IT’S THAT TIME OF THE YEAR AGAIN. Literally everything on Steam has ridiculous discounts and you’ve only got a little bit of money to spend and you don’t know what to get but holy crap you’ve just GOT to have Spintires even though you know absolutely nothing about it and your cart is full and you need groceries but if you just eat ramen for the next week you can get some DLC for that other game you don’t actually know if you want and that’s okay, I guess. Wouldn’t it be great if someone could help you make sense of all this madness, though?
Buckle up. I’m here to guide you through the biggest PC gaming event of the summer (until Amazon or Green Man Gaming or Good Old Games has another sale, I guess).
WHAT TO BUY AND HOW TO BUY IT (THIS IS SUPER IMPORTANT).
It’s really not my job to tell you what kind of games you should be interested in. I know, most game journalists tend to do that sort of thing but I’m not most game journalists. You should get things you want to play and not what IGN or some guy on YouTube wants you to play, just don’t buy it until it’s on the front page of the Steam store. I know you want Euro Truck Simulator 2 now but if you wait until it’s a Daily Deal, Flash Sale, or Community Choice game you’ll wind up saving more money which you can then use on more games (or bills if you’re boring or a responsible adult). Daily Deals actually run for 48 hours too so if you miss a game you want when it’s a featured game you can totally grab it a day later and it’ll be okay. Flash Sales and Community Choice games only run for 8 hours but they tend to run the same games over and over so it might wind up being okay if you miss one but possibly not.
WAIT, TELL ME ABOUT FLASH SALES AND COMMUNITY CHOICE GAMES
They only run for 8 hours. You already know that, I just mentioned that in the last sentence, whatever, I don’t care. The games that go up during this time are chosen by community votes though, and every 3 times you vote you get a trading card. Craft 6 of those cards into a badge and you’ll get e-peen points and other things I’m going to talk about in the next section.
BADGE CRAFTING? META-GAME? WHAT IS THIS MADNESS?!?!?!
It is exactly what it sounds like. Every time you spend $10 in the Steam Store, craft a standard game badge, or vote in 3 Community Choice polls you get a special Summer Sale trading card. Get 10 of those and you can craft a Summer Sale badge, which will get you an in-game item for a game that supports Steam Marketplace, an emoticon, a new profile background, and 10 points for whatever team you were randomly selected for at the start of the sale. Users lucky enough to craft a foil badge get 5 in-game items and 100 points for their team but that requires buying trading cards and no one actually buys those in real life.
If your team collects the most points by the end of the day everyone who contributed to that win gets 2 Summer Sale cards and if you earned any points at all that day you get one as a consolation prize. 30 members of the winning team will also get 3 random games from their wishlist so make sure yours is completely up to date. Stop reading this and do that right now. Take Bad Rats, Secret of the Magic Crystals, and Ride Em Low off too because it’d suck if your team won and you wind up getting those as your free games. You can also just sell the cards you earn and get money to use for padding out your backlog with more games you’re never actually going to play for longer than 30 minutes.
CURRENT DEALS
Sale is over. Go home and be a family man.
