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[Nzyme32]

It’s not a major change, but it does make the sale a lot more valuable for customers, and it allows us to build sale tools that highlight and recommend products all sale long, instead of just during front page features.

It is a major change. Essentially increasing the length that products are on sale will encourage less deep discounts and just a slightly lower price. There is also no reason for me to return to the store after one day. All the curiosity and excitement pretty much disappears without dailys, community choice and flash sales. Even putting out some sort of game to make the store more interesting or improving discovery will still make it a dull affair with higher than usual sale prices.

I'd also be somewhat sure that this applies to the holiday sale, since usually both prices carry over but were expanded to more games / different featured titles and thus varied pricing between sales and through each day.

 

[Lingitiz]

Not sure how I feel about it. All I know is that I feel like the last few Steam sales have been mostly irrelevant to me. But I guess that comes with the territory. There's nothing quite like your first Steam sale.

 

[Crimsonclaw111]

I literally JUST got a machine that can run Steam and play games...

Am I truly gonna miss out, or is this really not that big a deal?

There will still be fantastic deals, especially if it's your first sale. The deals might just not reach the absolute lowest they've ever been.

Enjoy your Steam Sale, make sure to stop by the sales thread when it goes live to see us bitch.

 

[Deleted member 125677]

On the plus side, if games get more expensive from now on, maybe we all have to actually start playing the 1000s of games we already own?

Spoiler

I only have ~760

 

[Shuggananas]

I literally JUST got a machine that can run Steam and play games...

Am I truly gonna miss out, or is this really not that big a deal?

Not a big deal unless you're cheap af
You'll pay games 10$ instead of 8$, woo

 

[deleted]

I don't like it - looking forward to the daily sales was the most fun in these sales.

Back in the days the ARGs that accompanied a sale were also awesome (play game x with exclusive content and earn potatoes etc), but it seems like those a gone for good.

I hope the daily sales return for Christmas and the next summer sale, since those are the really, really big ones, but if the 'smaller' sales don't get daily sales, I could be fine with that.

 

[Tetsuo9999]

I feel this is really going to hurt the smaller indie developers more than anyone else. At this point anyone who's had a Steam account for a few years has bought all the big AAA titles for a few bucks each, which already removes a ton of the excitement around a sale. The indie games don't have big brands behind them and the devaluing of games makes it hard for people to justify buying at full price. I'm a niche gamer and have all the well known niche titles already, so I often look forward to Steam sales to buy things that I either didn't know about or didn't want to take a risk on at full price. If the time-sensitive sales don't exist anymore and they put the front page advertising towards the bigger titles, I could see this change being rough for the small guys. Many smaller developers have said sales spike exponentially during a flash/community sale. How will this work when there's thousands of things on sale at once and attention is only given to a few dozen on the front page, with no increased discounts to get people on board to purchase something with no big name behind it?

 

[LizardKing]

The discounts on the flash/daily have obviously been getting less and less steep lately so this is probably because publishers no longer want to steeply discount their games as much or as steep. I've actually started buying PC physical versions because they are often times already at a close to 50% discount anyway over Steam and I can buy them whenever I want. Just as good as recent steam sales.

 

[spineduke]

Wait,I remember this year's update, with the introduction of Curators, the renewed portal...those sounded like good changes, and there were several positive articles on the matter after the implementation. Did anything else happen that actually hurt discoverability which I'm not aware of?

Curators isn't really a great system, but it's better than nothing. All in all I'd say discovery has been much much better for me since the update.

 

[Zepp Twofist]

Guess it's time to uninstall my computer and delete system32.

 

[Kintaro]

Well, if the sales suck, I save money. If I save money, I can play the tons of games I bought in previous sales. =)

 

[Mechazawa]

On one hand, it's an end of an era.

On the other, it makes it a hell of a lot easier to budget for. I've definitely skipped some games I was otherwise interested in because I wanted to see if something else would get cheaper.

 

[Zelias]

I always looked forward to daily/flash sales, so a bit sad about this. On the other hand, Steam sales have been lacklustre for me for a while now, so eh.

And no steep discounts means no buy from me.

 

[213372bu]

All those insane deals on games that came out 1/1.5 years before.

All those game discoveries that became the some of my favorite PC games.

All those games I glossed over in tight releases but found them during a sale

All those trying out different games because they were low on sale and finding out you like them.

