Steam Archives - Tales of the Aggronaut

Self Exodus

January 31, 2019 by Belghast

Here comes some random commentary. I have for the most part been in support of the Epic Games store and snagging some of their exclusives… like for example Hades and Ashen. Those are games for which pre-orders had not started on any platform and announcing that they would only be available on this somewhat new storefront was perfectly reasonable. I was largely okay with The Division 2 but I felt it was a little shady to shift gears a few months before the launch of the game. I had not pre-ordered, and if I had been planning on doing so… I would have probably just ordered through the UPlay store to cut out the middle man. However what just happened with Metro Exodus is in the “shady as fuck” territory, given that the game is roughly two weeks from launch and had been in pre-orders since at least E3. That is way too late in the game to be massively shifting gears like that and THQ Nordic the sub company should have known that they would be screwing things up for THQ Nordic the parent company.

Still I am largely cool with Epic Games store as a vehicle for grabbing games. Sure it feels a little spartan, but it is still a way better store front and client than Origin… a point that has been reminded of late given how much I have had to fiddle with that client thanks to Anthem. The problem I have is with the practice of taking pre-sales way the hell ahead of the games release, because frankly the term pre-order is a lie when it comes to digital software. You are not plunking down $5 to reserve your copy of a game… you are handing over your credit card information and often times being charged up front for the purchase. The thing is… whenever that process starts those vendors should be locked in stone and unchanging. If you didn’t want to support Steam six months ago… then you shouldn’t have allowed sales of your product to begin.

In truth I don’t so much fault Epic for making offers, but the company for taking that offer in Bad Faith. I get a regular stream of offers from people wanting me to place links on this site to whatever the hell it is that they are pushing… often times some sort of a casino. I don’t take the quick money because I feel like it would be violating the trust my readers have in me. I don’t necessarily have a dog in this fight however because while I have been looking forward to Metro Exodus… it was never really a day one title for me and instead something I would play considerably after release. However for those who were harmed by this action… I get the outrage. The biggest part I am confused by however is how they have stated that Steam Pre-Orders would be fulfilled and the game would be updated through that platform… but the game itself would no longer be available there. That just feels really odd and awful.

As far as gaming last night… I got the Blue Mage to 40 through lots of grinding that was relatively boring and not worth talking about. Then I swapped over and played some Destiny 2 where I completed a bunch of bounties… one of which being the weekly for Eververse. I lucked out and managed to pull the Last Word ornament… which will sit there waiting until I complete that quest chain. I did manage to push through the step where you collect a bazillion hive cores or whatever it was we were collecting. I also managed to make a little progress on the Malfeasance where I believe I am on the final step involving killing Guardians and getting invasion kills in Gambit. I had fun… but man movement felt weird after getting used to Anthem.

Speaking of which… who all will I be seeing in the weekend test happening Friday-Sunday? I’m BelghastStern over on Origin so hit me up with a friend invite.

Always a Sale

December 2, 2015 by Belghast

Psychology of Clearance

For as long as I can remember, I have always been a bargain hunter. Few things feel better than finding that rare item on sale for as much as 50 to 75% off of its original price. I know without a doubt that I got this instinct from my Mother, because when I was growing up I can remember my Grandmother joking that she thought I would end up being a “Blue Light Special”. For those who are either not old enough, or not from the right region… K-Mart used to have a literal blue light attached to a cart that they would drive around the store, and for thirty minutes a specific item in the store would be at a significant discount. I remember my mother would always go to check out whatever these items were, sometimes whether or not we actually needed them. So to say that allure of finding a deal is ingrained in my very fiber is a very true statement. Thankfully my wife is much the same… so she gets it… and in truth we simply don’t like spending more money than we need to on anything. She however is always willing to carry it further than I am… and there comes a point where I am sick of dealing with something and am willing to spend any amount of money to be “done” with it.

