Steam sales are what convinced me to stop pirating games. I'm perfectly happy picking up 1+ year old games on sale for under $15 (and usually much less). Doing this I usually buy about 6 - 10 games a year, and that's about all I have time to play. Heck, I've actually gone overboard the last couple of sales and I currently have 9 games waiting to be played (4 of which are indie titles).

I see where you're coming from though. It sucks when you put your heart and soul into something, and then you gently release it out into the world like a smiling parent only to then watch it be mauled by a cruel and unforgiving world.

The fact of the matter is there are so many great indie games out there, and only so many gaming hours in a day and so little money in my wallet.

Much likewise, I have two categories on steam:

* Stuff I buy on sale because it looks ok and at that price it's nice. That makes up 90% of my library

* Stuff I buy right at release because I want it now because it looks/feels/seems that awesome. Recent examples in that category are Binding of Isaac and Bastion, which I bought at release.

Binding of Isaac and Bastion had a fair bit of hype surrounding them at launch; is it fair to say that this is the case for all indie games you bought at launch?

Yes and no, I obviously have to know about the game to buy it at launch. And I have to be confident it's not a halfway chance of shooting myself in the foot. This has improved since I started regularly reading RPS, but before that Steam Sales were actually a great way to discover small Indie games: they're often featured pretty prominently, and /r/gaming and neogaf tend to have massive reco threads around sales, that's how I discovered gems like Atom Zombie Smasher.

But I tend to buy indie games at launch more often than "big name" $60 stuff.