A common sense guide to trading, depositing and everything else you can do with your Steam inventory

Common sense, often forgotten, often neglected. Yet, its the best way to keep your stuff safe and you from disappointment. Here we go! Never ever give away anything unless one of the following is true:

1. You receive what you want in the same transaction
2. You get a ransom from the other party you get to keep when the other party screws you over
3. You get a written contract from the other party

Everything else is extremely likely to be a scam.

“But wait” I hear you asking “other people win at that site so I can trust it, right?” WRONG! How do you know they’re not lying? Everyone can claim what he or she wants. Making up a web site, hooking it up with the Steam API and get scamming takes under a day. And even if people win, how do you know those people are really users lime you and me and not partners of the site owner? And at the end of day, the bank always wins. Want to win, then buy a casino.

With that covered, the rest is simple. Middle man trading, item lending, promises to pay via PayPal aren’t worth jack.

Hey, lets say you got a nice bike a couple years ago. That bike was 500€ back then and its still pretty good. Now a stranger approaches you. “Hey bro, fantastic bike. Imma give you 500€ for it!” You know that the bike is old and you could get a new and better one so yeah, it’s a good offer so you agree. The stranger replies “Great! Now let me take my bike, ride home and fetch your money. I promise ill come back because im trustworthy.” Unless you’re stupid, you won’t agree. And why would you? Everyone can claim to be trustworthy. If you don’t trust strangers on the street, you should also not trust strangers on the internet.

Preordering, or the joy of getting a kick in the teeth

Recently, I was asked if preordering from existing franchises was all right

Frankly, recent examples like AC Unity amd Batman Arkham knight and heck, even No mans sky have shown that preordering is indeed stupid. Two of my examples are from existing franchises. Draw your conclusion.
Or do you remember Sim City, the worst game in the franchise? Or Diablo 3 which was quite literally unplayable due to shortage of servers? Preordering existing franchises can bite you hard.
Preordering is buying into the unknown. The only decision ground that you have is PR material and PR material tends to deviate from the truth (Aliens: Colonial marines anyone?) PR is carefully crafted incomplete information. It’s not honest. Preordering is dropping money on something you know you’re being lied to about. Not to mention review embargos. Every time a review embargo is issued, I read “We know our game sucks, but we’ve spent billions on PR so they’ll buy it anyway”. That is of course not always the case, but that has been the case in the past more than once. So why putting down money on the fancy shell instead of waiting for someone else (critics) to open the box amd tell you what’s inside?

Were talking about video games here, not fresh fish. Games don’t rot. If you play a game months after release,you won’t get an inferior experience. Au contraire, you’ll get a better game! A couple parches later, improved stability and balance, and you may even end up paying less because you got it on a Steam sale.

But what about multiplayer games? What’s about the fun to be had before the game dies off a couple of months after release? (I am not kidding, yours truly was asked that question for real.)

More reason not to preorder. If the game dies after a couple of months, then you’re better off not buying it at all. Great games, however, are alive and kicking 12 months or longer after release.

Codename: Gordon

The Half-Life²-themed 2D platformer was pulled from the Steam store quite a while ago, but you can still install it.

I have uploaded a game backup. No copyright infringement since it’s not useful without a proper Steam account anyway, so download right now!

The Ball: all secrets revealed

The Ball has quite an interesting story. These chunks of text tell an absolutely great background story about the world the game takes place in. Sadly, they’re hidden.

Hunting everything requires alot of OCD’ness and may prevent some from just enjoying the level, using a secrets guide still spoils the fun of finding everying by yourself…

Cloud saves for all games

SteamCloud is great but if a game doesn’t have it, it kinda sucks. But there are cloud services around to help. This idea is nothing new. People have been doing that for years (mostly with Dropbox) but I bet there are people around who don’t know that and how it’s possible.

DLC: (r)evolution or menace?

WARNING: Wall of text ahead. If you don’t want to read this, you surely won’t scroll down for the conclusion so here it comes: DLC is nothing new, it’s just a new term for something older than a decade. And a little of a new aproach.

Well, DLC. Loved, hated, some discussions on that inspired me to think about what DLC actually is. Ok, DownLoadable Content, sure. But the term itself doesn’t tell much about what this concept actually is.

Compast

Is your Steam complaining about running in compatibility mode? Let Compast handle the problem!

Compast donwload

Rex

Use this to remove all the nice installers for several runtimes sitting somewhere in your SteamApps-directory eating gigabytes.

Rex download

Dress up Alice

Use that to unlock the Weapons of madness & dresses pack for Alice: madness returns on Steam.

Dress up Alice download

The tool uses .NET 2.0. If you get a really weird error message upon starting it, download .NET 2.0.

Sagenhaft

tl;dr: install your Steam games anywhere!

Sagenhaft allows you to redirect games the easy way. That means that you can have your Steam and most games on C:\ which is a kickass SSD and move Garry’s Mod and other space hoggers to the good old magnetic D:\ while still being able to play directly in Steam. Of course Sagenhaft can reverse all redirections.

Sagenhaft also allows you to move your games away and back, if you prefer the classical way.

Sagenhaft download

The tool uses .NET 4.0 Client Profile.