Summer Sales

Steam sales are awesome, right? You get to buy all those games you always wanted to own but never had the money to buy. Even when you have sufficient disposable income, a sale might entice you to try out a game you wouldn’t have considered buying at full price. I certainly have fallen victim to that logic more than once in the past. (Borderlands, I’m looking at you.) Why then did I buy essentially nothing in the recent steam summer sale?

There were some really good games up for sale, but the thing with really good games is that I usually already own them. That’s fine though, those sales are probably aimed at people who can’t afford all that many full price games. What didn’t work at all for me this time was luring me into buying games I wouldn’t usually consider buying at full price. Maybe the sheer amount of games on sale somehow hindered the “OMG, this is supposed to be good and it is soooo cheap” aspect of the sale, or maybe sales on steam are becoming so commonplace that that effect is suffering from diminishing returns. I wonder if it’s just me that feels that way.

I did pick up KotOR (which I already owned but wanted on steam for the convenience) and a couple of pieces of Civ 5 DLC because I wanted to see whether they are worth getting. I didn’t get Divinity 2, Fable 3, Two Worlds 2, or Shogun 2 mostly due to mixed reviews and the “do I really want to play another of those games, even for that price” factor. Maybe this simply speaks for a bad choice of games for sale? Or the decline of gaming as a whole? I simply don’t know.

How about you? What did you pick up and what didn’t you pick up for interesting reasons? Is such a summer sale just too much awesome to still be enticing?