One of our favorite activities during the parts of the year when stores are changing out seasonal merchandise is to go clearance hunting. We live in Wal-mart country, and are roughly two hours away from the central office. This means at any time there are around thirty or forty Wal-mart stores within easy driving distance. The trick of Wal-mart is the odd quirk that every store is essentially self governed to a certain bit, and this extends to what they choose to put on clearance. So one store might have an item for full price, but a store ten minutes away might have it for 75% off depending on a whole bunch of factors. My Lego habit has been fed by the fact that I can pretty regularly find whatever sets I want on deep discount… so that $200 set becomes $60… or the $30 set becomes $10. So the question always becomes… is this item good enough of a deal, and there have been times I have passed something up only to kick myself later. For example when driving home from Pax South last year, I found Star Wars Lego AT-TE for $40, but ended up passing because it felt like we had already spent a silly amount of money that weekend. I’ve kicked myself since because that was originally like a $150 set, and really freaking awesome.

The Steam Sale

So these instincts of bargain hunting and regret of the deals I have missed, carried with me into the digital world. As a result the Steam sale has been one of those forces of nature that I never can seem to resist. When I see that $60 game that I have always wanted to play… selling for only $5… it is really hard not to go ahead and pick it up and tuck it away for the day when I really get the desire to play it. The problem being… I like quite literally everyone else I know is doing this, and as a result we have hundreds of games as a steam backlog that we “really need to play”. Compound this with the fact that new games are constantly being released, it comes into a situation where there are just games that we own that we are quite likely never going to play. Over the last year I have tried really hard to resist the lure of the Steam Sale, but usually I end up picking up at least one “deal” that looks too good to pass up. Even though on some level the number of games that I have that I have not even installed… is a massive stress point for me.

This past weekend for Thanksgiving there was predictably yet another Steam sale going on, with its own rock bottom prices on games. I hit the site a few times to see what was being sold, and oddly enough had zero desire to purchase anything. At this point we have done a bunch of renovations on the house, so there is definitely the desire to “spend no more money” going on, but I don’t think it was that. There were also plenty of games that looked interesting to me, so I don’t think it was simply the fact of not having anything I wanted. I think maybe it is just the fact that I have finally come to the realization that there is no limited quantity here, that I am racing to snap up before they sell out. In a physical store… they have a limited number of items on the shelf, and when those items are gone… especially when clearance is concerned… they are not getting any more. When you are selling a digital key to a digital game… there is absolutely no rarity going on there. They can sell keys a virtually unlimited number of times… and be able to keep ratcheting that price downwards towards infinity, each time catching a new batch of purchasers. A physical copy of Pokemon or Final Fantasy ends up gaining value, but a digital copy only serves to get cheaper.

Always on Sale

I think another thing that is finally sinking in… is that I can purchase a game at any point and don’t need to have it waiting in the wings for me to play. I have insanely fast internet right now, in fact I ran a test this morning for the purpose of this article and you can see it over on the right hand side there. There is not a game that is available on steam that I cannot literally download in less than thirty minutes. So it is not like I need to preload things to really be able to have fun… I can wait for the whim to strike me, purchase it in any of the many always on market places and be playing the game less than a half an hour later. This is vastly different from the chunk of my life where I literally had to drive an hour away to be able to find any of the games I wanted to play. There is a part of me that still attributed a value to having something on hand, rather than having to go out and acquire it…. since I still remember having to go from store to store looking for one of the last remaining copies of a new game. Now I purposefully shun physical copies of things for the simplicity of knowing I can pre-order moments before the release of a game and still get the full benefit.

The other side effect is that there is quite literally always a sale going on somewhere. Between Steam, Origin, GOG, Greenman Gaming, Amazon, Humble Bundle… and countless other minor retailers there is quite literally always a sale going on for any game I could ever want to play. The only time this is not necessarily the case is for any game I might want to play on the Playstation 4. There I am very much still at the whim of a single game store, since once again I am not a huge fan of buying physical copies of games for the console. I greatly prefer the fact that thanks to my 2 Terabyte harddrive upgrade in it, I can have most everything I might want to play “on tap” and waiting on me to boot. All of these things honestly make the individual digital games worth less to me than they used to… and this is maybe going to be a problem that the industry will have to deal with. There was a time when I was willing to “snap up” a game for $20, and that degraded to $15… and then to $10… and now quite literally a AAA title has to be $5 or less for it to trigger that “buy now” instinct. I feel like I am simply becoming desensitized to the effect of the “Big Sale!” and now it seems simply easier to pay the price something is currently selling for rather than trying to stock pile it for later. This entire topic came up, because this recent steam sale seems to be the one that a good chunk of my friends also passed up. Has the magic of the Steam sale finally lost its magnetism? I’d be curious to hear some of your thoughts about this, because for me at least over the course of this last year…. the only “deals” that I have really snapped up are those coming from Humble Bundle or the PSN store.

