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Steam's 2011 Summer Sale Not So Sizzling. Is it the end of an era?

Zoso blogged that unusually for him he hasn't bought anything yet in Steam's Summer sale. I noticed a similar lack of enthusiasm myself and when I asked in Twitter quite a few respondents commented that they had yet to be tempted by the bargains on offer.

From my own perspective neither the games nor the pricing has been all that tempting although I have picked up one game so far: Darksiders. Significantly none of the triple A games seem to have the sort of spectacular discounts that I remember from previous sales. In fact none of the bargains has surprised me. Everything I have seen so far has already been on sale already at some time and probably will be again so I don't feel any need to take a plunge.

Perhaps there is juicier fare to come later or perhaps we are just jaded with too many sales. On the other hand could it be that maybe the era of give away sales is drawing to  a close and the time of game pricing madness is coming to an end?
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Comments

JThelen said…
What I think is happening with the current Steam sale is probably most easily illustrated with Fallout: New Vegas. Why FONV specifically? Well, because Best Buy(hiss) just had it on sale for $10 vs Steam's $15. This may not seem huge on the surface, but what it's strongly indicative of is that publishers play into Steam's pricing than we may have thought before, where Best Buy is free to take a hit on an item to use it as a loss leader.

As for everything else, I've been pretty impressed. I haven't bought a whole lot, mostly DLC so far, but I did miss out on snagging the GOTY Oblivion when it went on sale the first day, so I'm hoping it will show back up. Beyond that, the general consensus from another gaming site I spend a good deal of time on, people already own most of the games which are on sale. But with that said, there is one stand-out deal for anyone who likes Valve games: The Valve Complete Pack, which includes Portal 2, for the price of Portal 2 on its' own. Fantastic deal if you're lacking any of the games in the package, but especially if you don't already have Portal 2 itself.
9:06 pm
Jayedub said…
It probably has more to do with us gamers having purchased many of the games we already wanted, and so we have run out of stuff that we want to buy.

Or maybe that's just me.
10:24 pm
mbp said…
@Jayedub you could be right. There are so many sales these days that none of Steam's bargains are surprising and new. We are ask bargained out.

@JT Portal 2 is the one game I am hoping to pick up at a juicy discount. Unfortunately I already have all Valve's other games so paying full price for Portal 2 just to get games I already have is no bargain.
6:50 am
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