Game Sales & Bundles - If the price is low, my money I shall blow!

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What is your PC storefront of choice?

  • No Steam = No Buy ™

    Votes: 30 47.6%
  • GOG/itch.io/other DRM-free

    Votes: 13 20.6%
  • Epic Games Store (lol)

    Votes: 2 3.2%
  • YARRRRRRR

    Votes: 18 28.6%

  • Total voters
    63

Punished Magician

A Man Deprived of His A-Log
kiwifarms.net
Joined
Apr 1, 2019
General thread for posting game sales and bundles that you think are worth sharing. We've had a couple of lazy, dead-on-arrival general sale threads in the past, but this one's a bit more thought-out and should hopefully fare better.

Any platform is allowed, but try to keep it to official/established storefronts and resellers; nobody's going to care if you post a single eBay listing for a physical game, or a shady key reseller site with a "totally legit" AAA game for 90% off.
If you're looking for storefronts letting you permanently claim free games as part of a promotion, then try our sister thread.

PC GAMES
As with any other platform, there'll be the usual big sales on storefronts like Steam and GOG, but where PC gamers really benefit is in all the options they have, even for keys of an individual storefront.
Authorized reseller of Steam keys, partnered with various major publishers like Sega and Bandai Namco. They have decent sales (for example, a couple days ago they sold Rain World for $2.50), frequently offer minor discounts on brand new releases, and during major Steam sales they'll usually undercut the official sale price by a bit more.
Where they REALLY shine, though, is with their bundles. They offer everything from prebuilt bundles to build-your-own bundles (with price depending on how many games you choose, not discriminating based on title), a few 2-3 title bundles for around $1, and a couple that collect a specific series. They also have mystery/blind box bundles, but never get those, they are invariably crap. Whether it's newer indie games or big names of yesteryear, you can find some surprisingly good scores in their bundles.
I usually refresh https://www.fanatical.com/en/bundle/games (sort by newest) once a day to see if they've got anything.
Authorized reseller (of multiple platforms) and frequent offerer of bundles, as per the name. I don't think their sales usually undercut even the official prices, so it's mostly useful for getting giftable codes of games for a friend, or if they offer a DRM-Free title so you can download it yourself via Humble itself and pass the Steam key on to a friend all for the price of one.
Their REAL value is in their bundles, though the quality tends to vary and the pricepoint can get a bit higher than on Fanatical when you consider what you're getting. Their Humble Choice subscription doesn't seem very worth it, so your best bet is checking https://www.humblebundle.com/games every few days and looking for genre- or publisher-focused bundles for the highest chance of getting games you'll actually like with consistency.
Another authorized reseller, though their selection is a bit limited compared to bigger stores. Sometimes their sales undercut even other resellers, so I'd check https://us.gamesplanet.com/games/offers/all once a blue moon, I guess.
An indie-focused storefront with lots of amateurish or experimental games for cheap (or free), as well as a few bigger indie titles. There's some value in getting games there if they come with a Steam key, because you can just use the DRM-free download yourself and give the key to someone else, but the main reason I included them is, once again, because of bundles. Whenever there's some big war, or natural disaster, or "humanitarian crisis" (read: teenage white girls on the internet are upset about something), they'll usually organize some fuckhuge bundle of games (DRM-free download only, no Steam keys) for like $10 to raise funds. It'll be full of crap like "Axewounded Souls: A short TTRPG experience about what it's like to be pronoun-raped as an uwu smol bean transbian #transRAGEday" and "8-BIT PIXEL UNHYGIENIC PUBLIC BATHROOM STALL GAME ASSET COLLECTION (made in mspaint in 5 minutes)", but there are sites to sort the contents of their bundles by popularity/Steam reviews, and once you've trimmed the fat, you're left with big-name indie titles like Undertale, Hypnospace Outlaw, and Celeste, as well as some hidden gems like Toree3D and Sky Rogue, which make the price more than worth it.
Another "authorized" key reseller, with lots of good sales as well as discounts on new titles. I haven't used it myself, though, and I've heard that lots of people have had issues with support or been given the wrong key and then told to pound sand, so I'd trust this site about as far as I can throw it.

