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STEAM | GO FIND THE NEW THREAD
TychoCelchuuu
PIGEONRegistered User regular
PIGEONRegistered User regular
- Check out Enhanced Steam, a cool browser plugin for Chrome and Firefox that enhances Steam. Duh.
- Waiting is for chumps: Steam now has category for games with early access betas and alphas. Watch games develop!
- The other shoe drops: regular weekly deals begin on Steam! Are monthly deals next?
- The War Z returns to Steam with a more...honest approach. It is still shit that should not be bought.
- Linux joins Steam as several games get Linux-compatible versions.
Welcome to the Steam thread! This a magical place full of generosity and chilling displays of over-consumerism. Let this post be your guide.
Steam is a store/program by the Valve Corporation. It is both a storefront as well as a sort of launcher program for games bought from it. The easiest way to describe it is as iTunes for video games, and it's a rather apt comparison as Steam is just as much a juggernaut in its market as iTunes. We're talking THE biggest digital distributor of PC games, with a market share that is actually pretty comparable to Apple's little program.
Why use Steam?
Steam's real claim to fame is sales, which started about 6-7 years ago and have been increasing in variety and frequency as the years go by. Let's go down the main types of sales.
The Seasonal Sales: These are the two "big ones" that Steam does twice a year, and both run for roughly two weeks. You have the Summer Sale, which typically starts in late June/early July, and then the Winter Sale which starts a few days prior to Christmas and typically ends a few days after New Year's Day. These are chock full of varying sales, which I am now going to list.
- General Sale: During a seasonal sale, just about EVERYTHING goes on sale by some degree. This is typically around 25% or so, but deeper cuts do happen. The only games that don't go on a general sale are recently released titles and games released by stingy publishers (Activision).
- Daily Deals: A bit of misnomer now, but these are around 6-10 games that get even deeper discounts than the general sale. We're talking 50% or more in most cases. "Dailies" used to last 24 hours, thus the name, but recently they tend to last 48 hours. There are new dailies every day until the sale ends, and dailies tend to not repeat.
- Flash Sales: shorter sales of around six titles. SOMETIMES flash sales are deeper discounts than the Daily Deals, but this wasn't the case in the last Seasonal Sale. These tend to last 12 hours and do repeat.
- Voter Sales: The same as a Flash Sale, only Steam users voted on it. Three games will be up for vote, along with the discount that will be offered for each game should it win. Once the previous Voter Sale is over, the winner of the current vote goes on sale for 12 hours and a new vote begins. Vote options repeat frequently, though not always against the same other two games.
Seasonal Sales are basically a big deal around this thread.
Holiday Sales: A typically week-long sale around some holiday, typically Thanksgiving and Halloween. There are daily deals, and sometimes the other deals pop up (Thanksgiving sometimes get a general sale).
Publisher Sale: A publisher greases Valve's palm and gets a sale. These are similar to holiday sales, only there is generally a daily deal for one game each day, and the games will be unsurprisingly connected to the publisher.
Midweek Madness: Occurs every week, roughly starting midday Tuesday and ending Thursday afternoon. A game or two will get a decent discount for the duration of the sale.
Weekend Sale: Same as Midweek Madness, only slightly longer and TENDS to attract more AAA titles. Happens every week, starting midday Thursday and ending midday Monday.
Daily Deals: Literally a sale every day! Tends to be a decent discount that, as the name implies, happens every day for exactly one game. Deals goes up middday and lasts for 24 hours. Utter crap is generally up for grabs on daily deals, but sometimes you find some really good stuff here.
Note that, during bigger sales (mostly seasonal sales), the Midweek Madness, Weekend Sale, and Daily Deals are suspended until the bigger sales ends.
This is a big thread, and thus there are some guidelines to keep things nice and orderly throughout. Refusing to abide by these guidelines could get you in trouble, which includes being kicked out of the thread entirely if you are a real pain.
- This thread is for Steam-related discussion. Try to look for other, more appropriate threads before discussing games or other topics in here. Let's not drain other threads of precious content!
- Do not beg for games. This will make you unpopular and probably less likely to get anything.
- If you did get a gift, then thank the person for their generosity! Use the notification system so they can see your thank you post! ( @NAME OF PERSON )
- Likewise, if you give a gift, then you should probably mention your PA handle somewhere in the message.
- Do not whine over who got a gift.
- The person is spending money to give back to the community, and they have final say in who gets the gift.
- If you feel something is amiss in the thread, then quietly report the responsible parties. Posting about it will accomplish nothing, and probably just exacerbate things.
- Giving away games via contest? All entries must be PM'd to you! The thread gets too cluttered otherwise. You can, however, post the winning entries.
I have too many games! Which do I play?
Steam Roulette randomly picks a game for you to play.
I have too many games! How do I move them to my new hard drive?
Steam Mover makes transporting your massive library much easier.
How can I feel as bad as possible about owning these games?
Steam Calculator tells you how much money your account is worth, you terrible person.
