Episode: 3969
Title: HPR3969: Game Sales
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3969/hpr3969.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 18:07:14

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This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3969 for Thursday the 19th of October 2023.
Today's show is entitled, Game Sales.
It is part of the series computer strategy games.
It is hosted by Avokak and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is I have recently found some bargains and wanted the share that with the community.
You are listening to a show from the Reserve Q.
We are airing it now because we had free slots that were not filled.
This is a community project that needs listeners to contribute shows in order to survive.
Please consider recording a show for Hacker Public Radio.
Hello, this is Ahuka, welcoming you to Hacker Public Radio in another exciting episode.
And this is going into the Q is an emergency episode.
So if you're hearing this, it means the Q is running out of shows.
And it also means you should be recording a show.
It's not hard to do.
In fact, there are many shows on HPR about how easy it is to record a show and give you
some good advice on that topic.
So if you're hearing this, please do a show.
It doesn't take a lot to do.
And I'm living proof of that because I do a lot of them.
This is not going to be the longest one I've ever done either.
But it's something I want to talk about here in terms of I've done some shows about
computer games and the other day I happen to run across a really good deal.
And it got me thinking about how you can build up your library of computer games pretty
inexpensively if you learn how to shop the sales.
That's always the trick to these things.
So the first thing I want to talk about is steam.
And now steam is a platform and it's one that I found to be very handy.
The games are installed on your local hard drive.
But if you change computers or want to put your games on more than one computer, all you
have to do is install steam on that computer and then have steam install the individual
games and it's really easy.
And you can choose which games to install.
So some games can run on Linux.
So you can install them on a Linux computer.
I'd have to say that unfortunately most of the games out there require windows.
But the other option is if you have steam, you could decide for instance, if you had
a laptop with a smaller hard drive just to install two or three of your favorites.
And then if you had a desktop with terabytes of disk space, which is typically how I build
my desktops these days, you can go ahead and install all of them.
I've probably got a terabytes worth of games if you added everything up.
Now steam is not the only platform I use.
I'm going to talk about good old games or GOG and they have a platform called Galaxy
that I also use and like a lot.
But anyway, steam is something I find useful.
Now both platforms let you update your games easily.
A steam in particular makes it very easy to add what is called DLC and that stands for
downloadable content.
For instance, Civilization 6 has added lots of DLC to keep the game fresh.
Now they sell this so it's a way of keeping the revenue coming as well.
But the Civilization games are ones that I spend a lot of time on.
So recently they did something called the leader pass.
Now the way this works is that you purchase the leader pass in the beginning and then
they commit to adding every couple of months or so some new leaders that you can play.
And that just happens automatically in steam.
You've purchased the pass.
You will get them as soon as Forex releases them.
And the way that works is you open up steam, you look in your library and it will tell
you these are all the games that have updates that you can download and you can just go
through them and download them.
Now why am I talking about all of this stuff?
It's because they have sales and that's the really neat thing.
Both steam and good old games run sales.
Now good old games seems to run sales like monthly or maybe even twice a month.
Well steam does big sales four times a year, spring, summer, fall and winter.
Now you are going to find super bargains on the latest games in these sales.
That's not what this is about.
This is about catching up on games that you may not have played when they first came out
but might want to try when it doesn't cost much.
And you can get some real bargains if you look.
Now there is a YouTube channel that I like to follow.
It's a guy from New Zealand.
His handle is jumbo pixel and as always there's links in the show notes for everything we
talk about.
Now he does reviews of the games that are on sale on steam whenever there's a sale.
And I find his reviews valuable because he likes the same kinds of games I like.
And that's really the secret to reviews of anything.
Movie reviews, book reviews, whatever.
Find someone who likes the same things you like and if they recommend something pretty
good chance you're going to enjoy it as well.
So how did I run across jumbo pixel?
Because he did a lot of videos about Civ 5 and then Civ 6.
Then he covered human kind which is a game I've bought.
I haven't played a lot of yet but I plan to get around to it at some point.
So I always watch his review videos to see if there's anything I want.
And in summer of 2023 I saw that steam had something awesome on sale.
Now steam if you didn't know already is a platform put together by the game publisher
Valve.
But it has games from all publishers or all publishers that wish to offer their games
there anyway.
