Ladies and gentlemen, start your wallets!
By Ian Moorhead
The Steam Summer Sale is upon us! For those of you unfamiliar with the treasure trove of pure awesome that comes about this time every year, the Steam Summer Sale works like this: every day, the game client Steam will knock a ridiculous amount off the price tag of some of their best selling games. Feel like picking up Borderlands 2 Game of the Year edition? Ten Dollars. Indie games more your thing? I myself got a bundle of games that included the games Prison Architect (Normally $30 by itself for alpha game play access) , Uplink (a hacker-style game) Darwinia and Multiwinia (I haven’t installed these yet, so I can't really say much....), and DEFCON, which is a game that was inspired by the 1983 movie War Games. (All of those games sell normally for $10 apiece.) All of that ran me twenty. One thing though, each of these deals is only good for 24 hours, so make sure you keep checking back to see if a game you want is now on sale.
Also included in this sale are mini sales ( saleception? A sale within a sale?) called flash sales. These 8 hour long mini sales are voted on by the Steam community itself, so if a game you would like isn't going on one of the 24 hour sales, try voting for it to see if it will go on flash sale. Like getting achievements and earning experience and leveling up? Then get in on the ever popular Steam trading cards. In many, if not most of the games on steam, playtime will earn you trading cards for that game. If you can collect all the cards in a certain set, you get a badge for that game and a certain amount of XP points, which are used to “level up” your profile. (As far as I can tell, it doesn’t do much besides tell people how awesomely you game, but it's still cool when you see someone of a high level.)
All in all, this sale is a really great chance to pick up some great games from up and coming developers at a reasonable price. Developers also benefit from this sale because it opens their game up for playing by people who may not have bought the game at full price, but now that they have it, they can tell their friends, who may buy an awesome game at now full price. (Like I ended up doing with Kerbal Space Program after my roommate got it cheap). It also helps the developer get their name out there, so that people who like their older games are more willing to try newer titles. So get out there in Steam world and pick up a few great games at even better prices!
