Mind = blown. Not even a week after Steam’s EA week finishes, Valve announce, starting today, a massive summer sale going on until the 4th July with sales on pretty much everything in the Steam Store. There are developer packs ranging from 25% off to 75% off, two indie packages of 5 games each, and separate sales on a bunch of great games.

From the looks of it, there will be daily deals throughout the duration of the sale, so it’s going to pay to keep and eye on the Steam Store page for the best ones. These are the best deals I can see currently available.

Company Of Heroes (+ 2 expansions)
Metro 2033
Warhammer 40k (+3 expansion)
Warhammer 40k II (+1 expansion)
Titan Quest (+1 expansion)
+ more
£26.49

Call Of Duty (+1 expansion)
Call Of Duty 2
Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare
Call Of Duty: World At War
£21.99

DiRT
DiRT 2
FUEL
GRID
£16.99

Blueberry Garden
Bob Came In Pieces
Crayon Physics Deluxe
Plain Sight
Saira
£14.99

Darwinia
Multiwinia
Defcon
Uplink
£5.00

Individual Titles

Trine £3.40 (today only)
Bioshock 2 £9.99 (today only)
Killing Floor £3.75 (today only)
DiRT 2 £7.50 (today only)
Borderlands £14.99 + DLC (don’t get Mad Moxxie) £4.72
The Witcher: Enhanced Edition Director’s Cut £4.41
Beat Hazard £3.49
Men Of War Gold £7.49
King’s Bounty Gold £8.74

Updates coming tomorrow. Take a look at the whole sale here.

Update: Added The Witcher, Beat Hazard, Men Of War, and King’s Bounty

You’re too late for this one, it wasn’t a great deal £10 each for Crysis and Warhead.

Bad Company 2 for £20 is well worth it if you haven’t got it already. Pre-order Medal Of Honor and get access to the beta. If you already have BC2, then you get to play on the 17th (4 days earlier).

C&C4 is meant to be a poor end to the series, though some previous games may be on offer if you’re interested. Red Alert 3 isn’t a bad game.

Need For Speed Shift and Burnout Paradise are both great games. NFS:S is the first game to take the series in a realistic, track racing direction. If you like racing games, these could be well worth £10.

Mirror’s Edge is a great freestyle running game, shame the combat is so awful and unnecessary. Dead Space is a must if you like your scary games. I expect both of these to be less than £5.

Mass Effect will most probably be less than £5, while the sequel will be 50% off at £15. Both well worth picking up. Play the first one before the sequel if you can.

The pick of the crop, Dragon Age is the best RPG in decades. If you don’t have this, pick it up for most likely £15. Awakenings, the expansion to Dragon Age, is also worth picking up for £10, it provides an additional 15 excellent hours of gameplay.

This was unexpected. It was something that Steam users have been crying out for for a while, and last night the opt-in beta for this redesigned UI popped onto our Steam accounts. Taking part in the beta and trying out the new UI is simple, just go to your settings and in the beta dropdown select ‘UI Update’ (if for some reason Steam now doesn’t load for you, add ‘-clearbeta’ to your Steam shortcut).

Almost every feature of the client has been changed for the better. The store now runs on a WebKit based rendering system which replaces the slow cumbersome IE integration of the previous version. The library now shows a lot more information on your games, for example who on your friends list have the game and who are playing it, as well as your achievements. Strangely, the community tab remains unchanged, which to me was one of the clunkier parts of the old client so it seems strange Valve have decided not to update it.

Not everything is hunky-dory though. It seems the new UI suffers from a bad strain of consolitis. Icons are bigger, fonts are bigger, and in general it feels like a lot of space has been wasted. Take the store for example, I keep my Steam window quite small and with the previous UI the store page generally took up twice the vertical space available in my window (e.g. not much scrolling). The new store however is at least five times as big as the window, causing a lot more scrolling. This isn’t the only case, two of the three new library views consist of huge icons which make it a nightmare for users with many games (admittedly, you can now organize your games into categories, but the interface for doing so is less than optimal at the moment).

Watch this space because no doubt Valve will be improving the UI based on user feedback.