Impressive but Still Beta

July 8, 2014 by Belghast

Auto Update

“Wow, I’ve never seen that happen before” is generally something you never want to hear uttered from an auto mechanic. That said at this point my wife’s vehicle is fixed and ready to go and seems to have no negative impact. Apparently on the Pontiac Torrent there are two different sizes of bolts that can be used to attach the tensioner. Quite simply when they replaced that part they used the wrong one, and as we were driving Sunday the vibration and force sheared the bolt off completely causing the serpentine belt to shread, and at the same time stopping the flow of motion to both the water pump and the alternator.

The good folks at Hibdon were more than willing to fix the problem, and after getting the vehicle towed there yesterday morning they had already fixed everything by mid day. It is one one of those “honest mistake” type situations, and I don’t fault them for it… especially since they are also the ones responsible for making it right. It was a grand inconvenience but thankfully my wife really had nowhere that she needed to go yesterday. I cringe when I think how much worse this could have gone had the bolt sheared and she lost power to major systems while out on the highway with no place to really pull to the side of the road. We were likely saved by the fact that it happened so close to our home and we did not drive it long enough to cause a radiator boil over.

Steam In Home Streaming

One of the problems with having multiple machines is that ultimately the game you happen to want to play is not installed on the machine you are sitting at. Yes I realize this is a first world problem, as I am extremely lucky to be able to have both a nice gaming laptop and gaming desktop, but this is something I have tried to deal with for some time. I’ve tried gaming over various versions of remote desktop, and none of them work well enough to offer a passable experience. I am not sure who mentioned it first, but the other day I said something about steam logging you out when you tried to log in a second machine. Apparently this has not been the case for some time. What happens now is that you see all of the games available installed from all of the machines you happen to be logged into on your network. The cool thing about this is instead of the play button you now see a Stream button as shown above.

Last night I decided to try this out, and I had some mixed results. This all started because I decided that I wanted to play catch up on True Blood which meant needing to hang out downstairs with my laptop. True Blood is one of those shows where about halfway through the third season it went off the rails and I stopped caring about it. That said at the same time I felt like after spending that much time watching it… I felt committed to seeing it through to the end. Like if I stopped my choice to watch it in the first place would have somehow been invalidated. Sadly this is how I end up feeling about most television, and why I am still watching Bleach after all these episodes… when essentially every season is EXACTLY THE SAME. All that aside the game I wanted to play last night was not installed on my laptop, so it was either steam streaming or a 10 gig download over wifi.

Impressive but Still Beta

I have to say that the actual game play was rather impressive. The game I was streaming was not exactly fast paced and action oriented… in that I was playing Divinity: Original Sin. There was a minor input lag, but I seriously might be the only one who actually would have noticed it. For example I refuse to use a wireless mouse because I can feel the slight hesitation of the wireless lag… whereas none of the rest of the world seems to be able to. The biggest thing I noticed is that it felt like I was watching YouTube video. Since you are in essense streaming video across your network, there was a certain measure of blurring and artifacting of the screen. This was most noticeable when confronted with large areas of a dark color, but it was not bad enough to be anything more than an annoyance.

The deal breaker for me however was that every time I tried to alt+tab out of the game to check something… the stream would crash out, and in a game where saving your progress is important this meant that a couple of times last night I lost a bunch of progress. Alt+tabbing is something that is just habitual at this point, and I have done it before I even realize I did it. So all of the problems I had with Skyrim apply here, in that either I have to force myself to NEVER alt tab… or I have to deal with the consequences of my actions. As a result I decided to just simply deal with installing yet another game in two places. Unfortunately since Divinity: Original Sin does not use the steamworks cloud save functionality… this also means I will be manually copying saved games between the two machines each time I decide to switch systems.

Steam in home streaming is of course still very much a beta product, and hopefully they will fix the alt+tab thing. When they do I can see myself using it quite a bit more often, especially as my laptop ages. What this really gives you is the ability to play games using the full horse power of your gaming machine, while on another machine that simply acts as a viewer and input device. I’ve even seen video of someone playing games at full frame rate using a chromebook with linux side loaded onto it. If they ever get internet streaming working, and manageable lag wise… this means there might be a time when you could play all the games on your home machine from your tablet while travelling. What I would love to see is for this to work in a more universal fashion, so I could play the games from my PS4 while sitting at my PC or versa vicea. I don’t think we are anywhere near there yet, but it gives me hope that maybe at some point we will be.

