The Steam Summer Sale is now live, lots of goodies

Could this be the first Steam summer sale where I don't buy anything? Few games that I had my eye on (Firewatch, Knee Deep, Cradle...) are still pricey.

Quoting: meggerman

Ok, this gif, without the goofy additions is terrifying.


I'm going to see if there's any game worth that I already don't have and that's not available on GOG(and I can't see getting there soon). I'm getting really pissed with not being able to play one game on my PC and my brother playing another on his if both are in my account.

I just picked up Salt and Sanctuary, Hyper Light Drifter, Dust: An Elysian Tail, Day of Infamy and Halfway all for $42. Good day's haul

Meh, not gonna get anything, pretty much anything I want I already have on GOG. And while I buy games on GOG that I already have on Steam, I don't really like doing the opposite.

The store has been slow for me all day. Pathetically slow. I do understand how overloaded their servers must be, but after all the years they have been running the sales they should have a good idea on what to expect and plan accordingly.

That being said, I will probably pick up Dawn of War II with all the expansions and DLC. I am considering Desktop Dungeons and Infinium Strike but a little unsure of these two seeing how a lot of comments on the former hate the dev and the latter doesn't seem to have much activity at all in the community hub for the last 6 months. (if anyone has some comments on these two, I'd love to hear your opinions.)

I think the better alternative to the steam summer sale may be to just spend my money on the humble monthly and see what I randomly get.

I got Cossacks 3 for 10 bucks. Nice pickup, I think.

I would be more inclined to buy stuff on GOG if they hurry up and release GOG Galaxy for Linux, makes it hard to keep titles up to date when you gotta go through 100 menus on their website, and often download a FULL sized SH instead of smaller update files.

Quoting: stretch611The store has been slow for me all day. Pathetically slow. I do understand how overloaded their servers must be, but after all the years they have been running the sales they should have a good idea on what to expect and plan accordingly.

From a technical point of view that is impossible.

Take everything into account:
- You have a user base of over 125m that is constantly growing, any of which could log in at any time
- You have to constantly upgrade your network to support the constant user base growth
- During sales you will have a lot of those 125m+ users log in all at the same time.
- Current known peak is 8.9M users all logged in at the same time. Of which has likely to have since increased. In server terms, that is a crapton of users that will bottleneck even the most powerful servers.
- You have to also remember you'll get new customers joining steam to buy cheap games, adding to the current server load of your existing users. How many new users? Well your guess is as good as mine. Even Valve wouldn't know that. It'd be an outright guess.
- Then you have "outside" network factors to account for, mainly banks. They have to processed lots of new card payments, all of which must contact a bank. How does that banks network handle the extra load?
- And then of course, you've got to remember, it's not just servers that have to handle the load, it's network switches, it's routers, it's your ISP - When all of those experience a sudden burst of heavy traffic how do they handle it?
- If you have DDoS protection in place, the sudden burst of users is likely to trip it, so you'll have to configured to to be "ready" for a certain amount of boost of users.
- and lastly, you will have unexpected errors that may occur, hardware failure for example.

All in all, handling a crapton of users is not an easy task by any account.

"impossible" ... please, unless you run your severs on raw iron ( and nobody does this any more ) increasing capacity is simply adjusting a slider - even if valve hosted everything them selves you can still rent addition cpu's and ram. Hell back in 2005 IBM provided us with enough standby capacity for the servers we bought to triple the capacity with just a phone call to (de-)active them. Similarly network bandwidth should not be a problem ( neighter inside your datacenter nor into ).
As for banks - I have some serious doubts that even the dinkiest payment processer would pay much attention to the steam sale given just how much traffic they are usually dealing with.

No the reason you are getting those "try again later" pages ( served by their varnish server when ever the backends are too slow to respond ) is because they are choosing not to make the investment, and it's easy to see why - any other shop you would just visit the competition, here being no competition people simply return at a later time providing what is in it self a form of load balancing I suppose.


All that said it has gotten a hell of a lot better this year - guessing some pencil pusher has crunched the numbers on just how long we are willing to wait before for getting that we wanted to spend money ;)

I got Left 4 Dead 2, The Portal Bundle, Shadow of Mordor and Stardew Valley. Also Killing Floor from the Humble Store.