Christmas has apparently come early for a lot of us in the form of a massive Steam Sale that will be going on for the best part of a week. Notable games include Grand Theft Auto (£4.99), Stalker (£1.39), and Mirror’s Edge (£3.24), along with hundreds of others. However, it reminded me of a letter I wrote to PCGamer a while ago on how these sales could be damaging the PC gaming industry.

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Could digital downloads be a bad thing for consumers and developers? I’m starting to think so, and we’re already seeing the early stages of it.

For anybody who regularly checks out the Steam store (as I do), you’ll have noticed that The Orange Box has recently been on sale for less than £5. You may also have seen the 40% off Left 4 Dead sale shortly afterwards. I read an article in your 200th issue about how much sales increase when Steam does a sale, and it got me thinking.

Imagine if this massive influx of sales was not because of people who thought the game was too expensive beforehand, and then buying it in the sale, but because all the potential customers were waiting for the inevitable sale so they can get the game at a frankly ridiculous price. I recently purchased World Of Goo for £20, yet the following weekend it went on sale for £5. I didn’t feel ripped off because the game was worth the price I paid for it, but there was a slight feeling of regret.

I’m not suggesting gamers are going to wait half a year before purchasing the latest games, but 75% off sales are much more prevalent now than they were a year ago. If the benefits of putting games on sale are as pronounced as your article suggests, I see developers putting their games on sale closer and closer to the game’s release, while gamers are holding out longer on the purchase to try and buy the game when it’s on sale. Eventually games won’t sell at all initially and the developers will be forced to release their games at lower prices.

We’re already seeing the exact same thing with Apple’s App Store. For anyone who doesn’t know about the App Store, it’s a digital distribution service for iPhone and iPod Touch applications and games. Apple takes 30% of the revenue plus a small fee to publish a game, but in essence anybody can make and publish a game. It started last year with games selling for a maximum of £6, which seems fair for a game on an iPod. However, since then the prices have dropped dramatically with any app over £1.19 ($2) being criticized as too expensive unless it’s a console quality game. Guess what? It all started with apps having 2-3 day sales for 59p (99c). The consequences aren’t as large for iPhone developers, with games being cheaper to make. However, when you think of PC games which can cost millions to develop, the possible outcome is devastating.

The quality of games will drop and developers will start releasing games in quantity rather than quality to stay in business. Retail shops will be completely pushed out of the market.”

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Obviously I could be totally wrong, it’s just something to think about. In the meantime, we can all enjoy playing GTA4 for the price of two pints. Click here to see a fantastic spreadsheet of all the games on offer. If the spreadsheet doesn’t work for you, SavyGamer has a great list here.

Update: I’ve been getting some highly negative replies to this letter, I just wanted to say this is not something I believe will happen, just something I wrote a year ago to try and get into a magazine. By all means tell me why my theory (that’s all it is) is not correct, but please don’t hate me or say I’m an idiot for writing it.

It’s never been this cheap either, because this week Torchlight is 50% off in Steam’s Weekend Deal. Personally, Torchlight is one of my top games of 2009. It’s a fantastic example of how simple yet addictive a game can be. I’m not sure if Runic Games falls under the category of and independant development team, but the amount of support they are giving the game is standard of indie principles.

So why is this game so good? Essentially, the game takes the form of a traditional RPG in the same vein of Diablo (to be expected) where the only objective is to battle hordes of enemies in various environments, gaining in power with the end goal of defeating the mega-boss at the end. As I said before, the premise is stupidly simple, but for some reason this simplicity is what makes the game so great. Because you are cleaving through group after group of goblins, kobolds, drakes, wierd cat like creatures, and so on, your brain enters a sort of automatic mode where you can simply focus on the beautiful graphics and maybe listen to music or a podcast in the background

As with all RPGs, one of the most addictive elements is how you ultimately build your character. There are three classes to chose from, falling into the massive stereotypes for the genre, a warrior class, a mage class, and a rogue/ranger class. Each character has three skill trees, must like talents in World Of Warcraft, but you can chose skills from any tree once your level permits. Torchlight also posesses the mandatory enchanting and trading systems so akin to all modern RPGs and MMOs.

To me, Torchlight feels more like a singleplayer MMO than an RPG, which is probably a good thing because Runic Games have plans turn it into just that for free to all existing owners, an exciting prospect to say the least. There is also a demo available on Steam, so you have no reason to check it out before you make your mind up.