If you play games on a PC, you know what Steam is. If you don’t, then you aren’t paying attention. I’m old enough to have been around when Steam came out so I can tell you how amazing it is. It used to be that you’d install two, four, or even six CD’s worth of content in order to get a game onto your PC. If you were lucky it would all fit on one DVD. Then you had to manually update each game by downloading patch after patch after patch (because they were cumulative of course and you couldn’t just jump from 1.0 to 1.0.6 without installing all of the 1.0.x’s in between). You had to buy all of your games at a retail store and “searching” meant moving your feet from place to place and looking with your eyes. Sales happened occasionally but were hard to come by, at least for someone who wasn’t looking daily.
Then Valve, the company behind Half Life , released Steam. Steam was simply amazing. An online store where you could download your games directly to your PC. Updates were installed automatically. It had a bunch of other community features as well like chat, leader boards, and the like, but the big thing was the online store. Not only was it convenient, it was well-priced. Things went on sale all the time. Popular games from a few years prior could be had for under $10! Games frequently go on sale and there are mega-sales that happen twice a year – once in the summer and once during the holidays.
After ordering my PC, I needed some additional games to fill it up. I already had some titles that I hadn’t played yet, but I wanted to stock up on a few more, especially since the winter sale was on its way. I actually caught a sale in November as well. Here’s what I bought when it was all said and done.
November Sale
- Napoleon: Total War
- Assassin’s Creed Brotherhood
- Assassin’s Creed Revelations
- Batman Arkham City GOTY
- Assassin’s Creed 3 Standard Edition
- Grid 2
- Batman Arkham Origins
- Fallout New Vegas Ultimate
- The Walking Dead Season 2
- Total: $51.01 =~ $5.67 per game
December Sale
- Max Payne 3 (ROW)
- Assassin’s Creed III – Season Pass
- How to Survive – Storm Warning Edition
- Far Cry
- Far Cry 2
- Far Cry 3
- Far Cry 3 Blood Dragon
- Grid
- Need for Speed: Undercover
- Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II
- Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit
- Slender: The Arrival
- The LEGO Movie Videogame
- Alan Wake
- Red Faction Guerrilla Steam Edition
- DiRT 3
- Total: $63.17 =~ $3.95 per game
Look at those prices! For the price of two brand new games, I’ve purchased 25 titles! Now none of them are brand new of course, but that doesn’t make them bad games. A few of them are only a couple of years old but are still graphically rich (Assassin’s Creed, Far Cry series, Max Payne, Batman). In summary, Steam has an amazing marketplace with amazing sales and makes game maintenance super easy. I’ve made out in the last couple of months!
Relatively Ambitious 