Amazon PCDD - Important Update New Community Manager Incoming!

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Hey CAGS,

I’ve got some news I’m both excited and sad to share with you at the same time. I’ll be leaving the Digital Video Games team in Mid-March to join the marketing team for Amazon.com’s Loyalty and Rewards program, Amazon Coins. My boss and I have talked extensively about how to maintain and continue our presence here and across the other communities we’ve created in the past couple of years. To that end I’d like to introduce you to Josh, who take over monitoring, updating, and responding to this thread. Josh will be ramping up over the next couple of weeks, he  will be posting shortly to introduce himself.

Now that the “what’s going on” part of the message is out of the way I want to tell you all how much I love CAG and the posters here. This was the first community I joined when I started this job (anyone still remember that first thread?) and all of you have had a huge hand in shaping how we think about and execute Community Development and Management here at Amazon, which has in turn shaped my career these last two and a half years.

I started to write out a section calling out the regular posters and realized the list would be both overly long and incomplete at the same time. Instead I’d like to thank you all again, you all have my deep and sincere gratitude. I’ll still be around and my gaming accounts aren’t going anywhere so feel free to hit me up anytime you want to chat. I’ll probably still hang out in the thread too :).

Thanks again everyone, let me or Josh know if you have any questions!

The Indie Store has launched!
Amazon.com is launching a storefront dedicated to supporting and promoting PC/Mac/Web-based Indie Games. Our Digital Video Games team is a small group of passionate gamers and we’re all really excited to help Indie developers reach more customers quickly by providing a quick and simple process for bringing their games to market. Additionally we’ll be supporting the Indie Store with a ton of promotions, both at and after launch. Many of these promotions are designed to give the developer the opportunity to maximize their revenue. For example, Amazon is forfeiting all royalties from bundle sales and passing them along directly to the developer, we’ve also created an “Indie Spotlight” program to help customers learn more about the games and developers they love. We view the Indie developers as some of the most creative in the industry and we want to help them continue to create new and innovative experience for customers.

Why we are doing this:

  • Allow customers to discover an entirely new category of games on Amazon.com
  • Help developers reach new customers quickly. Our onboarding process is straightforward and we want to sell every Indie game available
  • We want to leverage our strengths to support and help the developers who are driving forward innovation and creativity in the games industry
General Information

Hi CAGs,
I'll be posting deals we're running on Digital Games (PC/Mac, Free to Play, Sony/Microsoft Points/Subs).

I'm also here to answer questions you might have, get you closer to the developers by hosting Q&As, setting up podcasts, live streaming gameplay etc. If I don't respond to a question you have in thread please send me a PM. These ping my email address and make it more likely that I will see your question and respond more quickly.

Cheers,
Tony


FYI. EA Games sold by Amazon will not activate on Steam.
F.A.Q.S.:

1. Does the game I'm buying from Amazon Activate on Steam/Origin/Uplay? What DRM does the game use?

There are two places to identify DRM on a digital video game detail page:

At the top of the page, below the title:

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In the "Product Description" section:

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2. Note on Electronic Arts Games - For the most part, EA games sold on Amazon do not activate on Steam. Most activate on Origin.

3. Note on DRM with limited activations:

Our Policy



4. Sometimes I'll do giveaways.

5. I work with developers and publishers to get fun (or at least what I think is fun) content to share with you all. Here are some examples:

a. Check out the Pax Gameplay videos here: Xcom: Enemy Unknown I played Xcom with Jake, the Creative Director for the game, a few months before the game came out Also, on this page, check out the Q&A, also a community driven event.

b. Check out the interview on this page: Borderlands 2 we did this interview at E3 with Randy Pitchford this year.

c. We've partnered with the ++GoodGames Podcast to feature many of the games we carry. They talk to the developers about the game development process, how the games are conceptualized and managed, all kinds of fun stuff. I'm working on putting together full link list and will update when I have it.

What else do we sell?

