What's better for sales

[Jason]

What's better for game sells the steam summer, steam winter, or the misc sales that pop up every week

[Jason]

What's better for sales

What sales are better the steam summer, steam winter, or the misc ones that pop up every week

[Crazy Tiger]

Depends on the game/game dev/publisher, best to check Steamdb.info for the price history to make that judgement call.

[Narcissistic Cannibal]

The right answer is "third party key resellers"

[Start_Running]

It depends.
Generally Publisher Sales are your best bet for getting lower prices.
That is when a Publisher is having a special event. Like rthe Star Wars May tthe 4th dealio. Sometimes you'll get prices lower, sometimes they'll be the same as you get in the other sales.

The best way to check is to check the game's price history on Steamdb and see what and when the lowest prices line up with.

[LowJack_VA1]

I think the publisher and weekend sales are usually the best value. The winter/summer sales are not sales in my opinion. They are sales events that many people enjoy, but they are not always looking at the discounts or prices. They are getting badges and cards and what not, but that is not always the better price or offer. I know people in real life that ignore sales on Steam if they are not a winter/summer sale, even if the game they want is 95% off on a weekend publisher deal, they'll ignore it.

[Kargor]

Depends on various factors, probably.

As far as I'm concerned, and your mileage will differ, smaller sales work better. I can't look at a sale with hundreds or thousands of games -- sometimes its just a couple of tens that makes me turn away because the page might just be filled with meaningless images and not even give you the actual title as written text, or it might be cluttered with DLCs. Not having useful sorting options doesn't help either. For such cases, isthereanydeal will/should still tell me about games that I have waitlisted, but that's about it -- I won't discover anything new, unless its by chance.

Also, while this is not true for all publishers, some publishers give lower discounts during the huge Steam sales. This is because these sales are "famous", and they are running for 14 days.

[NS Plover]

So I put everything that I might be interested in on my wish list (makes it easy to check what's on sale). I've got maybe 400-500 things there most of the time. The few days before things like summer and winter sale - there are usually no items on my wish list on sale. When the sale hits I usually have several hundred. Other events usually have more items on sale then when there are no events (but not as much as during summer/winter sale) - Steam events around the steam awards, lunar year and spring tend to have more things on sale, as does Halloween.

PS Steam needs to do a Halloween event!!

[Start_Running]

Първоначално публикувано от NS Plover:

So I put everything that I might be interested in on my wish list (makes it easy to check what's on sale). I've got maybe 400-500 things there most of the time. The few days before things like summer and winter sale - there are usually no items on my wish list on sale. When the sale hits I usually have several hundred. Other events usually have more items on sale then when there are no events (but not as much as during summer/winter sale) - Steam events around the steam awards, lunar year and spring tend to have more things on sale, as does Halloween.

PS Steam needs to do a Halloween event!!

They have a halloween event. IT. Much like the Lunar New Year, and Explorer events is rather short.

[crunchyfrog]

It akes FAR more than this to be "better".

It dpeends on society, what's going on in the world, what the state of gaming industry is at that moment and so on. So many variables it's literally impossible to give any certain answer.

The only generalization I will offer is that comparing summer sale to winter sale, they are the big two events, so they attract more eyes.

But on the other side of the coins, because it's a big event those eyes are divided among FAR more games. So if you put your game up for sale then, you will likely get more people seeing it, but you are sharing the limelight with all the others selling too. So it can work either way.

The one thing that might be useful is that summer sales will maybe have people with more expendable income available to spend throughout the time of the sale.

With the winter sale, obviously with it being on Christmas, you may find that before Christmas there aren't so many funds around but after those christmas monies have come through, there's a splurge.

[NS Plover]

Първоначално публикувано от Start_Running:

Първоначално публикувано от NS Plover:

So I put everything that I might be interested in on my wish list (makes it easy to check what's on sale). I've got maybe 400-500 things there most of the time. The few days before things like summer and winter sale - there are usually no items on my wish list on sale. When the sale hits I usually have several hundred. Other events usually have more items on sale then when there are no events (but not as much as during summer/winter sale) - Steam events around the steam awards, lunar year and spring tend to have more things on sale, as does Halloween.

PS Steam needs to do a Halloween event!!

They have a halloween event. IT. Much like the Lunar New Year, and Explorer events is rather short.

I meant one that had options for people to get Halloween themed stuff - like cards, backgrounds etc...

[Yzal]

Check price on steamdb, it shows the recorded lowest price.

[FatalError]

Първоначално публикувано от Narcissistic Cannibal:

The right answer is "third party key resellers" :feste:

this guy gets it.

[Garou]

Big Steam sales if you want to have a feeling of participation in an event.
isthereanydeal website for all other days. Check any game and which store has the best price at the moment

[crunchyfrog]

Първоначално публикувано от FatalError:

Първоначално публикувано от Narcissistic Cannibal:

The right answer is "third party key resellers" :feste:

this guy gets it.

No they absolutely don't.

It's alll very well to say "hey, third party sites = cheap games" but it doesn't tell the most important parts of the story.

Namely they're EXTREMELY risky.

Sure, you may pay far less for a game, but at what cost? The devs don't get any money for it, and that's a killer for indies. But worse than that many of the keys are stolen or bought with stolen credit cards.

We've seen countrless times on these very forums, users that have bought games that have been rescinded and ended up out of pocket.

And in rare cases from serial abusers, draconian action against their account from Valve, because don't forget this IS against the agreement you agreed to.

Is it really worth that?

[Narcissistic Cannibal]

Първоначално публикувано от crunchyfrog:

It's alll very well to say "hey, third party sites = cheap games" but it doesn't tell the most important parts of the story.

Namely they're EXTREMELY risky.

Sure, you may pay far less for a game, but at what cost? The devs don't get any money for it, and that's a killer for indies. But worse than that many of the keys are stolen or bought with stolen credit cards.

We've seen countrless times on these very forums, users that have bought games that have been rescinded and ended up out of pocket.

And in rare cases from serial abusers, draconian action against their account from Valve, because don't forget this IS against the agreement you agreed to.

Is it really worth that?

While I can partially agree with your statement, I'd like to elaborate on this topic.

First of all, I implied that Steam sales have become less lucrative for the consumers in general. Check out SteamDB history, and you will see that the latest major sales were nothing but a scam, when games that had been on a 75% discount several times during a year, receive only 50% during a "big sale". Publishers just make use of the mass market mentality this way.

Is it a risky practice? Yeah, to some extent, just like any other online purchase. HumbleBundle is technically a key reseller, yet thousands (millions?) of people use it freely. If you stick to 1-2 safe sites, there's nothing to fear.

Apart from that, resellers often have keys for the removed games. I've recently got American McGee's Alice 1+2 for 6 dollars. Was it worth the "risk"? Hell yes.

And I've never seen anyone punished for activating a side key. There's a sign in the review section when a games wasn't bought directly from Steam, but nothing else. There were a couple of stories with money laundering schemes when keys were sold in bulk and then revoked by Valve, but those were some trash hentai puzzles (or "indies", like you prefer to call them).

P.S. There's currently an Activision "sale" with 25% off CoD from year 2003. You're welcome to support the "real devs" with your generous donation.