Retail backlash against Steam

You make it sound like having Steam running in the background is some sort of gigantic negative, like its sucking the life out of your CPU and draining at least 20 FPS from every game you play.
 
Personally I think Steam's prices are carefully engineered to make people buy games they don't want in the sales.

With a "traditional" pricing scheme like the retail shops use, they just end up pricing everything a little under the RRP (except a few new releases and stuff they know will sell at any price). Customers aren't encourage to browse their websites endlessly, or go there any time other than when theyr'e a specific game they want to buy.

The way steam does things, with high standard prices but really low deals.... it encourages people to check the shop constantly to ensure they're not losing out. You check to see if the games you want are on sale...... but then.... what's this? World of goo for £3? Sod it we say... it's only £3. When you see a game that says "was £35, now £5" it encourages to buy even if you weren't planning on buying that game at all. How many of us were planning to buy all those old GTA games we bought last weekend?
 
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jimbob27 said:
but then.... what's this? World of goo for £3? Sod it we say... it's only £3. When you see a game that says "was £35, now £5" it encourages to buy even if you weren't planning on buying that game at all.
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And this is in itself is absolute genius, and one reason I have a lot of respect for Steam - people are trying out original, often experimental games they'd never think of going near otherwise, just because they're at the level of impulse buys, and helping to dig people out of the fps blockbuster rut that seems to have gripped the whole genre for the last five years.
 
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iviv said:
The one thing about steam is that it is getting fairly large, obviously there are issues perhaps of it becoming a monopoly. Would that be a bad thing? Its unknown. But that said, it does have competition from Impulse and D2D. Now... I do prefer impulse as a platform, it has all the benefits of Steam, with the addition of not requiring Impulse to be actually running when you play the game, which is great news. However, I do prefer my games on Steam because of my friends list there, I don't have anybody on my Impulse friends list, but loads on my Steam one. Plus achievements, I'm a sucker for achievements.

But I do have several games on Impulse which I picked up cheaper than on Steam.
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I add my impulse games to steam so i can have the overlay/friends :o
 
Sleepery said:
And this is in itself is absolute Genius, and one reason I have a lot of respect for Steam - people are trying out original, often experimental games they'd never think of going near otherwise, just because they're at the level of impulse buys, and helping to dig people out of the fps blockbuster rut that seems to have gripped the whole genre for the last five years.
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what i think might be interesting is with the massive influx of new people from the lunches of mw2/cod:bo i think steam is going to get a lot fo interst for indie/unique games that non "gamers" have never encountered/heard of before hopefully this will spark more interest in new ideas when people see the money it brings in.


steam revenue from the Christmas/new years sales will be interesting with the extra tens of thousands of members brought in by Cod;bo :eek:
 
Sleepery said:
And this is in itself is absolute genius, and one reason I have a lot of respect for Steam - people are trying out original, often experimental games they'd never think of going near otherwise, just because they're at the level of impulse buys, and helping to dig people out of the fps blockbuster rut that seems to have gripped the whole genre for the last five years.
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Yeah I know, I didn't mean it's necessarily a bad thing. It's doing wonders for small developers and the game industry as a whole. You've just got to be careful as a customer, not to get suckered into buying too many random games you don't have the time to play.;)
 
That's not particularly a bad thing either. I open up my games list now and it's like walking into a shop and being able to just pick up and play any game that takes my fancy (I make sure to download anything I buy as soon as I buy it).

In fact I'm pretty sure my steam list has more games than my local Gamestop :D
 
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