It begins, Steam Winter sale 2015 on now

[Zetor]

I played Paper Sorcerer quite a bit ~2 years or so ago, never had any problems -- of course that doesn't invalidate the experience of others. OTOH considering that it's a one-man project with the dude having moved on from game dev (afaik?) and the game never having cost more than $4 ever since it was released in 2013 (you could pick it up for even cheaper than $1 in random bundles), my reaction to that is well... /shrug.

It's quite enjoyable for a Wizardry 4-esque game, too, and gets pretty tough on harder difficulties. Protip: don't try 1980s difficulty unless you are a masochist.

[Lucas]

While there are still some issues, he actually released another patch a few months ago (May) :

http://store.steampowered.com/news/?appids=263560

[Kail]

I got a Steam gift card for christmas, so I ended up with a pretty solid take.

• Audiosurf 2  -  Played a lot of Audiosurf, but most of my music is on my other computer, so not sure if I'll play this one much.
• Civilization: Beyond Earth + DLC  -  seems like it could be fun.  I always liked sci-fi 4x games, but most of them are more Master of Orion than Alpha Centauri, so hopefully this will be fun.
• Downwell  -  Seems more like a mobile game than a desktop game to me, but I heard a lot of good things about it, so figured I'd give it a shot.
• Final Fantasy Type-0  -  I generally like Final Fantasy but hate the turn based battle system, so this looks like it might be fun.  A lot of the criticism I'm hearing about it (30 fps lock etc.) isn't stuff I really care about.  Figured it was worth gambling on.
• Ikaruga  -  One of the games I always used to hear people talk about but never played on account of not owning the system. 
• Metal Gear Solid 5: The Phantom Menace Pain  -  Honestly kind of torn on this one.  Heard it was great, but not crazy about supporting Konami.  I love Metal Gear, but I've heard the story for this one is garbage.  With Kojima gone it's not like I can even pretend that I'm trying to show that there's a market for a better sequel or something.  But at the very least it should be a fun game, right?
• Orion Trail  -  Not sure if it's a direct clone of Oregon Trail the way Organ Trail is, but it looks neat at first glance.
• Puzzle Agent, Puzzle Agent 2  -  Saw a video singing the praises for this game, so I grabbed it.  Played through it already (the first one is only about three hours long) and it's not super great, but meh.
• Red Goddess  -  I've been watching this one for a while, but never really had it at the top of my list.  Looks like a decent metroidvania.
• Solar War  -  Been on my wishlist for ages but it looked a bit rough.  It looks like they finally added sound, so I'm out of excuses to avoid buying it.
• Transformers: Devastation  -  This game looked pretty cool, but I was waiting for a deeper discount until someone pointed out that this was done by Platinum, at which point my wallet exploded and all my money flew in to my computer.
• Undertale  -  Same as Red Goddess, I've been waiting for this one for a while.  Internet won't shut up about how good it is so I picked it up even though it wasn't on super deep discount.
• X Rebirth  -  Been waiting for this one for a while.  I've heard it's pretty shallow, but since I was never able to really figure out the previous X games maybe that's what I need.  Not expecting great things but it was cheap enough to gamble on (I seem to be saying that a lot this year).

[KallDrexx]

Apparently the new format for the winter sale was a huge success

[Hawkbit]

That's interesting. I was far more conservative than any other sale. I only purchased games I was really watching and waiting for instead of impluse buys.

[Tannhauser]

I wish Crusader Kings 2 would go on sale.

[Goreschach]

Note that they just talk about views and hits and wishlists and user activation and marketing bullshit bla.

At no point do they even begin to discuss how much stuff sold or how much money they made. I'm guessing the sale bombed hard and they're desperate to not actually state that since they seem sold on whatever changes they're trying to implement.

[apocrypha]

From the linked article:

We looked at performance of the group of games outside of the Top 500 in revenue terms. This group collected 35% of product page traffic during the sale, which is over 4x their share of traffic from the previous winter sale. And these weren’t just idle views--we also saw 45% growth in the revenue generated by this group of games as compared with the last winter sale.

And from this analysis of Steam Spy data:

At least 46 million copies of games found their new owners during Steam Winter Sale. And it only includes those games that sold over 1,000 copies, as smaller changes are barely detectable by Steam Spy. That’s 50% more compared to Steam Summer Sale.

If we assume that all of those games were sold on Steam (it’s probably not the case because of bundles and third-party stores) and account for regional pricing, we can conclude that Steam Winter Sale brought at least $270M in revenue.

That’s almost twice as much as Steam Summer Sale did.

[Rendakor]

It would be better to compare to last winter's sale than summer, though. Summertime finds a lot of people doing other things with both their time and disposable income. Winter is the traditional stay inside time of year, and it's also when people are looking to spend money.

[Teleku]

Note that they just talk about views and hits and wishlists and user activation and marketing bullshit bla.

At no point do they even begin to discuss how much stuff sold or how much money they made. I'm guessing the sale bombed hard and they're desperate to not actually state that since they seem sold on whatever changes they're trying to implement.

Quoting this here because I do not yet run a f13.txt.   

I find it pretty hard to believe that this sale did any worst than previous winter sales, and most of the data so far really seems to support that it did even better.  Hopefully some solid stat comparisons come out soon.

[Rasix]

Steam is likely still growing as a platform, becoming basically the defacto distribution method for PC games.   So yah, revenue of this winter sale v. last winter stale with the platform grown taken into consideration while also factoring in the huge releases that were discounted this year, etc etc. 

Personally, while skeptical at first, I like this better for me.  I don't want to game the sale and make decisions on the fly.  I don't want to care about the cards.  I just want to take stock after Christmas and buy something to make up for all of the non-gaming gifts I receive every year.

[HaemishM]

Note that they just talk about views and hits and wishlists and user activation and marketing bullshit bla.

At no point do they even begin to discuss how much stuff sold or how much money they made. I'm guessing the sale bombed hard and they're desperate to not actually state that since they seem sold on whatever changes they're trying to implement.

The article LITERALLY spoke about revenue growth over previous sales. What the fuck were you reading?

[Rasix]

Unless my eyes are playing tricks on me, I didn't see a direct comparison in the overall performance of this sale v. the last winter sale.  I just saw winter v summer and the growth trend over a particular section of games.

[Azazel]

That's interesting. I was far more conservative than any other sale. I only purchased games I was really watching and waiting for instead of impluse buys.

Yeah. This was the first Steam Sale in years that I literally bought nothing at all from. I don't have time to browse through 4 billion titles, and I have so many that a 40% or 50% off doesn't tempt me. Shit, I barely bother with Humble Bundles anymore.

[Baldrake]

Unfortunately the same, although reading the Elite thread is making me wish I'd picked it up on sale.

[Paelos]

I doubt I will ever buy as much as I used to in Steam sales, simply because I own so much stuff now. Still, I like the format better when I can browse at leisure in the holidays.

[Morat20]

I doubt I will ever buy as much as I used to in Steam sales, simply because I own so much stuff now. Still, I like the format better when I can browse at leisure in the holidays.

Same here. The discovery queues were worth it. Getting a free shiny made me page through them, and I added 20 or so "Hey, that looks interesting" games to my wishlist. I've bought a handful of them on sale since. I have a ton of "One day I might play these games" that I will probably never actually play.

I just keep getting sucked into something like Banished, or deciding Tropico 4 sounds fun again.

[Ironwood]

Chaos Reborn just came on sale ;  did it manage to be good ?

Anyone else playing ?