Steam Summer Sale

Just as I'm promising myself to try and not buy any more new games so that I can whittle through my backlog, the steam Summer sale starts up and my wallet is about to take another beatdown.

The weird thing is, for someone who has owned Steam for a long time the sale season isn't really such a big deal anymore.  Sure, there will always be some games that I'd like to pick up on the cheap but I already own a lot of what's worth playing and at time of writing I've been feeling a little underwhelmed by the current sales.  Obviously something off my wishlist will crop up for an insanely low price but the phase of me buying everything ever because it costs about 80p is long gone, which is a little sad for me really.

Anyway, this year Steam have decided to roll out a little mini game that goes with the sale.  The Monster Summer Game is a clicker game where players work together to kill as many square looking monster things as they can within a day.  As people kill the monsters it unlocks sales on certain games so there is actually a pretty decent benefit to playing this thing.  Also as you play you can be granted up to 3 steam summer sale trading cards a day which is great if you're like me and just sell them off instantly.  Get some discounts on those already cheap games.

Granted a clicker game isn't going to blow anyone's minds but it's nice to see Steam trying to inject just a little bit more fun into their sale events.  It gives steam users something to look forward too ever sale other than just reduced prices on games.  If you have a few minutes to kill then it's worth just checking out but if you have a decent amount of free time you SHOULD be cracking through all those delicious cheap games you just bought.

The Problems With Backlogs

Not my collection, but at this rate it will be soon

My backlog of games has kind of become my own personal fucking nightmare.  It's a thing I'll never be able to get over and I'm doomed to perpetually have metric fucktons of games unbeaten on unplayed until the day I die.

On the surface it seems like every enthusiasts dream right?  Stacks upon stacks of games to play, never stuck for choice and just being able to quickly yank something off your shelf and play.  Failing that, firing up my computer and having hundreds of digital games at my disposal ready to be installed and played at any time, sounds wonderful, right?

Well no because that's not how it goes.  The problem with having a huge backlog is that you have too much choice.  You suddenly decide that you want to play something new and you'll sit there for fucking HOURS going through every single game you fucking own trying to settle on one to play to completion.  It's gotten to the point where I'm not finding games that I forgot I ever owned and when I'm buying used games in places like Book Off I have to wrack my brains trying to remember if I own it already or not.

The other problem is long games.  It's OK if you're backlog is all modern FPS games that are about 6 to 10 hours long, but if you have an old collection then I can guarantee that there are games 60+ hours in there somewhere.  Old school RPGs that you bought off GoG or JRPGs from the PS1 days sitting there, festering and you know that one day you're just going to have to rinse it for a week solidly to have any decent chance at beating it before getting distracted by something else in your massive collection.

It's also stupidly easy nowadays for a backlog to get out of control.  I can go 10 minutes down the road to my retro shops and find stacks upon stacks of games for about 100 yen.  I can find equally cheap PS2 games and it's now gotten to the point where even things like PS3 games won't exactly break the bank.  Not to mention that PC owners have to deal with Steam, constantly offering them sales on shit they may not even want but that "75% Off!" mark is just too damn tempting.  Making the whole PC situation even worse is the fucking humble bundle, offering you games at a price OF YOUR CHOOSING.  If you're feeling particularly miserly then you can add another 5 titles to your endless list for $1.  I spend more than that commuting to work for fucks sake.

Once a backlog is out of control, it's doomed to be like that forever.  You try to stop yourself but there's always some cheap way to acquire games and you may not be spending that much money but these poor poor games are doomed to be stuck on the shelf for weeks, months or maybe even years.

One day I'll topple my backlog and when that day comes I'll have to do something insane in celebration.  Until then I'm just going to carry on being a victim of Steam sales and stupidly cheap Japanese retro games.

Steam Sale! DRM discussion inbound!

Well shit, I'm surprised it's not started already, I was really hoping it would have happened by now.

Anyway, if you are not a user of Steam, at certain times during the year Steam do this massive sale thing where they will slash the prices of pretty much all their games by huge amounts.  I'm talking about being able to get games for insane things like 75% off the original price, it's a great time to get some cheap games if you're on a bit of a budget.

So I want to take this moment to talk about Steam itself, since there are a number of communities that like to yell "fuck Steam! fuck DRM!" and this tends to people on the other side of the camp getting all overly defensive and everything turns into a massive rage war between the two sides.

Well lets face some facts, Steam is essentially a form of DRM.  You buy a game and you can only use it on your Steam account, you can't lend the games to anyone or even sell them back (although I've heard about people in the EU getting refunds).  If something happened to Steam, you are more than likely going to lose your entire library and all the raging in the world wont return your collection or your money.

So from that brief paragraph describing Steam as a form of DRM you might think that anyone who uses Steam a lot must be fucking stupid right?  Well no, not really.  You see, while there is all these drawbacks with Steam, the software does offer you quite a lot.  It gives you everything in one place and provides a shit ton of feature for connecting with people and playing with friends.  But none of that really matters when you look at the prices of shit on Steam.

If you're willing to have some patience with it, Steam will give you a massive amount of games for basically no money.  Off the top of my head, I can't think of a single game in my entire library that I have paid over £20 for and with the introduction of the Steam Marketplace, I've been able to sell my virtual items and use that money to get free games.

So Steam is essentially DRM done right in a way.  It's annoying that I'm limited with what I can do when it comes to my collection but I paid so little for the 200 games I've bought over 7 years that I really don't care.  As long as you follow their rules then Steam is a great, cheap gaming platform that you can have a lot of fun with for very little money.

Ideally, no DRM would be best but in this day and age we know that's never going to fucking happen, so long live steam and their insane sales!

Unless you're GoG, those guys are great