How do I make one of those cool Steam Gifts signature giveaway banners?
Steam has downloaded DirectX twice for every game I own and now I'm out of disk space - what do I do?
Steam Cleaner is a program that gets rid of a lot of the unneeded crap that some games install on your PC.
What's on sale? Like, if I don't want to tediously check Steam.
Check out Steam Game Sales and this sales tracker.
Steam stopped doing stuff. It broke.
Delete or rename ClientRegistry.blob in your Steam directory.
Why did Steam reject this CD-key?
Only games that also run under Steamworks will have their CD-keys accepted by Steam if bought elsewhere. If a game is not Steamworks, then it will ONLY install on Steam if you buy it via Steam. Most digital distributors will now mention Steam if it is required to run the game, but another list can be found here. Note that you can make shortcuts in Steam that will play non-Steam games through Steam. As far as your friends list is concerned, you will be "In-Game" but it'll just give a generic "Non-Steam game." Also, no community perks like achievements.
Why are some games not available in my region?
Publishers determine what countries get what games. Someone in a suit decided that it wasn't worth the money to make the game available to your region, so it isn't available on Steam. This also applies to cases of games having edited/censored versions showing up on Steam in certain countries. The good news is that you can generally get around this by having someone from another region gift or trade you the game.
Look at those neat signatures for Steam! Where do I get one?
Try here.
What is this Steamgifts site? I wish to create a giveaway! I cannot enter a giveaway!
Steamgifts is a neat site that lets people create giveaways for games on Steam. If you cannot enter a giveaway, then you either lack points or aren't in a group required by the giveaway. Points are accumulated over time, so just wait a bit if you lack points. The group thing is generally done by communities to prevent mooches from getting games. If you are new to the forums, then spent a few months in the thread proving that you are serious about being a member of this community. Eventually, you will invited to the group that is required to enter our giveaways.
Steam is downloading slowly. What gives?
When a big title (or Team Fortress 2 content patch) comes out, you may notice really shitty download rates. This means you are likely on one of the default servers for downloads, which is being assailed by millions of people. Head to Steam -> Settings -> Downloads + Cloud and change your download region until things improve. Since other regions are typically less populated, you will probably get somewhat better results even if the new server is in another country. There are other ways to force Steam to switch which server you are downloading from, but these are just video games and maybe you should learn a little bit about patience.
This edit
started a trend in various fan creations dedicated to a portly man and his magic, money-munching machine.
Nodody expects the PA Inquisition!
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That game (and the board game) is crack for my missus, she loves it despite the keyboard-tossing frustration that can arise when the final points are tallied.
Definitely a solid choice, but don't discount Euro Truck Simulator 2. We've both played the demo of that extensively and the internet radio really makes the game shine. It's like that was the last piece of the "boring simulator" genre puzzle that finally makes it all make sense and wonderfully entertaining/relaxing.
She still gets my help to reverse the trailer into the dock for the XP bonus, though.
Not that I'm implying anything.
In related news, I finally got a refund for a missing delivery of Euro Truck and XCOM today and now I see they're $20 and $16 apiece on Steam and Amazon respectively... So, by purchasing them today, technically I've saved about $12.
That's how finance works, right?
(notice the sexy amount of rep)
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PSN: IncindiumX
So this Spring Indie Sale...what's looking like the hottest deal?
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I bought it during the last sale. I'm still not sure if I wasted money or not.
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Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
My backlog is too big for free games.... wait... what?
Also, apologies to the folks who won my Steamgifts giveaways tonight. Their site is borked and I can not tell who you are and I must go to bed. I will get you in the morning (most likely, tomorrow evening at the latest!)
Steam profile.
Getting started with BATTLETECH: Part 1 / Part 2
The catch is it is aimed at UKers. Gamersgate has the game for 30 pounds, aka 45 bucks. However, Gamersgate has always been pretty liberal about letting non UKers use the site. You can use your normal account and whatnot even. It comes with XCOM, Bioshock 1, and a choice of 1 of a handful of 2k titles, as well as 20 percent back in store credit (roughly 15 bucks after an additional bonus). Which probably makes this the best deal yet. Cheapest buy in, the only comparable price is GMG after taking cash back, but this gets you 15 bucks store credit on top of it. Link for easy access, sometimes it can be a pain to manually enter the site
2008, 2012, 2014 D&D "Rare With No Sauce" League Fantasy Football Champion!
I have it on PS3. It's OK. Pretty to look at, a bit slower paced than I expected. I'm not really interested in re-buying it on Steam, though.
My Backloggery
I think it's definitely a YMMV kind of thing, you're going to hate it or love it. I played through it on the Wii U version, and really liked it.
COME FORTH, AMATERASU! - Switch Friend Code SW-5465-2458-5696 - Twitch
Elvenshae's Man This Week Sucks, 99-Page Steam Thread Giveaway of Cuteness!!!
