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Steam Points are better kept in your pocket than spent on Steam summer sale stickersWoah, that’s the flamingo off Doom!
Woah, that’s the flamingo off Doom!
“It’ll be easy,” I thought to myself, when it was suggested someone do a nice, timely little post on the new-ishSteam Pointssystem, and the various new goodies on offer through it. “Sure, no problem,” I said, when Matt refused to write it because he thought Steam Points were “pointless”, and I was the only other writer on the call with Graham. Matt was being negative, I figured, and I’d show him the error of his ways with my happy-go-lucky, anything-goes, good times attitude. I’d breeze onto the Steam store, have a browse of what points-purchasable things were on offer, and do a quickie piece highlighting some of the most chuckleworthy.
Well, turns out Matt was right, and I was not.
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It’s not like I don’t get the principle. It’s like a loyalty scheme, innit. You buy games, and with every bit of real money you spend, you accrue pretend money with which you can buy fun little things from the shop you’ve done business with. The going rate is 124 Steam Points for every paaaahnd. I don’t understand quite how it works with the Steam trading card system, which I was never interested enough in to figure out, nor the badge-crafting system which I’m pretty sure is part of it, but apparently those two things still exist, and it all makes sense.
Steam Points aren’t even new, apparently. In fact, as it turns out, I’ve got tens of thousands of the bastards already. But I think maybe they were a seasonal thing? You can tell what an impact they’ve had on my life. In any case, whatever the deal was with them before, they’re now… permanently a thing? And the things that they buy will last indefinitely, rather than dissipating into electric farts after a few uses. OK, very good. So whatison offer?
Well! As of the Steam Summer Sale -check out our picks for the best deals here- there’s a load of new things added to the haul of existing… things. To one extent or another, they’re either cosmetics for your Steam profile (like animated backgrounds, which are a bit MySpace IMHO), or emoticons, stickers and chat effects to use in Steam chat. Here’s some of the new crop of animated stickers, which I have not bothered to make into an animated GIF, so you’ll have to use your imagination:
Look! It’s all your favourite characters from… games!
Admittedly, some of them are pretty fun in the sense of “ah, there is a character I recognise, drawn in a different style from the one in their game of origin”. But I’m not sure what use they could possibly be? For a start, I don’t really use Steam chat. There’s already an upsettingly large number of communication apps constantly buzzing, blinking and booping their way through my attention span every damned day, and except for on some rare occasions where it happens to be the medium most conveniently to hand, I don’t particularly want to use yet another one.
Look, it’s lieutenant wossnames from thingy!
Perhaps, I thought, I was being a bit of a git. Perhaps if I just splashed some of my hoard of Steam Points on the things, I might start to get in the spirit of the system. So I used the ghosts of pounds spent years ago to grab a slapdash assortment of things I liked the look of, and fired up Steam chat to inflict them on someone. Matt happened to be online, which seemed fitting, so I decided to pay him a visit.
Good old Gerald.
I have to say, I still wasn’t feeling it. And Matt’s question made me realise, deep in my soul, that my stickers had just seen their first and last uses. Nevertheless, being a sucker for the sunk cost fallacy, I went and bought more gubbins. Then I bothered Matt again:
It’s Wario Matt, just accept it.
Ah well. Perhaps I’ll get into Steam trading cards after all.