Gone. RIP in pieces.

--

Dramatics aside this is pretty disheartening, and I doubt lots of bigger devs are going to be heavily discounting their games if this continues.

Amazon Black Friday flash sales and G2A is the way I might have to go then.

 

[LizardKing]

Not a big deal unless you're cheap af
You'll pay games 10$ instead of 8$, woo

It's more like now you pay $20 instead of $12.50.

 

[Lord British]

This might be because of refunds.

- Buy game day 1 of sale
- Game goes on Daily Deal day 2 of sale
- Refund game and rebuy

 

[LurkerPrime]

Not a big deal unless you're cheap af
You'll pay games 10$ instead of 8$, woo

In the old system a couple dollars could be the difference between one game vs. two. Increasing the overall prices will only hurt the legions of bundle-tier games thirsting for our dollar. NinjaEdit: And yeah, like others mention the sale prices are worse than they used to be, especially for newer titles. It leaves a lot less spending money for whichever games are the "second," or whatever, choice.

The real question is, how will this sale perform? Keep in mind that Valve cultivated the old sale methods after years of careful study and calculations (this is the company with an economist on staff, after all).

 

[MUnited83]

Expect most titles to not hit their lowest recorded sale price. We're probably going to see a lot of titles that hit 75% during a flash or daily go no lower than 50-66% for example. All i see this change doing is helping out the publishers and valve, get more out of the consumers who don't know any better. Who will think a front page title is still being sold at a deeper discount.

This is 100% right. They know people flock to whatever is in the front page on a sale and they will sell craploads without needing to commit to a lower price.

 

[Soodanim]

We'll see what happens. If Valve see a notable decrease in profits then they might change it back to how it was. Not much point worrying about it now.

That's not to say I won't miss the dailies if they're gone forever, though.

 

[MissChief]

Never realized the Autumn and Holiday sales were so close together. Should I buy my games now (during Autumn Sale), or wait a month for maybe bigger discounts ?

 

[Shuggananas]

Never realized the Autumn and Holiday sales were so close together. Should I buy my games now, or wait a month for maybe bigger discounts ?

Do you really need these games right now ?

 

[Phinor]

I used to work at a developer and managed the Valve/Steam relationship. I can confirm that you would submit your prices and they would apply to BOTH the autumn and holiday sale. If they are only taking one price for autumn I can say with almost 100% certainty that the Winter sale will be the same.

So basically winter sale is over the day autumn sale begins because at that point you've seen 99.9% of the deals? Winter sale doesn't even begin until a month later but if both sales use the same prices without a chance for special deals, winter sale is just two week long encore sale.

I wonder if Valve has something new planned because that's my take on this new system.

 

[MissChief]

Do you really need these games right now ?

Sorry, I edited my post, I meant, should I buy games during Autumn Sale, or hold out till Holiday Sale And yeah, I want to play some games as soon as possible, but money is also an important factor

 

[Ban Puncher]

 

[Dryk]

Well I guess I'll be impulse buying less stuff I won't play this year, so that's a win

 

[orava]

Back in my day Steam sales were good. They don't build them like they used to.

Back in my day there was only couple huge and amazing sales yearly. Now there is some bullshit sale pretty much every week.

 

[BasilZero]

So basically winter sale is over the day autumn sale begins because at that point you've seen 99.9% of the deals? Winter sale doesn't even begin until a month later but if both sales use the same prices without a chance for special deals, winter sale is just two week long encore sale.

I wonder if Valve has something new planned because that's my take on this new system.

Maybe a new clicker game l0l

 

[8-Bit Sunset]

Not surprising really.
The Halloween sale was rather pathetic and half assed looking.

Maybe they have devoted all of their time into the upcoming HL3/L4D3/Portal 3 holy trinity, and doing a ninja release on us when HTC Vive launches in a few weeks!

 

[Tertullian]

Well, PC gaming had a good revival. Now that the good deals are over, time to save money and focus on my backlog like I should, I guess.

 

[derExperte]

Summer sale was great with more dailies/flashs, no repeats and no voting, I thought they were on track. Now this? Uhhhh, good luck Valve and devs, my prediction is that interest and sales will plummet after the first weekend and end up lower overall, no reason to visit the store after day 1, less daily talk. Except if there's some great meta-game going on or something else we're not aware of yet.

