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.