How To Stretch Your Gaming Budget

Kids (and adults) love gaming, and we live in a golden age for gamers. Thousands of games are released each year for computers, phones, tablets, and consoles. Newly released, “AAA” games from major publishers are the most expensive, whereas “indie” games from smaller independent publishers can be a bargain from the get-go. Once a game has been on the market for a few months, the price will drop, and significant reductions can be found during holiday sales. Eventually, these games may be found in a “bundle” of games for a relatively low price. These bundles represent the best bang for your buck. A bit of delayed gratification will allow your gaming budget to deliver more games than there is time to play.

Bundles are available from many online shops, the largest for PC games is undoubtedly Steam. Steam can be wonderful for gaming – it offers easy download and installation on multiple PCs, has a console-style gaming mode, and allows for sharing access to games among family members. Frequent sales occur, with notorious intensity around holiday times – for the standard price of a new AAA title, you can pick up a whole library of games for yourself or to gift to others.

The bundles offered on Steam are at a set price, but other services offer “name your price” bundles. There may be a nominal minimum price, or pricing tiers which include additional games or supplements such as soundtracks or content. These bundle sites often deliver “keys” for adding the purchases to your Steam library, or allow for direct downloads. But, be wary of sites advertising keys to games – many are shady grey markets re-selling keys purchased (or effectively stolen) from bundle sites.

The Humble Bundle is an excellent site for game bundles for PC and mobile, and occasionally books, comics, or music. The Humble Bundle allows you to name your price, and a portion of the purchase goes to charity. You can control how much you pay, and how much goes to each recipient. You can even choose a specific charity from a list of thousands. The Humble Bundle allows you to gift the purchases to anyone via email or a printed code.

It is certainly a favorite for us to gift to our loved ones around the holidays or at the start of the summer. For less than the cost of a meal, we can give hours of entertainment, education, or enrichment. Not only does it make people (of any age) happy, but it feels good to us to support the Gaming community, while at the same time doing something nice for the greater good.

Happy Gaming!
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PS In light of recent world-wide Malware occurrences involving Ransomware, please do consider reading our blog post about it. Just click the Dot Alert image below.

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