Old Addictions

Over the weekend there was a point where my wife needed to get out of the house and do anything. She had been sitting in the house for over 72 hours at that point, and just needed to see something other than the walls around her. While we didn’t really have much in the way of errands to run, I decided to co-opt the trip and run around and visit a few pawn shops. I’ve always loved going to pawn shops, because you really never know what you might find there. Since I hate paying full price for anything, they are a smorgasbord of potentially awesome things for cheap. One of the various ones we went to had a bunch of their Playstation 3 and Xbox 360 games for as low as $5 a piece. I picked up used copies of Tekken 6, The Simpsons Game, Metal Gear Solid 4, Heavy Rain and a copy of Fallout 3: Game of the Year edition.

One of the things I have always been curious about is playing Fallout or Elder Scrolls on a console, so for $5 I could not pass the the chance to see “how the other half lived”. When we got home I had this grand idea of testing out all of the games… but never actually made it past Fallout 3. I booted up the game and spent the next three hours playing it before I realized how much time had passed. This is one of those games that I can play over and over and never quite get bored of it, and I always thought it was the ability to modify it that made it so intriguing to me. Playing on a console I have no modding at all available, so I realize it really was the game itself. I am completely happy to wander around with wastes with nothing but a pistol, dispensing justice.

Last night after we finished our walk I went back upstairs to cool down, and made the mistake of turning on the television and continuing the journey into the wastes. Next thing I know it is 12:30 and I am scrambling to get back to Megaton extremely encumbered, but at the same time completely unwilling to drop any of my plunder. This will be interesting to say the least. One of the “mods” I always install when playing the PC game is something that removes encumbrance, because I absolutely hate playing the inventory management simulation that is a Bethesda game. That said at this point I feel committed to seeing just how well the Fallout 3 experience translates to a console. Additionally it has been a really long time since I have played Fallout 3, as more recently I tend to play New Vegas when I get the fallout itch. It is amazing just how much more I like Three Dog, than Mister New Vegas.

#SteamStreaming #Fallout3 #PS3

Grinch Stole Steam-mas

June 27, 2014 by Belghast

Changing the Game

The first Steam sale that I can remember was back in 2008 during the Christmas break. It was a truly magical event where we saw entire publishers catalogs neatly packaged for a specific price. I remember picking up everything that THQ had released to date for something insane like $20 and I was completely hooked. The deals were just flat out unheard of at the time, and I opened my wallet and gobbled up a ton of things that I had wanted to play, but never bothered to pick up. From that point on there have been multiple tiers of interest in a game for me. There are always going to be the games that I will preorder happily so that I can play day one hour one, but these are getting significantly fewer in number.

There is a slightly larger group that I am willing to pick up when it goes on sale for the first time, meaning that first time steam drops the price for a daily deal or a weekend special. There is a significantly larger group that I am interested in when the price gets below $10. Then there is another batch that I am willing to pick up if the price ever lands below $5. Finally there is a group that I have no interest in whatsoever even if they were giving it away for free, and these mostly are made up of the sports games out there. All the while I know in the back of my head, the game is just going to keep getting cheaper each successive Christmas and Summer steam sale. Essentially the amount I am willing to spend on any game is now reduced because I know something like steam exists.

Grinch Stole Steam-mas

The only problem is this year it all feels so formulaic. In part this is because the games we see for sale this year, we also saw for sale during the Christmas 2013 sale, and the Summer 2013 sale, and the Christmas 2012 sale, and the Summer 2012 sale… etc etc. The awesome and horrible thing about steam is that the catalog never depletes. They still regularly offer deals on games a decade old, and while these are generally pennies on the dollar… you can only see the “FATE collection” on sale so many times before you stop giving a crap about it. Over the last few years it has felt like the Steam sale was less an insane deal on games, and more this event that everyone wanted to participate in. There were “games” to be played and “party favors” to collect, and a universal sense of loss of money as folks indulged in picking up all of those games they had been waiting for.

