Survive the Steam Holiday Sales

With Black Friday out of the way for 2011, a lot of retailers (especially online) are still featuring unique sales for this month.  The Steam game platforming for the PC and Mac is increasingly famous for having ridiculous week long Sales during the holidays (See the November Autumn sale).   This year they even featured a smaller sale for Halloween, but it was only for horror games.  From my experience, the sales on this platform are often the lowest they go for PC/Mac games, but the only catch is having a system powerful enough to play them.  If you have one, then your all set! So to begin, here are some tips to surviving the sale - getting what you want and not spending too much.

1. Mainly focus on "Daily Deals."  These are generally the lowest things will go during this sale period. All though there are rare cases where a daily deal will re-appear even lower, it's often only a buck or two less.  Basically you want to look for anything around 75% off and/or $5 price.  Newer items are usually only 50% off and around $25.  Steam will have a ton of other stuff marked off outside of the daily deals, but much of it can and WILL be thrown into the daily deals later on for even cheaper so don't risk it. 

2. Read the reviews & make sure you actually want to play the game.  Too often there are buyers on Steam who build up these huge backlogs of cheap $1-$5 games that they haven't touched for months or even years! Keep things simple and go with things you (or someone else) definitely wants to play.  A little backlog of stuff is fine (especially if your usually very busy), but stay realistic and don't go overboard.

3.  Avoid the massive "Publisher Packs."  These always come about in the much larger December sale.  They feature huge collections of 5-10 games for $50 or 20-30 for $100, however many are often very outdated and people often regret buying them later for that.  They can seem like a really good deal at first, but you gotta make sure you actually want to try everything in them - and often over half the packs are so old most people won't even get around to them later.  Unless you absolutely know you want (and have time) to play over 50-75% of the games in the pack, relax and move on.

4.  Don't store your credit card on Steam's servers.  Though they have probably beefed up their security since they were recently hacked, it's still safer to take the time to manually input this data each time (it doesn't take long anyways). For more info, see my post "Valve's Steam Recently Hacked ~ How to Protect Your Account"