CONSOLE GAMES
Humble Bundle has Switch games, and all 3 consoles should have games available (both digitally and physically) on the sites of major retailers like Amazon, Walmart, Target, and GameStop. Their sales tend to be more infrequent and only reflect the discount of a few titles compared to the larger sales happening on the consoles' native digital storefronts, but sometimes one of them might try to undercut the others on the price of a game that multiple retailers are putting on sale.

PHYSICAL GAMES
eBay
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OTHER USEFUL SITES

https://isthereanydeal.com/
Aggregates sales and bundles for games across all PC storefronts (and authorized resellers) and lets you compare prices on an individual game to find the best deal.
Has all sorts of info on everything Steam, anything from checking the price history of a game, to telling you when the next major Steam sale is. Lists ongoing sales and lets you sort/filter by various paramaters such as discount% and review scores.
Tracks deals on Switch games both digital and physical, tracking major retailer prices/sales in addition to official prices.
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Both Fanatical and Humble currently have some pretty good bundles rolling out right now as part of the leadup to the holidays.

Fanatical
≈$7.50 per game
Standout Titles: Death Stranding, Ghostwire Tokyo, Control, Resident Evil 3 Remake, Ghostrunner, Bloodstained, Disco Elysium, Phoenix Wright Ace Attorney Trilogy
^
Definitely take a look at this one, it's got some actual big releases for cheap.
≈$2.33 per game
Standout Titles: Frogun, ICEY, Spirit of the North
Mostly indies so it's hard for me to judge since I've never heard of most, thumb through it yourself. Don't buy Scathe, it requires an Epic Games Store account to even start.
≈$2 per game
Standout Titles: River City Girls, Long Live the Queen, Dusk Divers, Dark Deity
And If You're Utterly Shameless: Gal*Gun: Double Peace, Gun Gun Pixies
Lots of indies and visual novels in here, so hard to tell what's quality. Take a look for yourself, they're pretty cheap after all.
≈$3.33 per game
Standout Titles: Little Nightmares, Tales of Berseria, Tales of Zestiria, Tales of Symphonia
Also: various anime tie-in titles (One Piece, Naruto, Dragon Ball, Sword Art Online)
And finally, with the build-your-own bundles aside, the one they're more known for:
$16 total, no customization
Standout Titles: Prey, Shantae 1/2 Genie Hero (with all DLC), The Mummy Demastered, Alex Kidd in Miracle World DX, Strategic Command WWI, Chronicon, DARQ: Complete Edition
The other ones are hit-or-miss, can't really tell if they're worth recommending from just a cursory glance at their steam page, so look through the bundle yourself to see if there's anything that stands out to you.
REMINDER: Do not buy their stupid "Mystery Bundles," it's how they get rid of all their shovelware codes that don't sell. No, you are not going to get their one-in-a-million AAA game pack for lucky customers with Lies of P and Elden Ring, you're going to get S.W.I.N.E. HD, Doom (the original one), a bunch of shovelware, and maybe a semi-decent indie game from years ago that was already cheap and that you already had anyway. (And don't think the next one they put out will actually be different, it's the same pool of cheap games every time, it's not like it randomly selects a game from across the entire store or something.)
 
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I'll get to the Humble Bundles later (most are repeats of ones from earlier this year) but I almost forgot about Jingle Jam. A big charity bundle of okay-I-guess games for £35 (≈$47).
Here's the list:
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A huge bunch of indie games I've never heard of, a mystery game on Fanatical (lol), a coupon for one of those youtube sponsors, lootcrate keys for a p2w minecraft server (LMAO), DLC for a game that seemingly isn't even included, and maybe a couple actually good games. Also the keys supposedly all expire by the end of the month, so you can't even use the extras as giveaway fodder.
Check it out just in case anyways, but trust me, you can just wait for the Winter Sale and buy Superhot, Homeworld, and Marble World for cheaper, and you'll literally never even think about any of the other games you passed on ever again.
 
