idk, as an adult, this cautionary idea that you’re “wasting tons of money” by making impulse buys during Steam sales is kind of a joke. Pretty much anything else you do recreationally will cost you WAY more in a shorter amount of time, due to one-time admission fees and materials you consume like food, alcohol, drugs, and other supplies/equipment.
The cover charge at a club is about the same price as a steam game on sale, and when your friend says “hey let’s go in here” you probably spend even less time thinking about it. After that, you might walk out as soon as you get in because the DJ sucks, there’s no girls, beer list sucks… even faster than it takes to get through a tutorial level and decide you don’t want to play a boring game.
If you actually stay in the club, depending on how drunk you get, your judgement is way worse and there’s in-person peer pressure to spend more. Any one of the following will cost about the same or more as your steam total, and multiple could be incurred at once whether you planned on it or not:
- bar tab
- cab ride home
- parking ticket for leaving your car in the wrong zone over night
- taking the girl you picked up to brunch in the morning
And that’s excluding more extreme shit you could get into like bags of coke, DUI, hospital/legal fees for getting into a fight, trying to do a backflip off the stairs, joyride through the golf course, etc etc. All of these are one-time fees for a few hours of fun you can’t go back to without spending money again.
The monthly fees at most gyms are about the same as you’d spend once or twice a year on a steam sale. The price for one session of some random activity like bowling or paintball via groupon discount is about the same as a steam sale, and then you have to spend more money on extra stuff when you’re there. A bag of paintballs is the price of several steam games! Filling up your gas tank to go anywhere for fun costs as much as a few steam games.
So given all this money spent on one-time shit, the fact that steam games are low-cost and infinitely reusable makes them a way more innocuous purchase than almost anything else you can get into. A box of condoms is more than a lot of steam games and all you do is jizz in them and throw them out!
5-10 years ago in order to find out you didn’t like a game, you had to rent it at Blockbuster, which was about the same as the sale price to own it permanently on Steam sale. Then if you decided you didn’t give the game a fair chance or your friend says there’s a really cool level after the spot where you quit, you had to spend the same money to rent it again. With steam, you can always give the game a second chance later, and it doesn’t even take up any physical space in your house.
Seriously, when you put it in perspective, making fun of people for frivolous Steam sale purchases is like making fun of people who put pennies in the “take a penny, leave a penny” jar at 711. Most people spend more money more frivolously on New Years Eve than any random gamer does on all his steam purchases during all the sales the whole year. I only bought a few games this sale, but if I bought more, I wouldn’t feel remotely bad about it.