Xbox Live Points and Subscriptions:

1600 Microsoft Live Points
4000 Microsoft Live Points
12 Month XBOX Live Subscription
3 Month XBOX Live Subscription]
12 Month + 1 XBOX Live Subscription

PSN+ Subscriptions and PSN Points:

$20 PSN Points
$50 PSN Points
12 Month PSN+ Subscription
3 Month PSN+ Subscription

We also have a Free-2-Play store supported by our GameConnect technology. Gameconnect allows you to link your Amazon.com account with free-2-play and MMO accounts so that you can buy things like in game currency, premium game time/subscriptions, in game items, etc. on Amazon.com using your Amazon.com payment options and have this content delivered directly into your game.

5. Price Matching notes: Generally we do not match international retailers (GMG, Gamersgate, etc) or physical retailers (Best Buy, Newegg.com, etc.)
To check out the Free-2-Play games we offer you can visit our storefront here: Free-2-Play Store

 
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cam5d said:
Ok, so counting cents - if you say you're saving on coupons: Ace Patrol goes on sale from time to time at GMG for $0.99 so adding their common 25% + $0.1 GMG credit they have, you can buy both Ace Patrols for US$1.3 total (I went for it this very weekend) ==> amazon's coupon saves you US$0.3. So - if you have something else for your coupons, ace patrol's should not be a factor I think.
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'cept GMG always gives me trouble when I go to use my credit card so eft 'em.

 
Mooby said:
Hah, exactly. Or I just turn it on in the morning and go do something else for the minute or so it boots. I don't doubt there is a noticeable difference. I just question the wisdom of spending $100-$250 (or more) on one versus upgrading other parts of your system that actually result in a better gaming experience. I mean, for that money you can go from a 760 to a 770 or a 770 to a 780.
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You could EASILY just buy a $50 80GB x25 SSD second handed from ebay (seen as we are CAGs anyway) to install the OS and give it a try. Its not like you should pay $250 for a 250 Samsung SSD thats on sale on Newegg

 
seamoss said:
My scientifically thought-out and patented method is to look for HDDs with the best Newegg rating (and pray that this means they are the least likely to fail). Statistically, despite the lack of any control, it seems to be working for me.
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Haha I use your same scientifically thought out process and it has served me well thus far. I actually have two of the 3TB model and I really like them since I've had no problems with them at all, however, a friend of mine that bought his at the same time has had one of his fail, followed by the RMA for that one and the RMA for the RMA lol. Needless to say I'm a bit unsure about them now.

Neuro5i5 said:
I've never had a failure with WD Enterprise editions, but they cost some hefty scratch. IMO, all the rest are hit or miss. I used to rely on Hitachi, but now being Toshiba/WD, I'll just have to see. I'm currently testing out two Toshiba (previous HGST tech) drives and so far so good. The only brand I currently have little faith in is Seagate (which i used to be a proponent of) as I've had too many firmware and controller issues with them over the recent years.
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Yeah, I would definitely like a couple WD Enterprises but as you said, the price for entry is just a bit too steep for me currently. What size Toshiba drives are you running? I had some interest in their 4TB that seem to fair well. I definitely agree with you about the current Seagate issues. Aside from the problems my friend has experienced, I have a couple external Seagates and they cause me no end of trouble.

madjoki said:
No failures in WD GREEN or REDs for me :)

Using SnapRAID as redudancy to allow one failure (never happend so far and actually hasn't been worth it :p).

Only some Samsung/Seagates have failed, but never Western Digitals.
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I've heard nothing but bad things about the new 'Samsung' drives as they are just rebadged Seagates. I was hoping that with the acquisition of Samsung's HDD division it would've increased Seagate's reliability but oddly enough it seemed to do the opposite lol.

Naked Snake Eyes said:
I had two WD greens fail within a few months of each other. Apparently they have some head parking issues which lead to failure (can be disabled via some utility but I didn't know this). Never buying another one of those, my last purchase I went with to replace the green was a WD black.
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Interesting. I'll definitely keep note of that. I was originally going to grab some WD Blacks but at the time the Sammy's ran at the same speed, had similar reliability reviews and were bigger at a lower price so it was a no brainer haha. I just wish they carried the WD Blacks in a significantly larger size at a competitive price. Thanks for everyone's input! I'll definitely keep looking into those models.

