Man faces financial ruin, possible loss of thumbs after Steam Black Friday sale
For many gamers, Steam’s recently concluded Black Friday weekend sale was simply an opportunity to pick up a few games they’ve had their eyes on at a discounted price or take a chance on something new without needing to invest the usual full price of a new game. For some, however, the holiday discounts offered by Valve’s popular digital distribution service have a dark side.
“That whole weekend is still sort of hazy,” said Paul Roberts, a 27-year-old resident of Chicago Ridge, Illinois, who discovered in the aftermath of the Black Friday sale that he had accumulated over $480,000 in debt to Valve Software over a period of less than 72 hours. “I remember logging on Friday and seeing that the sales had started. So I bought a few things that caught my eye, you know. Then I saw some indie games that were on sale real cheap, and I thought, why not? 4 or 5 bucks for a game, that’s nothing. So I grabbed a few more of those, and I figured that as long as the sale is on I might as well take advantage of it and get a few more of the higher priced ones- I mean, $25 for a $50 game, that’s practically nothing, right? The last thing I really remember is spending $4 for something called Star Ruler. I don’t even like strategy games, but at that point I was beyond caring. Then it gets really fuzzy.”
Roberts did not become lucid again until Monday, November 29th. Upon checking his e-mail, he made a shocking discovery: he had spent nearly half of a million dollars on Black Friday sales. “At first I didn’t believe it, so I went to check my actual Steam account,” Robert says. “When I clicked the ‘Library’ tab in Steam to see what I had bought, it took over 10 minutes to load.”
In the throes of a Steam sale-induced psychotic fugue state, Roberts’ fiscal discipline, sense of restraint, mathematical ability to understand that large numbers of small expenses can accumulate into a large total expense, and even his usual taste in games vanished in a mad frenzy to “save” as much money as possible.
“All those games that only cost a few dollars each during the sale start to add up. Do you have any idea how many indie tower defense games there are on Steam? A lot. And then there’s all the casual puzzle games, several dozen entries in the ‘Tycoon’ franchise, those weird Japanese shoot’em ups where instead of an airplane or a spaceship you’ve got some chick in a dress flying through the air shooting stuff with revolvers, everything.”
Roberts’ purchases did not end with small budget titles. “It wasn’t just super-cheap games, either. I now own over a dozen copies of The Witcher II. Steam doesn’t show the little ‘Add to Cart’ button for games you already own, so that shouldn’t even be possible. A lot of it doesn’t even make any sense- I still don’t own either of the Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War games, but I do now own all of the downloadable content for both of them. I guess the sale prices seemed like a good deal at the time.
“I have a huge list of games that not only aren’t in English, their text isn’t even in the Latin alphabet.. I’ve got hundreds of games that use nothing but Cyrillic characters, a series of seven games where everything’s written in these weird squiggles that someone later told me told is ‘the greatest Sri Lankan RPG franchise of the past decade,’ and a tower defense game entirely in what I’m pretty sure is ancient Hebrew. I’d never even heard of Steam selling stuff like that, but apparently they do because I had to buy a new 500 gigabyte hard drive to fit it all.”
Roberts says he’s learned a valuable lesson about becoming swept up in the excitement of a big sale. “For Christ’s sake, I paid $10 for Rogue Warrior because that’s half off the usual price. I mean…reviewers nowadays hand out scores of six or seven or eight like they were party favors. Do you have any idea what it takes for a game to have a 29 on Metacritic? Do you?
Roberts also says he still doesn’t know how he’s going to pay his debt to Valve, though he insists that he is determined to do so as soon as possible because “Gabe Newell said he was going to take my thumbs.”
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