General Video Game Deals Thread

[elmuerte]

you're not allowed to use maths

[feelthedarkness]

haha!

 

I'm #67 on a game I want with 1650, and the high bid is a bit over 30k, so I suspect it might not be out of the realm of possibility to get something. 

[Bjorn]

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. 

[Tanukitsune]

Wasn't the point of this auction to make us get rid of our Steam inventory instead of just buying the gems?

[Bjorn]

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. 

[SuperBiasedMan]

Actually I don't even know for sure if the auction time is localised to a user's country.

My steam says round 1 ends tomorrow at 3:45pm, is it the same for everyone? It seems like such a weird time to end.

[Ben X]

Actually I don't even know for sure if the auction time is localised to a user's country.

My steam says round 1 ends tomorrow at 3:45pm, is it the same for everyone? It seems like such a weird time to end.

 

Yeah, it's 1545 for us - Steam localises the time for you in the text sections (you'll notice it gives a different (PST) time in the banner images). It's still a weird time in PST, though!

[JonCole]

Well, auctions end every 45 minutes so I guess that weird start time is such that after 100 rounds of auction it ends at a normal Steam event end time of 10:00 PST.

[Twig]

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. 

Well played, Valve. Well played.

[Bjorn]

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. 

[Ben X]

It looks like there is only one copy available per auction, and everyone's bid gets carried over to the next auction, so my hopes of getting something with 600 gems are looking pretty slim...

[Korax]

I have 5 or 6 bids of 200-300 gems on some smaller things, and have maintained my top-100-bids position on all of them so far. As long as there isn't any bid sniping, I should eventually have some games.

[SuperBiasedMan]

I'm already seeing almost the ones I've marked dropping below 10,000 gems so I can probably get at least a few with the gem sack I bought for the 50 cent I earned in trading cards that I farmed from old games I never played that I bought from previous steam sales.

[Tanukitsune]

The ones I might win are probably less than 5€, but it will still be nice if I can get any of them.

 

It's kinda hilarious to see the bid for even the most obscure "animu" game spike ridiculously, I was in the top 100 for a few, but I had to cancel on ALL of them because it was obvious I couldn't afford any. 

[elmuerte]

I already won a copy of Escape Goat 2 for like 6000 gems.

[Bjorn]

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.

[JonCole]

I have to imagine this'll be some kind of bell curve though, right? There is no reason for the price to climb now that supply is relatively high, but bids will get more aggressive as supply dwindles and there's a chance people won't get what they want with lowballs.

[Bjorn]

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. 

[feelthedarkness]

the one game i'm going to try and get went from 76,000 to 39,900. i'm not sure that by the end of 3 days it will drop down to the 5k or whatever i have. 39,900 is like $27.50 right now. 

[Tanukitsune]

Like I said before, if you can't get in the top 100 bids, forget about it. There is one bid where I'm the 80th or so and I keep dropping, I'll just cancel that big and but it in the rest of the auction I might actually win.

[Bjorn]

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

[feelthedarkness]

i wonder if big retail games won't fall below ~15000 gems, as around that point it would be worth it to bid that, and try to resell it for human currency?

[Tanukitsune]

Wow, I could swear this wasn't there before? And neither the lowest bid ones.... Are people willing to bid on games with low bids just for Steam games or "free" games? 

 

To tell the truth I'm worried some on the one I'm bidding on will skyrocket. XP

[Reyturner]

Has anyone done the math to figure out how much valve stands to gain by the end of this? I'm pretty sure it's in the millions.

They figured out how to make millions getting other people to clean up their gamified market of fake cards.

Fuck.

[feelthedarkness]

Are the games donated by the dev/pub or did Valve buy them? It seems like some are trading below what a typical wholesale might be? I always heard the markup was only like 30% wholesale to retail with games, but I don't know for sure.