So, yeah - this week sucks. A really nice guy I worked with died of brain cancer. On Monday, my wife and son were in a car accident on the way to the dr's office for his 18-month check-up (they're both completely fine, which makes the week suck much less, and it's the other driver's very obvious fault, so at least nothing out-of-pocket for it). While I was pulled over on the side of the road with them, the cop who responded to the accident wrote me a ticket (expired plates; my fault, but they somehow got out of sync with my state inspection, so I didn't even realize they expired last month and was congratulating myself for how I was renewing everything this week when I still had two weeks before everything expired). I'm getting contradictory and mutually exclusive instructions from my two bosses about an IT project I'm managing with a June rollout, meaning May feature freeze, meaning seriously not much time left to faff around, meaning the programmers are on edge.
So, fuck it - make me laugh at something cute. Prizes for the top 2 entrants. I'll probably make my wife help me pick the winners.
Capitalism, ho.
Contest to run through whenever I feel like closing it down.
Steam: Elvenshae // PSN: Elvenshae // WotC: Elvenshae
Wilds of Aladrion: [https://forums.penny-arcade.com/discussion/comment/43159014/#Comment_43159014]Ellandryn[/url]
What is this new thing of wonder you speak of? Got me many kinds of curious now.
http://www.enhancedsteam.com/index.php
:shock: That...is a great thing. A very great thing.
That's kind of the point. Personally I thought Little Inferno deftly delivered a very powerful message, but I agree $10-15 is a fairly steep price in terms of content.
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Euro Truck Simulator 2 is on sale! Beintot L'Ete is on sale! It's like Christmas all over again... oh god my poor wallet.
Steam: Chaos Introvert | Twitch.tv: Chaos_Introvert | R*SC: Chaos_Introvert | PSN: testsubject23
Yes, yes indeed it is.
Thanks for the link @Luchaire .
I like DxTory, it has a free version but you end up with a DXTORY thing at the bottom of your video. Its pretty nice and you can record at a lower resolution than youre playing at.
A very worthwhile experience, one that I can really only suggest during a sale such as this. TFOL is a caper tale smashed into two games (you get its prequel - Gravity Bone - with your purchase of TFOL) even if the two are only barely connected by some loose bra straps. The worlds are vivid yet compressed, you'll barely find yourself going down but a few hallways before a break hits yet there's a lot of character to be absorbed from posters and such around the world. What writing there is to be found is minimal, but in a good way. After your first playthrough you will have some questions for sure, but when you go back and play again (and you should, each game is like 20 minutes) you start to realize things a little better and it occurs to you just how good of a job it did telling you everything you needed to know via tropes, imagery and sound than it could have done with dialog.
In my extremely short playtimes with both games, I felt more connected to the characters of the world in those 20 minutes than I did in 20 hours with some RPG characters. Maybe i've got some bias as a creator so it tickles my funny bone in all the right ways. Really though, it's an off-kilter spy novel squished into a bottle the size of a 5 hour energy drink and then poured over glass shards that deliver the drug right into your system. Go in with an open mind and a yearning heart.
I have to throw out a rec for this as well, I followed Everyday Shooter ever since it was originally PC Exclusive back in the day. I have fond memories of staring at the web page with my best friend praying for new news, hoping to god we'd be closer to launch. Then one day it became a PS3 game and really became something else. It's since been on the PSP and the PC, but it has yet to find an audience on any of them. It's unusual in that the shooting mechanics are not unified and it acts more as a shooting gallery than a constant game. Each new stage offers new ways to kill enemies and a new function that serves as its chain mechanic to score higher. You want to blow things up and collect their yellow blocks to gain points while figuring out the score system on the fly and adapting. It sounds hectic but the game's pacing is slower than your average shmup to allow for a more relaxed experience. It's still really difficult so thankfully the dev included some unlockable options for practicing and extending the number of lives you have.
It's also one of those games that has a reactionary soundtrack system, everything you shoot and blow up makes a noise correlating to the song of the stage. You perform live remixes while chaining your enemies. Unfortunately there was a weird bug with the sound engine and it is guilty of clipping when too many sounds are playing at once and I have no idea if they fixed it. But Everyday Shooter has a metric fuckton of heart behind it, and I take every chance I can get to tell people that they should play it. Especially since we came this close to losing it on the PC entirely.
That is a lousy week, but I'm relieved to hear your family is OK.
edit: I'm not too sure about that Enhanced Steam thingo, I mean...
That may guilt me away from serving the Newell
Man, that's a rough week. I'm glad your family is OK, though, and I'm sure you'll make it through this.
As for your request for cuteness... here's my mom's kitten, Doodlebug, enjoying a power nap.
So I bought a copy of Don't Starve, and it gave me two! I guess that means that...
Oh, yes, that's what it means. It's time for the "Wake up Monday morning to see if you Don't Starve" Giveaway...
or the
"I got a free game so I need to get rid of it as fast as possible" Giveaway!
You guys know what to do!
Clearly, I will have to give them additional monies.
They've done the same thing with the two previous versions. It's going to become a yearly thing just like Fifa, Nba, CoD and games alike. Better start getting used to it.