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Humble Bundle is currently bringing back one of their bundles from earlier in the year every day. Today's is crap ("Roguelike Deckbuilders"? no thanks), but yesterday's is actually good—I'd probably get it myself if I didn't already have most of the good games.
15 hours left as of the time of posting
$15
Standout Titles: Hollow Knight, Rain World, Blasphemous, Bloodstained

Here's another of their bundles, with less of a time limit (10 days left):
JRPG-focused
$15
Standout Titles: Bug Fables, Symphony of War, Nexomon Extinction, Dark Deity

I don't remember if there were many other good bundles on HB this year, but there was definitely a really good Capcom one with MonHun Rise, Phoenix Wright, and MegaMan 11—I'd definitely go for it if they bring it back.
 
I've been meaning to post about the sales on Fanatical, but I've been busy. Guess I'll wait until the Steam sales start so I can compare prices.
In the meantime, Elden Ring is $31.79 (47% off) for the next 48 hours, or until they run out of codes: https://www.fanatical.com/en/game/elden-ring
(Edit: It's now on sale on Steam too, but it's still a few bucks cheaper on Fanatical)

Also, the Humble Bundle bundle reruns ended a couple days ago. Weren't too many good ones, I guess it's not really up to them to be able to rerun publisher bundles so they were left with just the themed ones instead. Sad.
 
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THE STEAM SALE HAS BEGUN
Post deals, recs, carts, etc.

No Straight Roads ($8.50 Steam, $6.50 Fanatical)
An action game à la Devil May Cry with a musical focus. Enemies attack to the beat of the music with auditory cues. You play as an indie rock band in a city that generates electricity using music, rebelling against the corrupt record label that rules over it after they outlaw Rock&Roll. Each boss is themed after a different genre (with matching music that turns into a rock cover when you start winning). One boss is a boy band made up of literal mass-produced robots that are instantly replaced as you beat them, forcing you to go after rhe military contractor in charge of them. Another is a child prodigy on the piano, and the actual boss is her stage mom who turns into a giant angry monster when you interrupt her performance. There's even in-universe advertisements for each boss playing near the entrances to their stages.
It might not be as polished as other games of the genre, but it's still overall a good play, and definitely goes all-in on style.

Sky Rogue ($5 Steam)
A roguelite featuring arcade-y air combat. Choose from various types of planes (bombers, fighters, etc.), outfit them with upgrades and weapons (machine guns, missiles, bombs), and set off to archipelago of increasing difficulty as you take out the targets marked for you, and maybe blow up a few extra things for bonus points. Enemies range from stationary ground targets with minimal defenses to arrays of anti-air guns, squadrons of powerful fighter jets, and giant hovercraft bases with their own AAs and fighters protecting them. Colorful geometric artstyle.
Loads of fun, I got it in one of those itch.io bundles and only stopped playing because my controller of choice sucked, so I just rebought it on another platform when it went on sale.

Spark the Electric Jester 3 (Edit: fixed link) ($12.50 Steam)
Esteemed Sonic fangame dev lakefeperd decided he'll just make his own Sonic, to much success. Gameplay unironically blows every Sonic game from the past decade+ out of the water, only Frontiers begins to even compete with it and even then only with the expansion.
A real masterpiece, and if you hop straight into 3 then look up a basic story recap of the previous 2 games because shit gets real in the final act.

Various other sales I don't feel like typing up recs for:
Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga ($10 Steam)
Katamari Damacy REROLL ($7.50 Fanatical, $8.50 Steam)
Klonoa: Phantasy Reverie Series ($8.79 Fanatical, $10 Steam)
West of Loathing ($4.39 Steam)
Superliminal ($10 Steam)
And each of the Hotline Miami games are like $2 on Steam if you somehow haven't played them already.
 
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Skipped over some recent Humble/Fanatical bundles because they're ass. Here's a good one from Humble:
AGDQ 2024 Bundle
(edit: my retarded browser sent the post too early)
Price: $10
Games: Bayonetta, Borderlands 2 (GOTY), Celeste, Sprawl, Bloodstained, Astalon: Tears of the Earth, Sonic Adventure 2 (+ Battle DLC)
 
Another bundle from Fanatical, seems like mostly Boomer Shooters so I have no idea which ones are good. Has stuff like The Citadel and Dusk as well as older titles they're always trying to pawn off their keys for like Doom 64 and Wolfenstein 3D. Starts at 3 for 5$.

They're also having a sale on Bandai Namco games (meanwhile they're still full price on Steam), some good deals like Katamari 2 for <$9
 
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