“I haven’t played more than 15-20 minutes of it[Deus Ex]”

Whaaa?

Leaving aside for a moment my (unsolicited) opinion that Deus Ex is the best PC game ever made, I’m actually sad that your experience of Human Revolution is far poorer for not having played Deus Ex. DX:HR was full of nods and nudges to Deus Ex, from some of the more cryptic emails and news reports to the characters. Every time I would find something in DX:HR that portents the world of Deus Ex, it was hair raising. Heck, to someone who’s played Deus Ex, it was crazy just recognizing the true “bad guy” in DX:HR, who is the guy you see in the opening cinematic (and never actually hear from again until the credits roll).

What I’m saying is, whatever DX:HR’s faults and missteps, it was brilliant as a prequel to Deus Ex, with oodles of foreshadowing, and the idea that anyone missed this entirely is somehow rankling. :(

Phew, okay, about the sales: The people at valve making decisions are engineers, or possess that bent of mind. This is evident from their maniacal focus on data-based decision making. Their peers at EA appear to be working on gut instincts and thumb rules; they’re probably primarily marketing guys with most of their marketing experience in a pre-digital era where data was hard to come by and you had to make do with established conventions. This is probably the root of many of EA’s problems today.

[…] EA and their hate of sales […]

@ theperfectnose:

It’s not an addiction. We can stop buying whenever we want. ;)

@ Kim Johnsson:

Yeah, HR is a lot of fun. Except the outsourced boss fights. They blow. But the rest of the game is pretty amazing. :)

@ SapientIdiot:

Yeah, exactly. If there was no Steam sales, you probably would be happy just to pirate and never pay a dime. Steam summer sale rolls along, and suddenly all these developers are richer than they were before because you just bought a dozen games.

I mean, is a game really worth $69.99 if no one is willing to buy it at that price? Wouldn’t it make sense to sell it at $12.99 if it meant you will get ten thousand sales instead of five? Especially since there is no manufacturing costs to speak of.

“What Steam does might be teaching the customer, ‘I might not want it in the first month, but if I look at it in four or five months, I’ll get one of those weekend sales and I’ll buy it at that time at 75 per cent off.”

This is exactly what I’ll do in most cases (with maybe one exception a year), I’ll pirate a game (or if its for console I’ll rent it from gamefly), unless/until the price goes below $30. I do it that way because I think thats what games are worth for the most part.

I’ll pay $40-60 for skyrim or the new StarCraft, but those few exceptions aside I don’t tend to play the games I buy often enough to justify throwing down that much for just a single play through. These days you never really know if a game will have much replay value either (see:Deus Ex HR: which i pirated on launch. I liked a little bit, so i just recent spent the $15 on steam to get it with the missing link addon, even though i’ll probably never play them again. Duke Nukem Forever, and RAGE are some other good examples of why i won’t pay more then that for a game i’ve yet to try) .

But I don’t think that i have this attitude because of the steam sales, If it wheren’t for steam sales (or the sales on PSN and PS+ discounts), I’d probably just not buy most of the games i play at all. These kinds of sales are the only way to make pirates like me into legitimate customers. I’ve been pirating games since they came by mail order, but if a game is under $20 and comes with cloud saving features like on steam and PSN, its actually way more convenient for me to just pay for it (the cloud storage option is great since I tend to uninstall games for months at a time then suddenly have an urge to resume playing them).

So true! Just the other week I decided to finally acquire and play Deus Ex Human Revolution. My first thought was to pirate it, but then almost immediately I thought that hey, Steam would be more convenient. It just works. So I sign in to Steam for the first time in a while, notice the summer sale, and… suffice to say I now own a lot more games than I did two weeks ago (including HR, which is great btw!) :P

Well said m’man! I read and I chuckled. My partner is a steam addict and it works pretty much as you said |)