Steam Summer Sale 2020

This is a correct understanding of history.

Valve have fallen a long way as developers in my estimation since that was released, but if you’ve never experienced it before that’s a lovely little run of gaming, enjoy!

Yep, the Orange Box was also my introduction to Steam.

Yes, it does become less survival and more like the first game (though the new TR don’t have as much actual “tomb raiding” as the earlier games. And there is a further mix of environments later on, but you will be in the snow until maybe midway (?) through the game? Can’t remember exactly.

For me, Half Life 2 was the introduction to Steam. But there wasn’t much on Steam in those days. By the time HL2: Episode 1 came out, there was some other stuff on Steam. By the time Orange Box came out, they had quite a bit on the Steam store I think.

Yep, needed Steam for HL2. A lot of people installed it for that. But like many, I didn’t buy any other games there for years afterwards.

I guess a bit of both. Its been a long time.

Just checked my email archives for shits n’ giggles. I bought HL2 “bronze” in Nov 2004, and my next purchase was The Path in March 2009.

Never played it, so my long history of building a useless Steam backlog started right away.

Now this is a fun game and might warrant its own thread:

First Steam purchase was the Half-Life 2 + One Pack in April 2007 (for $15, apparently).

Second was the Orange Box in October of that same year.

First non-Half-Life Steam purchase was, Peggle Deluxe a few days later.

There’s substantial friction to buying in to a new platform, as we know from Epic and Origin and such. My guess is 2009 is when Steam started running great sales. I can’t imagine I bought The Path at full price then didn’t bother playing it. I paid $8.99 for the game in 2009 and it’s $9.99 right now.

I’m pretty sure you’re right. The list above is the entirety of my '07 purchases. In '08 I have a small handful as well. In '09 my Steam purchases explode. Sales are the only reason I can think of that would have happened, especially considering that I was very resistant to giving up physical media.

Yep. The sales are what made people get engaged. Valve never forgot that lesson, and Epic learned from it too.

Basically everyone seems to have learned that lesson, it just took some longer than others.

To some extent. You don’t see frequent giant sales from other studio-owned storefronts like Origin and Ubi Play like Steam. Humble does, but they never really competed.

I didn’t get Steam till 2009, and it was a slow start of just The Orange Box, but by year’s end, I had a good ten titles, and looking at purchase history, most were via discounts.

Looks like the first Winter Sale was 2007: https://steamdb.info/sales/history/

The studio owned storefronts have (until now) largely relied on (quasi)exclusivity. It will be interesting to see if EA start to do big sales now that they’re changing tack.

Agree about Origin, but Uplay has been holding parallel sales with Steam that have been substantial and store-wide for the last couple of years. For example: https://store.ubi.com/

Now, they haven’t been advertising them very well, from what I’ve seen.

So have Origin I think - it’s just that no-one cares :)

I’ll admit it’s been a long time since I looked at Origin, so I couldn’t say. :)

Since rebuilding my system back in December, I haven’t even gotten around to reinstalling it…

Yeah, you never hear about them. Probably because they largely but not entirely only carry their own titles.

Origin definitely has sales, and very good ones too, but on EA properties mostly of course.