I'm not going to go back and forth for a page over this but that's not what you said initially, you said the concept of a Steam sale was a new one.
No, that's not what I said. I said Steam having
frequent sales was a new concept. Yes, Steam had sales before that, and even had sales "periods" during things like holidays, etc. But they didn't have sales anywhere near as frequently as they do at present.
I guess the misconceptions seems to be over the term "frequent". If you consider holidays sales and a few monthly sales frequent, ok, fine, then perhaps I chose the wrong term. But if you look at the number of sales they've had over the past few months, and compare that to the number of sales they had over that same period a year or two ago, you'd have to agree that it's increased substantially.
I hope Origin follows suit but they are only selling EA games so I'm not sure the incentive is necessarily the same for them to do so.
Perhaps not, but what's the incentive for Steam to do it? Getting more people using Steam and selling more games, isn't it? Wouldn't EA want more people using Origin and to sell more games?
Incidentally you can disable this or just simply go offline
Can you disable it? I didn't see any option to do so when I checked the settings. Not sure that going offline really satisfies my criteria of "if I'm online"
. But yeah, I'd like to see the invisible mode. Same with an "appear offline" mode, and an "appear offline to specific user" mode. If they are going to implement a full IM client within Steam, you'd think they'd steal some of the better ideas from the various IM clients already in existence.