The holiday season is a time for friends, family, fruitcake, and sales, though mostly sales and no one knows this better than the Valve Corporation.
This year’s Steam holiday sale, lasting from Dec. 20 to Jan. 5, is all about neglecting your family and friends in favor of locking yourself in your room and playing video games until you cannot see straight, but more on that later.
Valve Software, headed by Gabe Newell, is the creator of several famous game franchises, such as “Half-Life”, “Team Fortress”, and “Left 4 Dead”. Steam is a separate branch of this company, which is used to distribute their products and those of third parties. Once it is joined, users can purchase and download games onto their personal computers for use.
The website supports Windows, Mac, and most recently Linux.
Yet it is not only a distribution system, as it boasts several powerful community tools including forums, chat, screen recordings and screenshot capturing capabilities, plus much more.
Recently it has become a place where independent game and software developers can go and try to get their product added to Steam’s library via the new “Greenlight” feature. This means that users can vote for games they want to have “greenlit”, so that they can be sold on Steam.
Additionally, it supports syndicated news which allows users to see information relevant to their gaming interests from a variety of sources, including PCGamer, Rock, Paper, Shotgun, and Kotaku.
With all of these features Steam has become the number one place for PC gaming, with most serious PC gamer’s having Steam installed. It has over 50 million registered users as of November 2012.
Arguably the most note-worthy feature of Steam and what draws the most users is Steam’s seemingly nonstop sales.
Which brings us to the Steam holiday sale. For every holiday you can think of, including some non-holidays like the first day of summer, there is a Steam sale, but none can compare to the December Steam Holiday sale.
This time around, it features multiple different ways to save.
The primary method sales is timed sales, including “daily deals”, which cycle every 48 hours, “flash sales”, which cycle every 12 hours, and “community choice”, where users vote on games to be put on sale for a limited time.
Lastly, there are discounts across the entire store, encompassing hundreds of games. Additionally, “publisher packs,” which include most or all of the games released by a certain publisher, are put on sale for ridiculous discounts.
Best of all Steam will send notifications on their mobile app or an email when a game or program on a user’s wishlist is put on sale.
There is no end to the amount of discounts on Steam, and these have largely contributed to it becoming one of the world’s largest gaming platforms, beating Xbox Live’s estimated 40 million users.
If you are a PC gamer of any type, whether casual, hardcore, or totally new to the platform, Steam should already be on your computer.
If it is not, grab it at http://store.steampowered.com/about/ , and come join the 50 million users simultaneously emptying their wallets in exchange for digital goodies, because let’s be honest, who likes week old fruitcake?