 
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RazOrStOrm said:
You could EASILY just buy a $50 80GB x25 SSD second handed from ebay (seen as we are CAGs anyway) to install the OS and give it a try. Its not like you should pay $250 for a 250 Samsung SSD thats on sale on Newegg
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Having bought my share of components on eBay, I can say data storage will never be bought used again.

 
cyrus386 said:
And you call yourself a PC gamer. Tsk, tsk.
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I call myself a Cheapass PC gamer. So, no, I don't have a SSD.

iSerra said:
SSDs are more affordable these days compared to last time, they have already dropped to 1 dollar per gigabyte. Maybe not much benefits if you are just gaming but if you are into graphics or videos editing, SSDs do make a difference.
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A bit more than $0.50 per GB is common for sales. That's too pricey--a good 10x what a mechanical will cost. Plus they provide less storage space.

They will continue to drop in price, though. And get bigger. It's just a matter of time.

 
Mooby said:
That and aren't SSDs prone to die a lot faster than standard HD's?
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Less. There were issues with early models due to not balancing the use through the SSD sectors, but that's resolved now. Consider that a traditional hard drive is a plate in a box (typically more than one) spinning at 5400+ RPM with a little arm that ratchets back and forth to touch down on a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny sector to get a bit of data. Also consider that it does this repeatedly the entire time it's being accessed and that large files (and games) are going to cause crazy amounts of disk access while the files load up.

An SSD has no moving parts. It's a lot less likely to fail, excepting the case of a power failure. With power failure they can sometimes completely blank out. Power failure can screw traditional drives just as easily, though, so really the correct handling method is to get a UPS either way.

 
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 I personally like the cache drive approach. You get near ssd performance while still having a multi-terabyte drive. Since a cache drive only has to be ~64gb big you can buy a cheap ssd and be done with it.  I used to have mine setup to cache my main system drive but recently switched it to caching my game drive so I could get quick bf4 level loads since that was getting annoying, and now Im usually loaded at the same time as friends with ssd installs.  Once you've loaded a level ~twice it gets recognized as a commonly loadable file and gets cached

Only issue is now I wish I had 2 ssds so i could still cache my system drive, but thats only for a few larger programs like ableton which now take twice as long to start up

 
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Thermopyle said:
Less. There were issues with early models due to not balancing the use through the SSD sectors, but that's resolved now. Consider that a traditional hard drive is a plate in a box (typically more than one) spinning at 5400+ RPM with a little arm that ratchets back and forth to touch down on a tiny tiny tiny tiny tiny sector to get a bit of data. Also consider that it does this repeatedly the entire time it's being accessed and that large files (and games) are going to cause crazy amounts of disk access while the files load up.

An SSD has no moving parts. It's a lot less likely to fail, excepting the case of a power failure. With power failure they can sometimes completely blank out. Power failure can screw traditional drives just as easily, though, so really the correct handling method is to get a UPS either way.
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Well moving parts aren't the reason SSDs fail, it's the limited number of flash rewrites.

 
Naked Snake Eyes said:
Well moving parts aren't the reason SSDs fail, it's the limited number of flash rewrites.
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its also horrible controller firmware. The ones used in OCZ drives are notoriously bad. I originally tried to use one of those as a cache drive and the drive completely died within an hour, the controller just completely locked up and killed the drive. Googling around it is definitely not the first, I believe its the sandforce ones that die easily, generally in any ssd failure you see out the majority of them have sandforce based products

Switched to a samsung after that who's known to make solid controllers and havent had an issue in over a year

 
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ezelkow1 said:
its also horrible controller firmware. The ones used in OCZ drives are notoriously bad. I originally tried to use one of those as a cache drive and the drive completely died within an hour, the controller just completely locked up and killed the drive. Googling around it is definitely not the first, I believe its the sandforce ones that die easily, generally in any ssd failure you see out the majority of them have sandforce based products

Switched to a samsung after that who's known to make solid controllers and havent had an issue in over a year
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I don't recall what iteration of the sandforce controller that was, but it was notoriously bad with failures for awhile. They released a revision of it and it's night and day. Drastically increased the performance and allowed significantly more read/writes compared to the older version.

