What do I mean? Sales and bundles. Look at what Valve has done with Steam. Valve does basically 4 things with products to make them sell better.

1. 10% off on pre-orders or new products. Little bit of a discount for new items let’s them stand apart from older products and gives a little incentive to buy them.
2. 4 for 3 package deals or buy 4, get 25% off. Link people together, get more sales from people who sometimes wouldn’t have bought it otherwise.
3. Multiple product bundles. Things like a discography or similar artists for a larger discount.
4. HUGE HOLIDAY SALES! Steam has holiday sales so popular people complain about buying things just because they are so cheap, even if they have no intention of playing it.

The point of all these sales? To sell people things they might not want, but in such a convincing way that they can’t help but do it. Another part of all these sales is to only do them on whole albums, selling all the filler songs that are generally lackluster.

The differences between music and games is actually better for music sales as well. People become bored of music much sooner than they become bored of games. People don’t (usually, minus one old roommate) become obsessed with music and not listen to anything else like they do with games.

Many people have vast libraries of music. Thousands of songs. You can’t expect people to pay $0.99 at a time to spend a thousands of dollars on a library of that size.

So that’s it. You now have direct control over the price of items. The cost of selling an item has gone significantly down. (transport, packaging, materials? hah!)

Use it.

What people apparently don’t like is the choice to buy items. The choice to buy non-tradable, non-craftable items. Items that are otherwise functionally the same as items you get randomly over time. For a game that is 3 years old and still patched frequently and paid $20 or less for.

I can see not wanting to buy items.

I’m not going to buy any new sets of items myself.

But how can you be angry at Valve for giving people the option to purchase things?

The drop system can be very frustrating and trading can alleviate that but if you don’t have the time or are just getting into TF2 then purchasing items is a very viable alternative.

What I fail to see is the downside to person A because person B has purchased items.

I guess I’ll keep whacking people with fish in a newspaper until I get an answer.

Why do people do this? Protection. So that their gadget still looks good after a few months of use.

But what ends up happening is the case starts to look horrible. It scratches easier than what it is protecting in the first place. I’ve seen cell phones and ipods with screens you can’t even see anymore. So you end up with a terrible looking unusable device.

The only thing worse than this is leaving the plastic covers on that devices are shipped. This is most evident on HP Laptops. These are generally dirtier than the device because they’ve been through the factory. They have bubbles under them. They sometimes are half off and people still try to keep it on… Next time I see one of those I’m ripping it off.

Update Dec 2009: There are many new computers at work with that plastic film that I have been able to take off. It feels great!

ARG *HEADDESK*

I get why repetition in movies is necessary. I get why repetition in music is necessary. I get why repetition in writing is necessary. I don’t get why you have to tell the guy sitting next to you that you should have sat on the balcony four times in less than half an hour.

He heard you the first time. He’s repeated it back to you twice. You agree already. It’s over, make a none of it and sit there next time. For the time being, you are stuck where you are so shut up! Talking about it any more does not help.

If you have nothing to talk about you should try something I like. It’s called not talking. Thanks.