizing on my own goddamn monitor that I haven’t been able to finish it.
Sounds like they should have called it Underscale
I’ll see myself out
I think I missed the window on Undertale. Who knows, if I played it when I was 17 I might have a different opinion but the whole “I’m so quirky and random” schtick doesn’t really land with me.
It’s not really my jam
I watched someone’s entire playthrough of it on YouTube, which I find to be a decent middle ground. In fact, someone else I know doesn’t even game any more and just watches playthroughs; better to see an expert do it with insightful or fun commentary than to get frustrated from not knowing what to do, etc. when we have such limited time in our lives anyway. Maybe that’s why I generally prioritize roguelites nowadays; if I’m gonna play something, I wanna ensure it’s a unique challenge that possibly not even the devs have ever exactly seen, and not simply be treated like a rat in a fixed maze to figure out precisely or struggle otherwise when other people have done it.
Anyway, I digress; Infested Planet is $1.94 USD for another recommendation, and it’s awesome. The trailer undersells it if anything.
Never heard of it and I can swing $1.94 – thanks.
Solasta Crown of the Magister for $8.99.
For me it’s the best game ever to capture the D&D feeling. The custom Warlock subclass, Timekeeper, is ridiculously fun.
I don’t see it mentioned elsewhere - but if we’re going down the CRPG route and enjoying it I’d recommend to others Divinity Original Sin 1&2.
I’d also recommend Neverwinter Nights: Enhanced Edition. But it’s age might scare some people away – so I typically don’t lead with that.