By the way, I just thought I'd throw this out there but the new humble bundle just went live not too long ago.

 
UcanSUKtheFAC said:
The same stuff is on sale that has repeatedly been on sale for months and months. Hardly worth going back to the OP every day. Oh gee golly I hope there's another SIMS expansion on sale tomorrow. Dont forget about xcom and borderlands lol I have some diapers to go change.
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Mooby said:
< This guy. I can live with ten second slower loading times.
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for the best of both worlds see below

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlmYqQ-sthA[/youtube]

Mooby said:
I splurged on the graphics card. SSD's are one of these luxuries that people deem as a 'zomg must have.' If it increased FPS or put out better visuals… then maybe.
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all you need is 3 3TB drives raided together and you get the same speeds as an SSD but with 9 TB of space for your Steam library, Origin library, Uplay library, Desura library, Porn library, Music library, Unicorns on film library, etc....... this can be done for about 300 dollars

stimpy said:
You know it's a sucky sale when more than half of the thread has nothing to do WITH the sale.

Reading thru the posts here is more like being in a tech support thread.

I am pretty lame.
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ftfy

 
Don't expect any pms, they would have put in some safeguards to insure that we don't get free/really cheap games like the last few years.  A few good deals should still pop up within the month.

 
I don't think they've pricematched anything from Gamefly in a long time (not worth the effort according to Tony), but I could see Brothers getting pricematched since it is on Steam for a couple of days at that price.

And an SSD is the best upgrade you can make performance wise on most games, it's an amazing difference that I'd recommend to anyone. But I'm glad I didn't jump on the Secret World deal because finding 40 gb of space on my SSD would be tough... had a hard enough time finding 15 gb for Defiance.

 
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Mooby said:
I splurged on the graphics card. SSD's are one of these luxuries that people deem as a 'zomg must have.' If it increased FPS or put out better visuals… then maybe.
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SSD's are like air con in a car. Yes they are an optional luxury. But they're an optional luxury you'll always have forever more once you've experienced what you're missing!


Naked Snake Eyes said:
Well moving parts aren't the reason SSDs fail, it's the limited number of flash rewrites.
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A modern SSD will last decades of re-writes. Things have moved on since the Indilinx days. :)

 
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lomaxgnome said:
I don't think they've pricematched anything from Gamefly in a long time (not worth the effort according to Tony), but I could see Brothers getting pricematched since it is on Steam for a couple of days at that price.

And an SSD is the best upgrade you can make performance wise on most games, it's an amazing difference that I'd recommend to anyone. But I'm glad I didn't jump on the Secret World deal because finding 40 gb of space on my SSD would be tough... had a hard enough time finding 15 gb for Defiance.
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I just got 4GB back by cleaning up windows update files through Disk Cleanup.

 
targetbsp said:
SSD's are like air con in a car. Yes they are an optional luxury. But they're an optional luxury you'll always have forever more once you've experienced what you're missing!
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That's not even close to a good analogy. It's more like GPS in a car… even then it's probably a bad analogy.

 
targetbsp said:
A modern SSD will last decades of re-writes. Things have moved on since the Indilinx days. :)
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Decades, are you serious? I thought it was in the range of 5 years. I have an Intel 320 series. Just got my brother a Samsung 840 Evo.

Mooby said:
That's not even close to a good analogy. It's more like GPS in a car… even then it's probably a bad analogy.
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It's like syrup on pancakes.

 
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Mooby said:
That's not even close to a good analogy. It's more like GPS in a car… even then it's probably a bad analogy.
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Yeah, not the best analogy. I'd liken it more to having a car with paddle shifters. I have a laptop with an SSD and have used them in the past. For my use, money is better spent elsewhere. That's not to say they aren't useful, just the dollars and cents have them far down on my priority upgrades list.
 
