Bjorn

Braid inspired The Big Lebowski. Because time is wibbly wobbly.

Like I said earlier, it's evil genius level of brilliant. As for how much they'll make, it's super duper hard to estimate even. For the vast majority of the emoticons and backgrounds, Valve is getting 1 cent and the dev is getting 1 cent (not counting Valve owned properties, where they get 2 cents). There are something like 13,000 unique backgrounds and emoticons. Some of those had stock in the thousands, others only had stock in the single digits. Even if there were a million transactions for these items, that's still only $10,000 for Valve. Valve gets the entire 15 percent cut of gem sales, so around 15 cents per sale at the current prices. It says there have been 132,000 sack of gem sales in the last 24 hours. The average Valve cut is probably 10 cents or so on those (since the prices started off much lower and have steadily climbed). So that's $13,000 in a day for gem sales. So at a guess, I'd say this whole stunt might drive a few hundred thousand dollars in payments to Valve during the event itself. But, I'd imagine that the real value to this is long term. Assuming that gem to booster conversions are permanent, trash that never sold now has a persistent value, and the prices of many items have been seriously elevated. If gems continue to be a thing, it is a move that's going to pay millions going forward.

Are these buttons above the search bar new, or I was I that blind over the weekend that I never saw them:

Ha! "Hey grandma, lets watch a movie!" I actually rewatched that this year, for the first time since its theatrical release. I remember hating it walking out of the theater. I still think it is the worst Kubrick movie, but I have to admit that I enjoyed it a lot more now vs then.

I bought it for my daughter as a xmas gift. She's played every single AC game so far, but skipped buying unity after the poor initial reviews on it. With all the patches and the free dlc, seems like it'll make a nice gift from Santa for her.

That's my assumption. I think we'll see prices pretty much level out after 10ish rounds, then in the final 20 rounds, prices may climb back up as people just dump whatever gems they have left so they don't go to waste. The biggest question for the final 20 rounds will be just how large is the gem pool. How many people will be out of gems by then, which may lead to some isolated super cheap games. But its possible that the pool is big enough to avoid seeing anything go super cheap. Prices on gem bags have climbed up to almost $1 per 1000 gems, but the available buy pool seems to have stayed relatively steady at around 14K bags available. As I mentioned earlier, I bought a bunch of backgrounds early on, for what amounted to 30 cents per 1000 gems. Which seems like a steal now.

I am a big ass nerd who likes spreadsheets. For rounds 1-4, I checked prices in the final minute on the 80 games I have a bid on. I have that many bids mostly just to track a whole big array of games from crappy games to big games. There's probably only about 20 that I have real interest in, and none of them are the big expensive games. There is bid sniping going on, but not as much as I expected (based on the starting bids for the next round). The bid sniping doesn't appear to be affecting the values much, as it's mostly just going up to the next minimum bid above the current price, not like there are massive spikes in the final minute. First Round: Average price: 18,248 Second Round: Average price: 14,055 - 23 percent decline Third Round: Average price: 12,493 - 11 percent decline from previous Fourth Round: Average price: 11,246 - 10 percent decline from previous Top bids were still above 50,000, but the cheap games were down to a little over 2,000.

I think that was the story of Braid.

Every last one of those is pure gold.

So the high bid shown must be the max bid, not the minimum necessary to win, as the bids dropped by 10s of thousands of gems on some items after the first round. I had figured the max bid was hidden, and what was visible was the minimum necessary to outbid second place.

Wapeach kidnaps Mario and Wario. This forces Luigi and Waluigi to team up and save the day.

Probably women reviewers on Goodreads, given some of the drama and controversy that has come out of reader reviews from there in the last couple of years. Also, metalgate is the least fucking metal thing I've ever heard of. Fucking posers.

I've held off on buying Starbound, because I've read so few positive things about it. Has it finally started to come together? Everything I had read was that the promise existed, but the reality just wasn't very good.

I'd say it successfully did that. It looked like by last night, pretty much everything that was worth 60+ gems had been cleared out of the market. Those items dropped from having an inventory in the 1000s selling for 3 cents, to having inventory in the low 100s selling for 7 cents.

They re-enabled the buying and selling of gems on the market (it had been disabled for awhile after the auctions came back up). Looks like gems go for roughly 60-70 cents per thousand, if you wanted to try and get in on messing around with this stuff without having to break down a bunch of crap.

I'm with you on that. I'm actively disinterested in Minecraft, but Terraria clicked with me hardcore, especially playing it in co-op.

I know that feeling.

I think you could see the bids on stuff fall precipitously after the first 10 rounds or so. High bidders cannot change their bid amount, so current high bids are unlikely to fall significantly (unless bidders 2 and 3 significantly lower their bids). It looks like right now, the average per game is a minimum of 5 to 6 thousand, as even the junk games have 3K+ bids on them and the popular games are 50K+. That means that at least 12 million gems will be eliminated from the economy in the first round, and a similar amount the second round. I doubt very much that there are a trillion gems in the economy, which is what it would take to sustain those bids through all hundred rounds. I'd bet that most games will see their high bid amounts cut in half (or more) after the first 10-20 rounds, barring the most popular and newest games. There's just a very large, but ultimately finite, number of gems in the economy.

Crafting badges gets you a holiday card, along with the typical emoticon and background. Not really worth it for gems though, as the two items I got were worth 10 gems each. Too random to be of value.

If I had realized how long it was going to take me to convert all these to gems, I probably wouldn't have spent $3 on 100 backgrounds. But now they're in my inventory, and it would take longer to sell them than it would to just convert them.

Errggghhhh....clicking through a hundred backgrounds to turn them into gems is awful.

I think there are probably opportunities to win things for 500-1000 gems a few hours into the auctions once they start and the top bids have gone, but probably not for anything expensive or popular. I'm looking through the stuff that supports local co-op, as we'll have a bunch of fun with even an average game with the two of us playing. Once you've placed a bid, if you are in the top 100, it will tell you your current bid placement. I put some 25-50 gem bids in on some less popular stuff, and typically show as being around the #25-#50 bidder. I'm sure that will fall as it gets closer to the auctions starting, hence my feeling that a few hundred gems may be able to win some of those.

Searching and sorting is absolutely fucking terrible. It's mystifying that there isn't more power to their system. I was amused by a search for Bioshock 2 though (seeing if Minerva's Den was in there):

Yeah, this is definitely a move to clear out thousands and thousands of junk items, plus re-invigorate the card market as well. It varies, but it looks like crafting a booster pack can vary from 600 to 1300 gems, and you can only do it once a day. So it's removing much more value from the system than its putting back in. I'd expect the Booster crafting system to stay as well, to try and regulate the whole economy more going forward. The value of cards had really dropped since the last Steam sale. Lots of cards were only selling for 3-6 cents (not counting Valve's cut). I'd love to know what the big picture is on the Market before and after this stunt, how much the average value of an item was driven up. I did spend $3 on 100 backgrounds worth 80 gems each. I actually find these events pretty fascinating, both from the business side of why Valve structures them the way they do, and how the community reactions. Participating in them is fun, and comparatively low cost for my fascination with it.

The auctions and gem creation stuff is live again. This is by far the weirdest thing Valve has done. Like the values of stuff are all over the board, seemingly at random.