Steam Tramples Brick and Mortar

The Five-Day-Long One-Day-Only Early Holidays Sale!

So I'm already a Steam junkie and habitually check their store for surprise deals every single day.

And this massively RED and WHITE banner catches my eye.

Even before the "Steam Updates" pops up with their friendly advertisement elucidating the deals of the day.

And omg, what deals they are.

I see that the currency exchange is currently 1.4, which is a far sight better than the 1.5-2.0 I normally use to calculate "good deal or not."

This makes:
Fallen Earth - $35 sgd
Champions Online - $28 sgd
Batman: Arkham Asylum - $35 sgd

If I didn't already have Osmos and Far Cry 2, those are fantastically good deals too - but I bought Osmos at 50% off, so no regret there, and I also got the earlier version sans DLC of Far Cry 2 at 50% off, so nothing terrible there either.

Ironically, I had just been giving thought to going to Tec-Drome to check out prices and pick up Batman: Arkham Asylum.

Well, Tec-Drome just got picked up and stomped in the face, because good relationships with the Uncle not withstanding, there's no way he's selling me Batman at $35, it'll be more like $45-50.

I am also now entertaining the slightly insane ideas of picking up Fallen Earth and Champions Online to play for the free month before abandoning them. This is hilarious though, I would be leaving a trail of lowbie characters across random games, intending to return one day to them, but not for a while.

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Dragon Age: Origins is now very close to what I could probably get from Tec-Drome, $52ish. But I'm still hanging back on this because of DLC issues. It's kinda nuts to create 'unlockable' content in a singleplayer game. I would much rather wait a year or two for them to republish as a "everything included" type of experience.

Seriously, they have turned a singleplayer game into a MMO in-game store experience, just without the other players! According to a review I read, Penny Arcade hits it on the head, if you're playing an un-upgraded version of Dragon Age, an NPC will actually link you to the in-game store and say, hey, buy this premium content so that you can unlock the stuff I'm selling!

To quoth the character... "suspension of disbelief...pierced."

It may be a good way of combating piracy, of turning the consumer into a faithful two-year subscriber of your content, of sticking it to the brick and mortar stores who control pricing and filtering back more money directly into your coffers for more game production budget, but it makes it really hard to swallow for me.

I suspect I'd eventually pick it up, but the longer I hold back on it, the more time there is for the base game price to drop, and the DLC to fall to half-price and game of the year editions with extra DLC included to be released, etc.