 

[El-Suave]

That's probably the price of the refund policy. People would send in urgent refund requests if they see they could have saved a few bucks. Tons of work and cost for Valve - that's how they avoid some of that.

 

[Marow]

I don't really mind this and hope this leads to a higher amount of variation in the featured games. The last year(s) feels like they've featured the same old.

 

[d00d3n]

We’ll still be highlighting top games on the front page for 24-48 hour spans, but those products will stay at their most competitive discount, before and after being featured.

What is the point of this? People will just buy what they want the first day. I actually think this is good, but it does not make sense from the perspective of Valve if they want to keep up excitement/anticipation during the whole sale period.

 

[mclem]

Back in my day Steam sales were good. They don't build them like they used to.

I miss the metagames. The invasion last sale wasn't really the same sort of thing.

 

[tiebreaker]

Fine by me. Will only need check my wwishlist to see if any games get a deep discount.

 

[Terra]

Looking for Grandia & YS to be on sale. Be it a daily or not. I really need those in my life!

 

[Sir Garbageman]

I could've sworn I read somewhere that the sales price for games during the Autumn sale was the same as the Holiday sale last year? Was that accurate?

If so wonder if there will be no dailies during the Holiday sale either.

 

[Rosur]

Kinda sucks as the big discounts where the fun part of the sales. Along with the challenges etc but they stopped them so should of seen this coming.

At least it means I can wait till I get paid and not miss out on any deals.

 

[UrbanRats]

Summer sale was great with more dailies/flashs, no repeats and no voting, I thought they were on track. Now this? Uhhhh, good luck Valve and devs, my prediction is that interest and sales will plummet after the first weekend and end up lower overall, no reason to visit the store after day 1, less daily talk. Except if there's some great meta-game going on or something else we're not aware of yet.

This, though as a consumer I hardly care.

I barely bought anything in last 2 years of sales anyway.

 

[cyba89]

This will only result in less games sold not only because the prices might be higher but also because people will just throw everything from their wishlist in the cart on the first day and won't come back on the other days for some unplanned impulse purchases.
People will also spend less when purchasing everything in a bulk than when they purchase one game a day or so.

 

[valouris]

Dammit just when I filled my steam wallet up with card cash :/

 

[jeemer]

This is almost a relief in a weird way. I've missed out on flash sales on wishlist games before because I was away with work etc.

At least this way, whether the reductions are as big or not, I can look on day one and see what they are without having to repeatedly check back.

I wouldn't be surprised if this is planned from now on, but they're gauging the response first. If they get a ton of bad feedback and/or their games sold figures drop a lot then they'll likely rethink it just like the paid mods incident.

 

[Randomizer123454444]

I'm fully expecting that the discounts games get stay exactly the same as before, we just no longer get the more steep discount of daily/flash sale. I am a bit sad.

 

[mclem]

New refund policy is good, daily deals/flash sales are also good. A real shame we have to make that tradeoff. Isn't there a chance your refund may not be processed in time to take advantage of a daily deal? I feel like they could just adjust the refund policy to say refunds take 48 hours to process and keep the best of both worlds.

You could work around that buy just buying it the second time as a gift and waiting until your library has lost the previous purchase before opening it.

 

[Stone Ocean]

Better get used to buying games at 50% tops then, because no way in hell prices will remain the same without short windows of bigger discounts that can be missed.

Everyone gets to be Activision now.

 

[Gbraga]

RIP absolutely everything

 

[LeleSocho]

weeeelp no dailies equals no sale for me.
The whole appeal of Steam was that the game would get a double discount with the daily and flash deals, if they only offer the normal discount i might as well go to GOG...

Valve what are you doing man...

 

[Vital Tundra]

Ehh probably will get the real big sale around Christmas. It's not like we never see the lowest discounts outside of Steam sales ever sense devs were allowed to set their price points and days when they want.

 

[spineduke]

why are people specifying the refund system as a reason? Knowing valve, wouldn't they have automated this to some degree so they don't need human intervention

 

[Danielsan]

On the one hand this is a bummer, on the other hand this means I'll be saving a lot of money. I still have a ton of games that I never touched from previous Steam Sales. Without the dailies there is little reason to check out the sale each day, or to buy random shit just because it's cheap.