Steam Summer Sale Soirée

Greetings travelers!
It’s one of the two best times of the year to purchase PC games: the Steam Summer Sale!  From July 12 to July 22, Steam gets a graphical makeover for ~2 weeks, and prices are slashed and burned like it’s the Holocene extinction.  The fairly straightforward concept of saving money on video games can be a treacherous business.  After the jump, here’s a few mechanics and some common wisdom I’ve learned as a Steam Sale veteran…

There are essentially four tiers of quality for deals in this sale, which I have arranged from best to decent:

Pack Deals would have been lower on the list in past Christmas and Summer Sale value rankings, but this year I put them at the top because they really went to work on the pricetags for huge bundles. This is the best across-the-board bundle deal I’ve ever seen on Steam.  Big name packs (Bethesda, Square Enix, THQ) that include the developer’s whole catalog on Steam are all $50 or less, the price of a single retail console game! (Is that still true? I feel like a geezer, I haven’t bought a console game in ages…) These will stay in place until the end of the sale, if history holds true.

Daily Deals change at 1PM EST. These are the best deals and will have large and indie titles cut as low as Valve will bring them.  Each day will bring brand new deals, but the previous days deals will be unavailable after a several hour long countdown on the Featured page.  At the end of the Summer Sale, usually on the last day, there is a recap of some of each day’s deals, meaning if you miss a game’s Daily Deal there is still a chance you’ll be able to get it on the last day, but no guarantee.

Community Choice Deals last for 8 hours each starting at 3AM EST each day, after which the deal expires.  The first 7.5 of those hours are also allotted for voting for the next period’s Community Choice Deal. Each community vote consists of Valve presenting three games with three different large price cuts for the community to vote in to the next buying period, where the most popular deal will be available for eight hours.  This is a new mechanic, so expect some fine tuning with how Valve runs the voting process.  The deals seem on par with or better than the Daily Deals so far, but it is unclear so far how often, if at all, the same deals are offered as voting choices.

Flash Deals are one time Deals that pop up and expire in a period of time which seem to be random, and are then replaced by their fresher cousins.  The percentage cuts on these games are usually substantial, but heavy hitter titles rarely come through the Flash Deals bin.

Storewide Cuts are exacted on the price of every Steam game whose developer allows price cuts, I believe, but these deals (while they do seem tempting) are red herrings, as you might buy a game for 20% off one day and then it goes on a Daily Deal for 90% off the next. It’s a trap!

Other Thoughts:
There used to be a minigame every big Sale that you played by unlocking Steam achievements to win tickets to exchange for prizes, or other such (awesome) silliness.  I’m not going into detail about that for this Sale, because it does not seem Valve deemed us worthy of their trinkets this Summer Sale. It’s a shame, really. It was fun. Instead, if you vote a bunch times in the community choice, buy a game, and join a Steam group, you get a digital badge. Woo-hoo.

If you tell yourself you’ll only buy a small thing or two everyday (“Just the games I’ve always reeeally wanted!”) you will lose all of your money. I’m serious, don’t do it.  Yes, you. Put down the credit card. To avoid this, I recommend you plan out how much you can spend and which games you’ll spend it on before the sale unfolds.  You can even go for one of the Free to Play (F2P) games Steam carries now in mass quantities.  Some of them are quite excellent, I hear, and I’ll vouch for Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO)’s excellence.

We Redshirt Crew bloggers enjoy video games. We hope you do too! So please, grab this chance to dive into PC gaming!  It’s my favorite way, and probably the cheapest.