Steam summer sale is on!

[wonko the sane?]

In case you haven't logged in since about 1 pm (central canada.) yesterday: the steam summer sale for 2023 is on. I've already acquired monster hunter rise and forts. Thinking of dipping back in for X4 before the end of the sale. We'll see.

Also seems to be another year where they aren't doing thematic days or rolling deeper discounts, so no difference in buying now or waiting.

 

[Pocket]

Well, yeah. It was clear that flash sales were gone forever as soon as they made "I didn't know it was going to go on sale in a few days" a valid reason for refunds. (Which is still a baffling decision, by the way. FOMO is literally the whole point of sales, and I don't think any other business in the history of the universe has let people effectively get discounts retroactively like that. Sure, it's a nice thing to do, but of all the ways they could be running their business more ethically, that wasn't even remotely close to the top of the list.)

 

[wonko the sane?]

Steam is also an effective monopoly, as all the other store/launcher combos are balancing between hot garbage and entirely unknown. They really don't need... ethics. So flash sales of the kind of yesteryear are probably never to be again. That's kind of the point of being the best at what you do (even if you are only mediocre at best and everyone else just sucks.), you get to set the rules.

 

[Pocket]

There really needs to be a word for when one company isn't a monopoly, but they might as well be due to the gross incompetence of every single one of their competitors. Because it happens surprisingly often in the business world.

 

[wentwood]

Steam shouldn't be the only way to play PC games but it seems to be as there are less disk games these days.

Forcing us into buying from Steam is a monopoly especially when it comes to digital games.

This can happen when it becomes the only place for digital games on PC.

As for PC I would buy a game disk any day.

 

[Zephyr]

I feel like GoG does well enough in that I hear it mentioned a lot more than the Epic Store - just the odd times I have used it, it's like. If Steam is Photoshop, then GoG is GIMP in terms of user interface. Especially the store search function.

 

[wonko the sane?]

I like gog galaxy. It's functional, fast, even pretty.

I neither want, nor need ANOTHER service running in the background, and doing something that is majority located in a perfectly functional program in it's own right. Could I use it to replace steam? Probably, but why would I?