But because of the Valve connection that might be why they offered something called the Valve
Complete Pack.
Now this bundle of games included Counter Strike Condition Zero, Day of Defeat, Source,
Team Fortress Classic, Day of Defeat, Deathmatch Classic, Opposing Force, Ricochet, Half
Life, Half Life Blue Shift, Half Life 2, Counter Strike Source, Half Life 1 Source, Half
Life 2 Episode 1, Portal, Half Life 2 Episode 2, Left for Dead, Left for Dead 2, Portal
2, Counter Strike, Global Offensive, and the Lab.
Now there were like three or four games that I mentioned had the word Source in the title
and what that refers to is the Source 3D Game Engine.
So those particular games will be 3D games.
Now that's quite a bundle of games.
You might not want to play all of these games, but there's some real classics in that,
you know, Portal, Half Life, Counter Strike, I mean, you know, these are legendary games.
You know, there's a lot of value here.
And this bundle cost me with tax included $6.94 for all of them.
Now for that price, if you only played one of these games for a couple of afternoons,
you've got your money's worth, you know, it's just, you can't go wrong with a deal
like that.
Now are you going to find a deal like this every time you log in to steam?
No, you got to kind of watch the sales to do this.
Now, I was alerted to it by Jumbo Pixel, you know, I watched his video and he talked
about this and pointed out, you know, this is like the deal of the century and I immediately
logged into my steam account and there it was and, you know, click the buy button.
Now over at Good Old Games, it's a little bit different.
I watched the sales and, but, you know, even when there's not a sale going on, there's
some good bargains.
They have a little slider thing you can set to put in your price range of what you're willing
to do.
So, I selected games of no more than $5 and they came back with 50 pages.
That's 50 pages of games, not 50 games because there's probably 15 or 20 games on each
page and so 50 pages of them.
Now, are all of them going to be gems?
No, of course not.
That would be ridiculous.
But scanning through, I saw, for instance, they offer a combo, Master of Orion 1 and
2 for $2.39.
Baldur's Gate and Baldur's Gate 2, it's not a combo, but each of those is going for
$4.99 a piece.
Then there's Mist for $2.99.
These are all classic games.
Now once you establish an account at Good Old Games, you get regular emails from them
with the latest games on sale, so you'll be able to keep up that way as well.
I always go through and just look for the ones that happen to be things like, oh, I've
thought about that one, but I never quite regret around getting it, and now I can get it
for a few bucks.
Now, the last thing I want to mention here is Humble Bundle, and again, link in the show
notes for this.
Now they will package up a group of games, and I've bought a few bundles from them.
Generally it's a theme of some kind, and you decide how much you want to pay.
Now the way the deal works is the more you pay, the more games you get.
Now Humble Bundle doesn't just do games, they do books, and it works pretty much the
same way.
So for instance, I only want to pay $5, you know, for $5, we'll give you these
four games, or these four books, or whatever.
Okay, maybe what if I pay $10, all right, we'll give you a couple more, you know, and
so on.
And then, you know, somewhere around $15 or $20, you get the whole bundle, usually.
So, and the other thing is that a portion of the proceeds from these goes to charity, and
they'll tell you which charity it is, that they're supporting on any given bundle.
And you can download the games, but for most of them, you can just add them to your Steam
account, assuming you have a Steam account, and I do.
Now right now, I just checked, as I write this, and record this, I see they have a bundle
of 16 Train Simulator games.
Now, that's a niche audience to be sure, but I finally remember many hours playing
Sid Meier's Railroad Tycoon, so I get the attraction.
And I've published bundles of indie games that run on Linux from them, and they run
on Steam.
You know, Steam is also available for Linux.
The only issue there is that it can only run games that are written for Linux specifically,
and there are some issues there.
Now, I have run Civilization 5 on Steam on Linux quite successfully.
I've had a few issues with Civilization 6, but that's also available on Linux.
Well, it's just some things that happen to occur to me that I thought I would share,
because I know there's other people in the community that are lovers of computer games.
And it just, there's no excuse, in my view, if you're a game lover, not to be playing
a ton of great games for not very much money, just by knowing how to shop the sales.
So this is Ahuka for Hacker Public Radio, signing off and encouraging everyone as always
to support FreeSoftware.
Bye bye.
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