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Cheaper is better: money-saving tips for gamers Cheaper is better: money-saving tips for gamers

Gamers know how much money can be spent on video games. Especially nowadays, when some companies no longer sell you the whole thing, but only a part of it and then expect you to purchase DLCs that are almost as expensive as the original game (yes, EA, I'm talking about you), so affording your favorite titles can become a real problem. If you're on a tight budget, here you will find a few ways to save your money when buying games.

Sales

If you want to acquire your favorite games at a cheaper price, there has to be a trade-off. So, in case you don't urgently need to play a game as soon as it launches, your best bet is to wait for a sale. If the sale happens to be a few months after the game is launched, you will most likely be purchase it at around 20-30% off, plus if the game has been on the market for a year or more, you might even pay only a quarter of its original price and that can be significant even for larger budgets. As far as the sales go, there are two major ones you should keep an eye on:

Steam Sales

Steam is the largest online game marketplace in the world and, fortunately, it also offers awesome sales. There are several seasonal sales which generally encompass thousands of games that you can get for a much lower price than you would normally have to pay. This year's Steam Summer Sale is currently ongoing, so you can take a look and see exactly what I'm talking about. The discounts will be available until July 4th, which means that there's no need for you to rush into decisions. As a rule, there are five large sales each year: the Summer Sale, the Winter Sale (around Christmas), the Thanksgiving Sale, the Halloween Sale and the Black Friday Sale.

Moreover, beside these seasonal offers, Steam also presents various daily discounts and even allows you to play some paid games for free (for a limited timer period). If you need my advice, keep checking out the Steam front-page, and you're bound to run across an offer that will interest you. Bear in mind that you can add titles to your Wishlist on your account and receive a notification when they're being featured in a sale on Steam.

Humble Bundle

Another great source of cheap games is Humble Bundle. This website was created to help charity organizations and it allows users to pay what they want for the available selection of games. As far as I know, there are weekly offers so if you're looking for a specific game, you should check out the website regularly. Humble Bundle isn't the only pay-what-you-want game store on the Internet, but it's the largest one and generally offers high-quality content. Moreover, your money gets donated to charity, so it will also count towards your good deeds tally.

Account sharing

If you don't want to wait for a sale, there's another solution that you can try out, but it's less elegant and more complicated when dealing with multiplayer games. Almost each gaming website offers a family sharing feature, but none of them cares if you have actually shared your account with members of your family, friends or random people. This means that you can create a small group of gamers and have everyone pitch in for a game, then share the account between yourselves. As far as I know, if you're using Steam, there's also a small trick that allows several people to play the same game on one account simultaneously, by taking the advantage of the Offline feature. My friends also use a similar method for their Xbox One as the game license stays saved on the console even if you log out of the account you've made the purchase in. Moreover, I should point out that the games from GOG are DRM-free, so you can legally share them with other people that have contributed to the game purchase.

Staying informed

Of course, the best way to save money when buying games is to stay informed of all the latest offers. Since not many people have dedication to spend long hours surfing the web for discounts, Reddit, one of the most well-informed communities on the Internet,  has created a subreddit called GameDeals, which will provide you with all the latest deals. You may also like game.giveawayoftheday.com which, in comparison to other sources, lets you download licensed games absolutely for free during the limited period of time. However, my favorite way to know about new offers is a website called IsThereAnyDeal, which doesn't only let you individually search for discounts on specific titles, but also allows you to create wishlists and notifies you when the games that you're interested in are mentioned in a sale. 

Since you're obviously interested in games, you might also want to find out "Everything that happened at this year's E3 Gaming event" or check out these "Forgotten gaming gems".

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