//Tropico 4 Steam Sale//
A month and a half ago, Jack shared a post about the joy of a particular bundle of games available through Steam. Steam, if you don’t recall, is a game distribution system (named after a famous game engine created by developer Valve). In that deal, Jack bought 7 excellent games for just $5.63 — titles that would have cost at least $70 if purchased individually; possibly much more. I recently got a deal through Steam. It wasn’t seven games, but one: Tropico 4. It’s a game I’ve wanted for quite a while. Apologies in advance to the 90% of readers who couldn’t care less about video games.
Tropico 4 is a real-time strategy (RTS) game. But it’s a lot different from the traditional RTS fare like Red Alert or StarCraft. Tropico 4′s gameplay dynamics are more like a mix of RollerCoaster Tycoon and the Civilization series. Normally, Tropico 4 retails for $29.99 on Steam. That’s not a “made up pie-in-the-sky” price. At Wal-Mart, I saw it priced even higher sometime in December. During Steam’s sale last week, I was able to buy it for just $5.99 US. I could have bought all the extra downloadable content (DLC) but, frankly, didn’t want to spend another buck just to waste a gig of bandwidth downloading “bonus” stuff I’d never use.
OK, so it sounds like a fun game and you want to buy it for $5.99. Well, sorry, but the sale is long over. Wow, I just lost the remaining 10% of readers. The point of this post isn’t a “deal alert”. It’s to highlight a key fact: if you want a particular video game, try waiting and set up an alert on Steam Chances are good that it’ll go on sale sometime in the next few months. You might even be rewarded with an “80% off” sale like I was — or better!
Playing video games is an extremely affordable hobby if you do it properly. Here are a few other tips for making it cheaper, besides the obvious “buy games used”:
- Don’t load up on swag – you can dump tons of money into gaming gear that is useless. Sure, I’ll never be the best sniper on TF2 without an Alienware desktop and Sensei mouse, but gaming is about relaxing and having fun. (And I’ve still managed to get 20 kills in a single life on TF2 while using my quad-core laptop and $10 wireless mouse. I’m apparently a dangerous guy with a sniper rifle.)
- Get comfortable with playing “behind the curve” (except in rare situations like my Halo 4 deal). I didn’t own an Xbox 360 until 2011. Admittedly, I didn’t have much leisure time up to that point anyway.
- Purchase the stuff that’ll get used. I bought my 250 gig Xbox plus over 10 games (good ones like Halo 3, Fable 3, Alan Wake, BioShock 2, etc.) for $299 plus tax. When divided out by the number of hours my partner and I have played the system and the games, the cost works out to pennies per hour. Final Fantasy 13, alone, took about 40 hours. While I managed to get the Kinect for an excellent price of just $99 (which was an excellent price in 2011 and I also scored $25 in Shoppers Optimum Points), I’m really not certain that its usage has justified the expense. It’s been really fun on three occasions when we had guests but, going back, I wouldn’t buy it again.
//Catana//
//lol-worthy//
I thought the best way to save money on video games was to have Dad pay for them?
The marketing these companies do to teens is brutal. We had to battle against our kids dropping $60-$80 on video games AND talk some sense into them about paying that money two months before the game’s even available. How is that any kind of sane? Yet a lot of people are doing.
We’ve actually managed to get our ‘gamer’ very interested in outdoor hobbies like fishing, camping, etc. So now they waste their discretionary income on that. I take some solace in the fact that at least they’re now buying tangible and quality so it’s stuff they’ll have as adults.
lol yeah the pre-sale thing is horrible. It’s a hangover from a time when, like Apple, the game distributors created fake “shortages” during every release. But somewhere along the line, they realized they could get the money beforehand from the self-labeled hardcore gamers AND still sell the game to everybody who wanted it on launch day.
Even more bothersome is Downloadable Content. As soon as Halo 4 was released, it had downloadable content. To get the Crimson Map Pack you either had to buy a ‘limited edition’ (they already charge $59.99 for new games; but $99.99 are you KIDDING me?) or pay $25. Why should I pay extra?? It should have been packaged WITH the game. Some hackers found that the game Mass Effect 3 had DLC ON the game disc that was released; buying the material just ‘unlocked’ it on the disc. What a ripoff. I might rant about video game ripoffs sometime, thanks for the fodder Glenn!
I’ve been wondering about the Tropico game series. I was an old school PC gamer back in high school. Warcraft, Starcraft, and Civilization were the favorites. Much like yourself by the sounds of things, that was the last time I really had the leisure time to game, until the last year or so when I finally bought an Xbox 360. I love playing the Civ game for Xbox, and Tropico is always recommended by Amazon as “those that bought this also bought x” feature, so it has piqued my interest. It’s obviously worth it from your point of view? Thanks for the tip about Steam, I usually just buy used through Amazon and have never had any problems, and got pretty good prices (although not nearly the same as what you got!).
Neat. Yeah we’d play 360 on Friday nights but University / my first 3 years of work really cramped my gaming lol. No more Earthbound or Diablo II.
Steam is only for downloads to PC. It sucks that Xbox Live has a monopoly. For example, much of the Left4Dead DLC was released by Steam for FREE on computer, meanwhile Xbox Live players had to pay money. Valve apologized profusely; Microsoft wouldn’t let them release free content. Bill Gates understands money like Steve Jobs — get it NOW rather than later (btw, I’ve never seen customer loyalty like the average Steam user’s love for Valve).
Civ 3 is one of my favourite games of all time. I’ve played through like 7 or 8 of 20 Tropico 4 missions (they are really long; not long like a game of Civ but long) and I wouldn’t say Tropico is as good (although that’s measuring it against an insane standard). But for $6 I would buy it again no doubt. Side note – an Xbox 360 RTS you can pick up really cheap and that I enjoyed was Halo Wars.