Sure $5 is my buy-point for Bioshock Infinite.  However, it's still #4 in their DVG sales.  Why would they need to PM it?  Especially with Gamefly? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's a rule they MUST pricematch.

 
spacejunk said:
Sure $5 is my buy-point for Bioshock Infinite. However, it's still #4 in their DVG sales. Why would they need to PM it? Especially with Gamefly? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there's a rule they MUST pricematch.
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There isn't any rule, and they only seem to match Steam these days.
 
Naked Snake Eyes said:
I just got 4GB back by cleaning up windows update files through Disk Cleanup.
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I actually have one small SSD just for Windows, and another 256 gb SSD for my games. I just end up bouncing around games a lot so I have a lot of games installed.

It's easy to discount how much difference an SSD makes, but load times eat up a huge portion of gaming (especially in things like MMOs), and having that drop to virtually nothing is not only extremely noticeable, but actually increases how much time you have to play. That and super fast rebooting are something I wouldn't go without now.

 
targetbsp said:
I use Origin and actually think it's better than Steam. It does precisely the job I want with far less bloat.

Also, SimCity was my most played game of last year - that was EA/Origin. :)

It was somehow both my game of the year and most disappointing game at the same time.
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So you played one game total in 2013. Gotcha.

 
lomaxgnome said:
I actually have one small SSD just for Windows, and another 256 gb SSD for my games. I just end up bouncing around games a lot so I have a lot of games installed.

It's easy to discount how much difference an SSD makes, but load times eat up a huge portion of gaming (especially in things like MMOs), and having that drop to virtually nothing is not only extremely noticeable, but actually increases how much time you have to play. That and super fast rebooting are something I wouldn't go without now.
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While this is all true, I do want to point out that with some games it doesn't really matter how fast your HDD is.

Like Mass Effect. Goddamn you spend a lot of time in elevators for no reason at all.

 
Having an SSD is like having an STD. I have no real analogy, but got tired of waiting for someone to say this.

 
georgebot84 said:
Don't expect any pms, they would have put in some safeguards to insure that we don't get free/really cheap games like the last few years. A few good deals should still pop up within the month.
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And this is sorta why there is that occasional negative message here. In the old days, as Amazon DVG was being built out, the $5 EC coupon was a real $5 off a game. It was, in a way, Amazon's gift for people to try and buy from their new DVG store and get them in the "game" so to speak of selling games online. They didn't care as much about making profits or what not and was ok with giving a bit away to get people buying and getting used to buying from them.

The EC coupon now completely takes into account what the final price is and Amazon isn't really giving anyone $5 I don't think as they negotiate with the publisher on the price and unlike before, I don't think, or don't feel they are really as into what was done 2 years back. There will probably be some deals later, but compared to 2 years ago, nothing will get close to that. Again, I don't expect any free games or any insane deals like from the past, but, when they were price matching steam left and right just during the holidays and don't price match now JUST BECAUSE PEOPLE HAVE AN EC COUPON clearly shows they don't want to give much value to the EC coupon anymore. Again, Amazon can do whatever they want with pricing and I have just chosen to buy insanely less, but them's the facts of how things are now which is ok, but just a little disappointing of course. Good thing I have less than 5 coupons I guess.

Would love to be wrong on this on the "Brothers" game and see them match with steam since that's running all week, but I doubt they'd match it.

Yes, I'm griping and don't have an Avatar pic neither (I actually don't have an Avatar for any forums I visit). I think this is simply me having the attitude that like any public forum on the Internet, my opinion is simply worth what you paid for it and that's not much so I don't take my online comments/views as seriously as most. If you don't likey, just ignore me and move on.

Thank goodness for huge backlogs and tons of patience to wait for even lower prices. As I say, if you don't like the deal, simply don't buy it.

 
One of the biggest draws of the EC coupons has been the fact that they almost always match Steam's deals they run throughout the week.  Take that away this year and that makes the EC coupon a bit less useful.  I'd actually be surprised if they didn't price match steam.

 
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