General Video Game Deals Thread

[Justin Leego]

EDIT: It is also exceedingly bizarre that the rounds all last 45 minutes exactly... except the first that lasts 2 1/2 more days?

I think it's just that there's a run up to the auction phase starting to allow bidders to prepare / charge the virtual items market.

[Merus]

I've been finding a lot of indie games where there's less than 100 bids right now, so even a 1 gem bid would (in theory) receive the game. Eh, worth a shot.

 

This is indeed what I'm referring to. I found four games that had the right combination of on my wishlist, in the promotion (and I'm nonplussed/worried about the games that are participating in this promotion) and had relatively few bids so that, without putting a big bid down, I'd still have a good chance of winning a game.

 

I'm guessing the vast majority of the gems comes from people dumping inventories full of things they crafted and didn't bother selling on the market. There are people with ludicrous level counts from crafting badges and getting cards and crafting badges, and while I have too much dignity to buy into that pointless bullshit I'm perfectly happy to appraise this new dumb thing to see if I can get any value out of it. I've got four bids down purely from doing the same, realising I had $2 of Valve Funbux in my Steam wallet, and then using that to buy 20 Arkham City backgrounds to convert into gems. Only one of them really looks like it won't win, which is fine.

[Ben X]

So if there's a game where 90 people bid, and they all bid 10 gems, but I bid 100 gems, will Steam charge me 100 or 10 or 11?

[SuperBiasedMan]

I think it's the eBay model. Where they increment your bid above the one just under yours and give you back the extra gems. So in that scenario they'd take 20 *I think*.

[Ben X]

Ah, that's handy to know, thanks!

[Bjorn]

Why is there no option to filter the massive list of auctions of games by inclusion on my wishlist and DLC by inclusion of the base game in my library? These days, Steam's "events" mostly exist to remind me of how much I miss a proactively designed UI when it's not there.

 

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):

 

[Smart Jason]

So, it is unrealistic to expect to win anything with these astronomical gem counts, right?

[Tanukitsune]

They only seem to have 100 of each on auction, so unless you're lucky and find something that doesn't have that many bids.... You could still lose at the last minute?

 

Those that have over 1000 gems must be cheating, right? Is there any item even worth more than 4 gems?

[elmuerte]

profile wallpapers and emoticons are up to 80 gems. I got rid of most of them and gathered like 13000 gems.

[Korax]

Is there any item even worth more than 4 gems?

 

Oh, yeah. Cards are worth around 20-30, depending on how many cards are in the set, it seems. Icons and backgrounds are anywhere from 40-200.

[Tanukitsune]

Oh, I didn't think about those, those I have a few I wouldn't mind disposing of. I could just convert them into booster cards now, right? 

[Nappi]

Those that have over 1000 gems must be cheating, right? Is there any item even worth more than 4 gems?

 

Read this, checked out my inventory and noticed that some of my wallpapers are worth 100 gems, got excited and went to the auction thing, was disappointed when everything was going for tens of thousands of gems.

[Bjorn]

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.

[Tanukitsune]

I'm looking around and yeah, most auctions are too expensive and have too many bids.

 

I might just stop searching and transform them into cards.

[Dewar]

Prices of some cards seem to be going up a bit, but it's mainly the value of the emoticons and backgrounds that is spiking.

[Twig]

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):

I honestly think that's intentional, because they already have sorting readily available in their store, and it can't be that difficult to add it to the auction thing. I'm not sure what they're trying to accomplish. Make it harder to get to the games in the middle, so the games on either end of the list are higher in price and you craft more gems to bid on the easier-to-find items, thus clearing out more "space" in the market? I don't know. It's weird.

[Tanukitsune]

I searched through all of them MANUALLY, I'll bid a bit on each and hope I get lucky, or to be more exact, I'm hoping the other bidders and bigger cheapskates than me. XP 

 

Edit: Wait, wait... I can bid the same amount of gems on every item? What happens if I win? I seem to have the same amount even after bidding.

 

EDIT: EDIT: Never mind, my gem count is normal now. XP

[Bjorn]

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

[Twig]

You guys are crazy. I'm normally all about the dumb events because I like collecting dumb things, but even I'm not participating in this!

[Bjorn]

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. 

[Tanukitsune]

Apparently Steam will just tell you if you're in the top 100 bidders, so you'll have an easier time knowing if it's worth it and cancel the bid if your max bid isn't in the top 100.

 

I might actually win something?

[Bjorn]

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. 

[feelthedarkness]

Since it only shows you the high bid, out of 100 possible winners, it's possible that person is hundreds times over the median. I would say the more useful number is number of bids. 

 

i assume a lot of people had a TON of junk stocked up, because a lot of the top bids on the front page convert to being more than current retail!

[elmuerte]

I think it's best to skip the first 3 day long bidding war and simply try to bid in the next 99 rounds which only last 45 minutes.

[Bjorn]

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.