We are reaching the middle of May and gamers are getting more and more excited by the day: No only we are getting closer to this years’ E3, but we are also weeks away from the world famous Steam Summer Sales: the time when Valve’s digital game store for PC slashes the price of a good portion of its titles. According to a message posted on Reddit by a developer, the dates of this years’ Steam sales would be June 22 to July 5.
The information is based on a screen capture from an announcement taken from the closed Steamworks developers group. As the name implies, this group can only be accessed by being an official developer for the platform, which has made people believe on the veracity of the message. Also, considering the large amount of developers working on Steam, it’s not unusual that someone leaks this kind of information, even if they are not supposed to.
Valve has not made any comment regarding this leak, but the dates would fit with the period of time that the company usually chooses to celebrate the special Summer Sales. Last year’s sales commenced on June 23rd and finished on July 4th, which makes us think that even if the leak doesn’t prove to be right, the real dates will not be too far off.
2016 Steam Sales followed a new pattern introduced to maximize the revenue for the companies. While the summer sales had become a real community event in previous years for their daily surprises, rotating prices and flash sales, las year they featured none of those special events, which made them more boring in the eyes of the PC gamers. However, according to Steam Spy, this kind of regular sales with more stable discounts and no surprises were much more profitable than the previous year, with companies gaining $236 million vs $160 million in revenue, and selling 37 million games vs 33 million.
We’ll see if the trend repeats this summer.
Published: May 15, 2017 04:08 am