The problem is this year it just feels tarnished. I still instinctively check the page each time a new set of games goes on sale, and for the most part there hasn’t been anything that really excited me in the daily sales. I am not sure if this is a side effect of me just being more accustomed to preordering the games I really care the most about, or if it is a cumulative effect that over the years I have cherry picked most of the good things from these sales already. This year the thing I have really indulged in so far is using this opportunity as a way to pick up the various DLC associated with games I already owned, since while the games go at a significant discount, it is usually the DLC that goes for pennies on the dollar during the steam sales. I used this opportunity to pretty much unlock everything that was available for Borderlands 2, and at the same time freak people out as it spammed my steam activity thread.

You can tell the magic is pretty much gone, when there are multiple flowcharts floating around the interwebs showing users how to get the best possible guaranteed deals from the sale. The base rule is to never buy anything unless it is on a Daily Deal, Flash Sale or Community Choice. Daily deals of course change out around Noon Mountain time I believe, and then Flash and Community Choice swap out every 8 hours. Then at the very end of the event, on June 30th this time around… there is usually an encore sale featuring the best deals of the entire run of the sale. This offers a last chance to pick up some of the more popular items. Since there is this formula however it takes almost all of the excitement out of the process. Once upon a time it was super exciting seeing what new wonders would go on sale each day, now it feels like you have guess what games will be big sellers based on the past performance on the store.

Soured the Milk

The thing is, it isn’t just steam that has destroyed my willingness to pay “full price” for anything. PlayStation Plus is this amazing program where you pay $50 a year and get 2 games a month for each of their three platforms (ps4, ps3, vita). Over the course of my time being a subscriber I have gotten 150 games through the program. This coming month we are getting Strider for the ps4, a title I would have eventually bought…. but was holding off just on the off chance that it might be a free title thanks to the PS4s currently limited software library. Sure enough it is this month and my waiting paid off… and the thing is, that is really way Steam and Playstation Plus and even Games With Gold has taught gamers. If you wait long enough you will get whatever it is that you wanted for next to nothing… or maybe even free. Sure this gives publishers a longer tail on the revenue stream, letting them make some profit off of games that have already cycled off of the store shelves, but it also lowers the total value of ANY title in the process.

At this point $60 seems absolutely outrageous to me to pay for a game regardless of platform. If it is something I am really amped to play, I might do it… but very rarely am I willing to pay that for something that is not an MMO. $40 is really the sweet spot of where I start to be interested in a title, but it isn’t until it gets to $10 or so that I am starting to be willing to pick it up “just because it looks interesting”. Essentially all of these programs have turned games into a commodity for me that I know will lower significantly over time. As far as console gaming goes, I have purchased mostly used games for years… and even then I am not willing to pay the type of prices that GamesStop, Best Buy or even our local chain Vintage Stock has to offer. Most of these places drop the sticker price by $10 and call it good. In order for me to snap up a console game, it has to be at Pawn Shop prices, so $15 bucks or so.

Gaming Altruism

The Steam Sale has taught me to buy a lot more games… but has lowered the total price I am willing to spend on any single game. The funny thing is… this also has caused something completely different. Every now and then there is a title that I believe in so much, that I am willing to buy additional copies and give away to my friends. So this week Borderlands 2 was like $5 and one of my friends mentioned that they had never played the game… so BAM! I purchased it and gifted it to them, because like a really good book… I feel like that is a game that everyone should play. This happens quite often in our little community. Over the course of the week, I gave away several different games… but at the same time received several back from totally different people. The prevalence of this happening has increased significantly over the years I have participated in the steam sale.

So while the total price given per item is less, there are several titles that get bought over and over to give as gifts. A few of my friends keep a stock in their steam inventory of titles that they loved to give out to someone who hasn’t played them yet. This has turned the whole process in a different direction for me, and when I see something like that happen it just makes me smile. Games are to me like Books are to my wife… and just as there will always be a “must read” book that you have to share with everyone you know, there will be a “must play” game. I am just happy to be in a place in my life where I can be generous like that without much issue. It has always made me happy when I can turn someone onto something cool, be it a game or a song or even one of my favorite movies. It is this act of sharing our favorite things that makes the internet such an awesome place to be. Maybe in spite the formulaic nature of the steam sale, there is still a little bit of magic left in that old top hat.

#SteamSummerSale2014