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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   38814 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 15, 2024

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There’s also the men who complain how expensive vidya is.

Skill issue. I have a whole-ass algorithm for getting games on the cheap using Steam. Namely, you may add any game you want to your wishlist. However, you may only BUY the game if the following conditions are met:

  1. The game must be on sale. Steam does so many sales that there is no point to ever buying a game at full price.
  2. The game must be at its lowest price ever. If it was that price once, it will be that price again. You can check a game's lowest price on SteamDB.
  3. The game must be at least 5 years old. This ensures that a game has had time to be patched, had all the DLC released, gone down in price, etc.
  4. The game must be under $19.99. Anything more than that means it's still too expensive.

By following this simple algorithm, you can usually get games that retailed for $50-$60 brand new a decade or two ago for $5 or less.

A note on bundles: Only buy bundles if every single game on the bundle follows this list. Otherwise, the bundle discount will be more than outweighed by the extra price you will pay on the non-compliant items.

There are a few exceptions for #2 -- there is a small genre of indie games what have never returned to their pre-release pricing, with Minecraft and Factorio being the most famous -- but in turn these are high-variance choices, and many in that genre flop badly. Similarly, while Humble Bundle has gone pretty far downhill recently, you can ocassionally find times where the minimum price on a bundle is under the historical sales price for just a couple of the games.

((Although the latter usually means a lot of the games are trash: cfe the current Astragon bundle, which is technically a price savings if you're just gonna play Bus and Construction simulator... but you're not.))

So you still buy single-player games?

Unfortunately this system has a problem...

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