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Let's all confess this year's sins.

I'm actually feeling a lot safer from sales now than back a couple years ago when I clearly had an addiction to buying games just because they were a good deal even though I clearly didn't have time to play them anymore.

I don't know if it's really an improvement of willpower, or if it's that there's just not a whole lot that tempts me anymore that I don't already have. I got Wildermyth on Steam and Per Asperga on GOG. That's it besides Banner Saga 3, and a few older games from GoG that were alluringly packaged at criminally low prices.

What can I say, they were a great deal even though I clearly don't have time to play.

Yeah, those sales can be tricky. There's just something so tempting about a game that's normally $59.99 being sold for eighty percent off, even if you know deep down that you probably won't play it.
Out of all the games I own, it's pretty surprising to me how few of them I make time for. Almost all of them were just bought because of a limited-time low price. I like to think I've improved in that aspect recently.

Not to mention, I found a Discord bot that automatically tells me whenever a game becomes free on Steam, so I've had the luxury of filling my library with games I won't be playing without having to pay for them. Feels good.

Which bot is that?

And I mean, I got Sleeping Dogs for $2.99. Sentinel has gushed so much about that one it was going to be an eventual purchase anyway, but $2.99? Sure, maaaybe I'd have to carefully manage the download across two months to not exceed my data limit, probably my potato of a laptop can't run it, and definitely I have no time to play with I'm already only sleeping four hours on a good night, but...it's $2.99. There are people in this world who pay more than twice that much for linear and badly written text games from an unethical company while the other pees on their face, shut up conscience, don't tell me what to do.

Also got the first (best) Tropico, packaged with the second one which was the anomaly of the series with the pirate town that I don't have the disk for anymore, for $1.79. Can't even buy a 20 oz Coke for that amount.

Spore with all DLC was $7.50, and since GOG somehow got EA to release it from the shackles of their fucking evil EULA it made sense to acquire the DRM free copy. It kind of sucks as a game but it's still a fun toy to play around with, and since we have users here who were probably still in diapers in 2008 surely there are some who haven't played it. I figure if I can sussessfully give away half a dozen copies at some point it will make up for the $60 preorder that still haunts me to this day.

Looks like I was mistaken, it's not really a bot. The official Terraria Discord server has a channel appropriately titled 'free stuff' where they post when items on Steam become free. There's an option to follow that channel and have the messages redirect to a channel in a different server you own.
They also post about the Epic Games Store in there too, between the two there's usually something every other day or so.

I actually picked up Spore when it was on sale on Steam a little while back, fun game, but once you start your second planet you start to realize that the game isn't really as big as it first appears. The DLC helps, though.

Whoa, crazy how Discord can let you do all these things I have nfi about and will never attempt!

The value of Spore is basically just the strangely addictive tiny blob eating other blobs phase, and the creature creator which is still an unparalleled little time waster.

The creature phase was alright but never held my interest for long, and the rest was just, like, this tacked on feeling Casual Baby's First RTS (x2) and then a sandbox continuing nothing very interesting to do.

At the sweet 75% off at GoG and minus the pain and bitterness from all the bullshit dishonesty in the pre release hype some of us suffered through, it's a good deal anyway, although apparently it's already one of the most heavily pirated games in existence....probably half of that done by people who legitimately bought the game in the past and then were not allowed to play it anymore.

And I really appreciated your excellent review of Wildermyth on Steam.  Now I have a good sense of what to expect.

I realized right afterwards that the box said something like 'tell your friends about this game'. I simply misread it the first time, a mistake that anyone could make.

No sales here unfortunately, but I figured I'd post in this thread since it's gaming related. Just this past week, Reddit has tried to cancel two major game developers and appears to have succeeded in at least one of those cases. About a week ago, it was discovered that Scott Cawthon, the developer of Five Nights at Freddy's, donated to Donald Trump and several other Republicans. This led to a massive shitstorm first on Twitter and then on Reddit, with some people claiming that because he donated to Republicans, he must hate gay people, of which there are apparently many in his fanbase. You can read the Reddit thread on it here. He responded here saying how much he loves the rainbow people and that he was willing to be cancelled for the greater good. 2 days ago, he announced his retirement, supposedly to spend time with his family, and reiterated his love for the rainbow.

Next, we have Michal Kovarik, the lead designer and one of the founders of Factorio. A couple days ago, he made a blog post about some coding method that was first introduced by some guy called Uncle Bob. Now, this Uncle Bob is allegedly a racist, sexist Trump supporter. Obviously, Redditors demanded that Kovarik take down the blog post or at least the portions mentioning Bob. In response, Kovarik replied, "Take the cancel culture mentaility and shove it up your ass." The comment has since been removed by moderators of the subreddit for violating the subreddit rule to "be nice", but you can still see it by scrolling a couple pages back on his user page. Redditors did not take this well and for some reason decided to label him as a transphobe even though AFAIK neither he nor Uncle Bob ever mentioned trannies. He also made some comment about statutory rape being an "SJW term" but later said he didn't know what statutory rape was when he made that comment. In any case, here's the current thread about the topic. Lots of comments about how heartbroken they are that they wasted thousands of hours on a game developed by a transphobe as well as those on the other side saying they'll buy the game to own the transgenders. For his part Kovarik is still fighting against cancel culture in the comments but says he has "nothing against trans people". Time will tell whether they will succeed at cancelling him or getting him to bend the knee.

