Steam Summer Sale goes live

Get your credit cards ready, ladies and boys, for Steam’s epic Summer Sale has gone live, offering massive discounts on games, indie and AAA titles alike. Valve, which runs the Steam service, says it will offer deals on thousands of games. You can browse Steam's website, though it seems to be buckling from high traffic. The Steam Summer Sale will go on till July 22.

Better late than never

Steam also has flash discounts that last for eight hours. As I'm writing this, the game on sale on the flash discount is Saint’s Row The Third for $12.49 instead of $49.99. One of the better deals on the website as of today is the Indie Game Bundle I, which has the games Anomaly: Warzone Earth, Cave Story+, EDGE, Lone Survivor, and The Baconing. This bundle is on sale for $9.99.

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The game bundles that would be available on Steam’s Summer Sale were leaked a few days ago.

Steam is one of the most popular gaming platforms on the PC. It’s become an extremely popular game distribution platform that’s used by Valve and a whole bunch of other game publishers and developers. The platform's seasonal sales have been extremely popular with gamers the world over, with AAA titles going for as low as $10. This has always been one of the greatest strengths of the PC as a gaming platform.

Steam has a good reputation for its 75 per cent off sales - and many gamers love them. But for rival Origin and parent company EA, that's not the right approach. Origin boss David DeMartini said that random deep-discounting of games "cheapens" IP, and promised not to copy the practice.

"We won't be doing that," he said, bluntly. "Obviously they think it's the right thing to do after a certain amount of time. I just think it cheapens your intellectual property. I know both sides of it, I understand it. If you want to sell a whole bunch of units, that is certainly a way to do that, to sell a whole bunch of stuff at a low price. The game makers work incredibly hard to make this intellectual property, and we're not trying to be Target. We're trying to be Nordstrom. When I say that, I mean good value, we're trying to give you a fair price point, and occasionally there will be things that are on sale you could look for a discount, just don't look for 75 per cent off going-out-of-business sales."

Valve has countered EA's accusation that Steam sales "cheapen" intellectual property, saying they in fact benefit games, publishers and gamers. When Eurogamer put this accusation to Valve business development chief Jason Holtman at the Develop conference in Brighton today, he said the opposite was true.

"Ask our partners," he said. "Ask the large to the small and see what they think about that. Putting it all in the bucket of 'it's all about the discounts'; I don't think that's everything about it."