Surviving the Steam Holiday Sale - Day Five

The Steam Sales are something that we all anticipate with equal amounts of excitement and fear. How many awesome games will be reduced? How many of them will I have already paid full price for a few days before? Will I end up spending my life savings on games I never looked twice at before? We’ve all been there, and the Holiday Sale is no exception.

With a name like Holiday Sale, you almost feel compelled to buy stuff, you know, it’s the holidays, you deserve it, right? Of course you damn well do, you made it through the year! Only problem is, you’re already in debt from all the presents you had to buy for family and friends, and the random people you drew in your work’s Secret Santa that you spoke to once that time by the coffee machine. So seeing all these great deals come up becomes a bit of a balancing act. It’s almost like an equation really.

Where X = happiness:

X = (Game you really want + Great deal) > Amount of debt you can afford to bury yourself in.

Sometimes though, you have to draw the line, and for me, this is one of those times. I have well and truly tightened my purse strings, about to attempt something that may not even be possible: surviving the Steam Holiday Sale without one purchase. Every day, as I browse the sale, I will do so with the goal that I cannot buy anything, because I simply cannot afford to. The best part is, you guys will get to watch me squirm as I let the games slip through my fingers. So whether you want to support or mock, come join me on my tortuous journey!

Day FIVE:

You know what? Today is a good day. Today is a good day because there is nothing I want in the Steam Holiday Sale. The closest to temptation is probably Borderlands 2 which is funny because I played the first one and wasn't all that into it. Maybe going back I would enjoy it now, who knows?

Sure there are some real low prices in the daily deals, that I probably would have bought had I not been trying to survive sans purchase; but they would have been bought for the sake of being bought, and left sat in my library in a permanent state of not installed. Anyone else got games like that? So feeling like my experiment is definitely paying off here; this is where I would usually end up wasting money that I could have/should have saved. I guess sometimes a good deal is hard to resist and a great deal even harder.

For those of you not on a Steam fast I would definitely recommend picking up Reus. It's a real bargain for £1.74, and will give you plenty of hours of fun. As one of those games that is much more complex than it appears, you'll probably find it quite an enjoyable challenge too!

So all-in-all today I am feeling pretty good, and decidedly more positive about this experiment. Although I'm sure as soon as a game I really want comes up, I'll be back to sulk-mode again! Ah well, you can't win 'em all... or in this case buy 'em all.