Steam summer sale

I started this blog in response to last year’s Steam summer sale, when I bought an obscene number of games for a slightly less obscene sum of money. This year’s sale has just finished, and yes, a good blogger would have mentioned it while it was still going on. I’ve been a little overwhelmed, though. After a while, all of the different games in a class (World War II first person shooters, sci-fi shooters, Western fantasy RPGs, JRPGs, puzzle platformers, abstract puzzles, and so on) start to blend into one, and I can’t remember whether I’m looking at Dungeon Siege III or The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings.

As well as the blanket sale, they’ve been having daily deals which are even more heavily discounted, and daily challenges, where getting specific achievements in some games will get you points. And what do you points mean? The daily sales and challenges tend to overlap, but not be identical, so there’s a decent sized set of games that you need to get TODAY RIGHT NOW BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE. So far, I’ve mostly restricted myself to getting these daily ones – aside from anything else, I would be irritated with myself if I paid $13 for a game only for it to be available for $11, three days later. On the last day, I picked up a bunch of games that I’ve wanted for a while but haven’t been daily features.

All in all, I ended up buying 57 games, costing something over $320. I can’t tell for sure, because the receipt for one of the days has gone missing. At full price, these games would have been $960. So who’s laughing now, overdraft fees? Using a non-strict taxonomy, there are:

• 17 Action games
• 5 Adventure games
• 2 Driving games
• 6 first person shooters
• 2 Platformers
• 3 Puzzle games
• 3 Puzzle platformers
• 7 RPGs
• 10 Strategy games
• 2 Tower Defences

After all the rush, I’m not sure I can face playing any games for about 3 months.