Steam Holiday Sale! (and Origin)

*sings*
"It's the most wonderful time, of the year!"

Now through January first, there are all sorts of crazy deals on Steam (Portal 2 for $7.50!), and like during their Summer Sale, there are rewards for earning Achievements in certain games, which coincidentally are also on sale. We even get a daily reward for using various features of the system. I have a 'coupon' for 30% off a Valve game; I already have all of their games, so the discount will probably go towards a gift. Seeing so many deals for AAA titles, I think I've reached the point where I can resist buying them for full MSRP and instead wait for the inevitable sale. Combined with the explosion of F2P games, it's a good time to be a PC gamer.

With that said, after perusing Steam I decided to fire up Origin to see what kind of holiday deals they are offering as competition. (I needed my BF3, don't judge me!!!) Drumroll please...

• The Sims 3: Barnacle Bay
• Bulletstorm

I can't even tell if those two being half-off have anything to do with the time of the year. And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why Origin is destined to fail. EA is simply clueless. When physical production costs are reduced to $0.00, there's no reason for a downloaded game to cost exactly the same as what you'd find at Best Buy. And on a tangent, Origin apparently can't remember that Show: Favorites means it is not supposed to show everything attached to my account. Why does EA even bother to still display the BF3 Alpha and Beta? You can't install them any more.

TF2 F2P: Why I'm Not Bitter

So, Team Fortress 2 is now free-to-play. Is this good? Bad? I say mostly good. If you're unfamiliar with Valve's model for the game, free-players only get basic item drops, can't instigate trades, and some other limits. If you're content with the default weapons or are uninterested in getting fancy hats, you might not notice what you're missing out on. By making any purchase through the in-game store, you get upgraded to a Premium account, which is the same as if you bought the game at retail. I feel slightly bad for anyone who recently paid full price (hi Maggie!), since all they get is a hat for their $20, but I'm not bitter about the game I paid for (three years ago?) becoming free.

So many of my friends are gamers, but when I consider how many of them:
...play on PC, and
.....use Steam, and
.......play TF2, it's not surprising that I've never played TF2 with any of my friends. Now that there is no financial barrier to entry, they have no excuse to not at least try it. And anyone who has gamed socially knows, games are exponentially more fun with friends. Being able to unite your R/L friends in one or two games will make their first experiences better as well, since they'll have each others' support and won't have to deal with as many jerks online, nor alone.

I will suck less. By comparison.
With the exceptions of the original Dead or Alive and Wipeout XL, I've never focused so much on one game that I become truly great at it. With a whole slew of new players who are worse than me, hopefully future matches won't be the trainwrecks of hyper-competitive players insulting their own teammates because not everyone is playing at an e-sports level of efficiency.

Be ready to do some coaching, 2Fort combat vets.
The downside to a whole slew of new players is that the absolutely larval newbies may still be learning basic strategies, like an Ubercharge on a Heavy is a bit more valuable than on a Sniper. Or even how to use Ubercharge. If the old-timers simply get frustrated and start filling the voice channels with feces, that impression is going to stay with the newbie and harms the community as a whole.

I find it fascinating to hear that already, some veteran players are using their Proof of Purchase hats to distinguish themselves from newcomers. We'll see if human nature drags down the gaming utopia that Valve appears to be working towards, but I for one welcome this grand experiment in PC gaming. I don't believe that full retail games will ever die out, but hopefully this will spur other large game developers to try out F2P financial models.