The New Boring Steam Sales are Actually a Lot More Successful

Steam Sales used to be the highlight of the year for PC gamers. The promotions offered gamers massive discounts, and kept them coming back every day, both for new sales and to play the game that would gain you extra discounts or even free games. Last week’s Steam Summer Sale, and the couple of events that came before it, were all quite different though. Offering no daily, flash, or community discounts, the Steam Sale has changed to be a lot less boring. However, according to Steam Spy, it is also a lot more lucrative for Valve.

“It seems this Steam Summer Sale was way more successful than the previous one: $236M vs $160M in revenue, 37M games vs 33M sold.” This news comes from Steam Spy, a well known service that digs into the backend of Steam itself, pulling out all the info it can. The numbers could be a bit off, but they are usually at least close enough to draw comparisons and make claims.

So, it seems that the loss of all those elements that made Steam Sales fun might have had the added effect of making the event more successful. There could be a lot of factors to this, including Steam growing in popularity, and the specific games that were on sale. For example, DOOM was a relatively new title and was steeply discounted. If it caught on and sold a few million copies that could help skew these numbers.

Still, the trend does seem to show that the new method of Steam Sale might not interest longtime fans as much, but it does get them to spend more money. Of course, many have pointed out that the discounts have gotten smaller, which could also contribute to the raised revenue. But the stats show that more games as a whole sold as well. Perhaps by removing the incentive for gamers to wait for the best deal, and making it so that you can’t miss out on the lowest price of a game, people simply buy more and with less hesitation.