expopower: Just in case anyone actually thinks these could maaaaybe be a good buy...
They're not. You'd be better off buying a quality bundle from an actual bundling site, rather than risking paying for excess giveaway keys or games that have been bundled to death.
Sadly that's not a major surprise overall. I've never understood the allure of such "mystery" deals personally, but then I've never understood the allure of slot machines etc. either.
My personal thought is that the only reason companies offer such mystery deals to begin with, is that they know for a fact that by putting an air of mystery around the promotion they will generate artificial enthusiasm in some folks under the illusion that it is "fun" or whatever, when in reality it is just an anti-consumer marketing ploy designed to stimulate a greater amount of sales profit for a number of game titles than they'd be able to bring in if they just priced them fairly and advertised them honestly in the first place. Since nobody is forced to buy them though, I can't fault them for creative capitalism either however.
What if it was the other way around? What if, we could go to a gaming site and submit mystery bids for games or game collections? We would pick one or more games and then give the company a chance to accept our mystery offer of an unknown amount of money we are going to pay for them. Why wouldn't they take us up on the offer, it sounds like a good deal no? I mean they might get some people offering $0.01 with a sign that says "Sorry, try again!", but there would be the odd bid for $1000 too, which should be the incentive for them to take the chance right? :) See, when we look at it this way we can see the inherent flaw that would prevent this from working. Realistically not very many if any people would voluntarily pay more money than any game(s) are worth, and more likely than not the majority of people would pay far less than what the company could consider profitable. That would be the company's premise, they'd say it would be insane to accept such a promotional idea outright. Having said that, there are "pay what you want" bundles and whatnot out there which in a sense are along similar lines, but that is generally only done on specific sites with specific purposes for charity or similar and usually with games that aren't worth a heck of a lot anyway and just giving them away for free as a promotion isn't unheard of.
So when we re-invert the idea back around to the way it is presented to ourselves as a mystery "fun" bundle, IMHO there is nothing fun about it at all, it's simply using marketing ploys to prey on consumers via psychological warfare. :)
ABH20: In honour of David Bowie, Square Enix is giving away Steam keys for
Omikron: The Nomad Soul.
Limited to one per account, giveaway runs until 9.00am GMT Friday 22nd January 2016 while stocks last.
I went to go grab one and it doesn't recognize my squeenix login, telling me I have to create a new account. I went to create a new account and just keep getting repeated errors that something is wrong with my information submitted without actually telling me what is wrong with it. The only thing I can think of is that my email address contains a "+" symbol in it which is a perfectly valid email address character but which many broken website designs reject as invalid. Funny thing is, I used the same email address as I had used with my prior working Squeenix account. Don't know if the email address was the problem or not, but I ended up bailing out as I didn't want to futz around any more. Nice gesture by Squeenix, but no soup for me. ;)
