Do you think you will get any games out of the Steam auction?

@professoress: I like the UPlay and Steam systems. I don't get why people have problems with them. You are getting something for nothing. If you don't want to interact with it then don't but I really don't see how anyone could have an issue with a system that rewards you for playing the games you purchase.

@mb: Back on day one when the sacks were worth almost nothing, my friend and I did some rough math. We found that the highest bid(about a million at the time) on the winter profile would translate to about 40$ of real money. crazyness! And if I am not wrong, at the current bid of 375700 gems for that profile and a value of 1.23$ for 1000gems, the top bid would translate to about 462$... for a steam profile!

For what it's worth, 2-7000 gems could probably buy you some lesser-known indie titles if you have a couple of pages worth of cards and Steam junk you want to clear out. I got Resonance for about 2500 gems today.

@super2j: Yeah there are some really poor financial decisions currently on display. I mean, at least with the profile thing it's a limited item that can only be obtained during this auction, so I can sort of understand people wanting it. For the games though, there is just no excuse for spending more than the game is worth in gems just to win an auction. It's like buying $1,000 in lottery tickets to win a $500 prize.

@vitefish: I got bored and skimmed through about 50 pages or so, until I hit a real rut where no good games were on like 5-6 consecutive pages.

• Jazzpunk - 5600
• Papers, Please - 7400
• Hotline Miami - 6400
• Bastion - 5400
• Limbo - 4600
• Mark of the Ninja - 6100
• Gunpoint - 3500
• VVVVVV - 2700
• Botanicula - 2800
• Machinarium - 2800
• The Swapper - 3700
• Gemini Rue - 2200
• Reus - 3300
• Matthew Rorie's Alpha Protocol - 4200
• Steamworld Dig - 3500
• Fez - 4400
• Braid - 2600
• Teleglitch - 2300
• Guacamelee - 3800
• The Fall - 3600
• Luftrausers - 4300
• Halfway - 4500 (I won a copy of this)
• Puzzle Agent - 1200
• Puzzle Agent 2 - 1300
• Fract OSC - 3600
• Paper Sorceror - 1750
• Pid - 1300
• La-Mulana - 2600
• Volgarr the Viking - 3100
• Vessel - 1500
• Bit.Trip Runner2 - 4300 (actual title is silly and long)
• Drox Operative - 3000
• Wizorb - 800
• Proteus - 1700
• To The Moon Game and Sountrack Bundle - 4600

I think a lot of those are legitimately better than many of the games going for 10,000-20,000.

Also, I don't understand how This War of Mine is going for 23,800 gems, when its price on the store is $20 USD. That doesn't even make sense, you knuckleheads.

Well after trying for most of the day I was able to snag Renegade Ops for 1500 gems (all that I had basically). It seemed like it was hovering around 1300 all day but I kept getting sniped, so I had to up my bid.

I assumed that the prices would steadily decline after the first day as people burned through their gems, but that doesn't seem to be happening yet. I guess there are a lot of people coming in from the sidelines still.

I still have no clear understanding of how this works. I feel like someone at Valve came up with this idea a month ago and they just went with it.

Don't get me wrong, I like the idea. But poor implementation and explanation seems to have cut this program at its knees and serves only those die hard Steam users rather than everyone.

@finaldasa said:

They've also changed the rules on the fly.

When it first launched, gems were tradeable/sellable, but then people found a way to dupe them. When it relaunched, gems were not tradeable/sellable for like a day or so, but then they opened it back up to trading/selling.

Also, when the auction first started, if you won the game for that 45 minute segment, you were refunded the difference between your bid and the next highest bid. So if you put in 10,000, and the next highest guy put in 8,000, it refunded you an amount of gems where it's as if you only bid 8,001. It no longer does that, so if you win the auction, you spend all of the gems you designated as your "max bid". I think they did that because people were highballing all of the bids because they just wanted to muscle everybody out and they'd get back most of what they were bidding anyways, and it was discouraging users with lower amounts of gems from even trying.

Also, when it started, you could cancel out of a bid whenever. Now you can't cancel out of a bid if you're the top bidder, or else people would back out after driving up the bid price.

@bisonhero: All of that sounds insane. It sounds overly complicated for what should be a chance for users to get "free" games.

@finaldasa: Oh yeah, for sure. This thing is hella complicated. Almost like an economist was behind it...

I'm not going to be anything from it.

wow, good job! that a nice game to get for that amount.

@bisonhero: Holy crap, that's a lot of time! I don't know the actual conversion rate, but that seems like a lot of those games are cheaper in gem form that in money form, which is pretty good!

I sold all my gems and bought the games I wanted instead. Thank you, broken gem economy.

I just sold my gems and made almost 8$ might be able to pick up a game or two when the sale starts.

Nope. Not even close. I think I managed to get 240 gems out of breaking down every item in my inventory. Guess I didn't buy the right games? Seems pretty dumb anyway. Why can't you sort the auction by lowest bid either!

@therealmoot said:

Granted, I think they only added that in the past 24 hours or so, because Valve is making this event up as they go along. Also, the games with extremely low bids (less than 1000 gems) are...maybe not the best in terms of quality.

It's been a terrible idea.

The economy is completely broken and considering this seems to have replaced a large part of the steam holiday it's worked infavourably to the majority of it's users.

Well hopefully this isn't replacing the holiday sale all, but we'll see.

One thing I like about this whole trading cards metagame is it gets me to at least download and fire up the games in my library I never got around to. I had like three indie games running the background for cards, then I got to Gunpoint. I didn't get very far but I kept the music running the background the rest of the night.

@jaycrockett: Gunpoint has really good music! Also the writing is quite clever, and while the gameplay isn't the deepest stealth/sabotage game out there, it's solid enough. Also the game isn't incredibly long since it was mostly created by one person, so you could probably finish it in an evening. I put in about 10 hours, but that's only because I went back to get all of the achievements. You can probably blast through the game in like 4-6 hours.

Also, I still can't believe the number of people who think this event is in any way replacing the holiday sale. It says the following on the Auction page, but I wish it was in enormous font: "The Auction runs 15 Dec @ 10:45am to 18 Dec @ 1:00pm when the Holiday Sale begins."

I've got a couple thousand gems from my inventory from all of the useless steam shit in it, and bought about 6 dollars worth of gems on the market by selling a CS GO skin for the CZ75 which is now useless. I've managed to pick up Guilty Gear and Dive Kick, saving about 3 dollars on each title. I don't understand why people get so vehemently upset about these kind of things; it's just another dumb gimmick to get you to spend money, and another way to get games for cheaper than retail pricing. I'm glad that Valve created some way to make my shitty emotocons and wallpapers worth something.