Steam Sale

Single Player First Person Shooter Maps and Mods for Half-Life 1, 2 and Episodes 1, 2 and 3

About

I have a Love - Hate relationship with Valve. Actually, it’s more Love - sometimes get annoyed with them relationship. I try to balance my negative articles with positive ones (Probably the Libra in me - Yes I was born in October, before somebody makes a smart comment of a sexual nature!)

Anyway, I will be posting more Half-Life-related newsy-type stuff and this comes under that heading.

If you didn’t already know (Is that possible?) then Steam has a store wide sale on and you should get down there (Virtually speaking, that is) and have a good dig around. I think this is a great gesture and I heartedly applaud Valve and probably the other developers for doing it.

The image above is the price you will pay for the Orange Box which is absolutely fragatastic.

Now onto some comment…….

Whilst I haven’t researched at all it seems that the prices on Steam for non-valve products are fractionally lower than bricks and mortar retails. Initially I was expecting a significant difference. I believed that people would be prepared to pay more for a physical box, manual etc. But it seems that I was almost 180 degrees wrong. I suppose you could easily argue that you should pay more for the convenience of buying through Steam.

(Normal price of Bioshock on Steam is $54, which is slightly higher than Play.com is selling it for, although they are out of stock. Also there will probably be a tax to add to the Steam price, depending on your location..)

I still fee that the publishers are missing an opportunity to create limited editions of games, with beautifully printed manuals etc. I know they exist but they should almost be considered essential.

Now, this recent sale has countered another obvious problem with Steam in that often retailers have sales to get rid of stock and a lot of my games were bought from Play.com during a sale. Of course Valve doesn’t need to do this because they don’t have product sitting on shelves that they need to move and another point is that ALL Valve’s games sell well, always.

So, thank you Valve for doing this, even though I know you have done it from a sound financial model, it’s still helps the average player.

I would be very interested to see how many Orange Boxes they sell over this sale period. Any Valve insiders wan to slip me the numbers? Anonymity guaranteed!