On Friday I shall receive my first paycheck and use it to buy Factorio out of respect for a man who won't let himself be bullied over something so stupid. Great game but all this time I have been using a copy I...found. 

 

FNAF has always had the worst community in the world, that guy should be used to tuning out 90% of them already. When this happens I never understand, why not just shut down your Twitter and keep making games for the people who want them?

People still are going to buy the FNAF games and he'll still get money for them. It's just that now he can just blame the internet when asked why he doesn't make games anymore and not the fact he was just grinding the one idea he ever had into the ground over and over again for sequel after sequel.

Factorio was fun a few years ago, but I don't see any reason to ever go back to it now that Satisfactory exists. But honestly while gamers are always whining about something now, reducing them to hysterical sobbing and screeching just by mentioning the name of a person that's relevant to the thing you're discussing is a new one to me....I wonder if one could harness this power in other ways. And I'm happy for the dude telling them to fuck off, that's so refreshing.

Once a person has become unpersoned, you can never speak of him again. I know it's cliched, but 1984 is truly prophetic. "He did not exist: he had never existed." I've heard that Satisfactory is still quite unpolished compared to Factorio. Is that not the case?

@Ford
Come be autistic about Satisfactory here.

To be honest, the FNAF games are pretty meh. I did like the first one, but I thought it was a bit overrated. The sequels were getting more and more uninspiring. It was just him recycling the same ideas over and over again. If he gets called out by twitter for donating to the GOP, then so be it. I don't have to hear about FNAF ever again. His other more religious games are nothing noteworthy really. He just got lucky with making a Chuck E. Cheese horror flick.

There are just way more creative indie game developers out there. (I have to fangirl about Lucas pope again. Papers please and the return of obra dinn are just so much fun in different ways. They are also completely different from each other and awesome to look at. His other smaller and free games like republia times do also lend themselves to a fun time.

We also have the creator of the IF game called Magium in the app store. It's still a lot of fun to play it. This guy writes and codes 250.000 words in a year. I have nothing but massive respect for this man. He has been writing and updating this for years now. The game is also free with no ads or pay to win or "battle passes"!)

I also plan to buy the original pathologic once I get my vacation. It's pretty cheap on steam due to it being such an old buggy game haha. I heard that it should make me feel miserable which means that this is a perfect match for me. 

Only played the first one which I decided wasn't really for me. I always found the lore more interesting than the gameplay.

Since you brought up Magium, the premium indie app for CYOA style gamebooks imo is Delight Games, by Sam Landstrom. He's had other authors pitching in over the years but it's primarily a one man show, and he's put out more than 75 books. And he's a pretty cool guy as he stopped by here a couple years ago and gave out a bunch of free keys for Google and Apple stores.

Really the ideal way to run a company like this if you have the skill, you just cut out the middle man entirely, write and code things yourself and put it in the store. The hurdle is not at all an impossible one with text games even with most writers not having the greatest skillsets for coding or marketing, so it's not like we're in a situation of one poorly run company which shall not be named holding some kind of monopoly on monetized IF forever.

I got a notification he just finished the Rogue's Choice series in June, that one alone is 22 books long and the most popular. You can buy them individually, but the full library is $29.99 in the Google store, which means 75 books and counting for less that 40 cents each. Much better deal there than some places we know...

Funnily enough I saw somewhere that he once wrote for CoG, then realized he didn't need them and had to buy back the rights to his own work. Can't find the post now though and searches just pull up his more current stuff. Delight has been a thing since 2013 so of course it would've been awhile ago.

Yeah, his books were one of the first things that introduced me to these type of games besides Magium. My old save files had been wiped a long time ago, but I remembered that a couple of the stories were pretty good. I played through the whole wizard game, the zombie one, the orgeon trail and another couple of them of which I don't know the name anymore. The first volume of wizard's choice was definitely my favorite of his whole collection; a good blend of classic dungeon crawling and adventuring time with your buddy.

I have looked at the rates of Choice of Games, it only gives you 25% of the revenue. It's a bit sleezy considering that the writers do most of the brunt work, but the one thing that truly bugs me the most is that you can't have the game distributed elsewhere or post it for free in another site. 

Broke down and preordered battlefield 2042 after I saw its gameplay trailer. With gameplay that looks like the golden BF3 era and 128 player maps, I got the feeling it'll deliver on the Planetside 2 experience without actually being Planetside 2.

Also haven't played a good shooter in a while.