It's time for another steam sale! It's time for who cares!
There are three things of worth to mention re: this steam sale. This is all text, and it's not even very funny, so feel free to not read this discussion of "the moar thangs change~"
The Death of Steam Sales
No, they're not going away, but I'm going to be honest in that no flash deals and no dailies all but instantly killed the sale for me and everyone I know in terms of enthusiasm. I just immediately bought Axiom Verge, a couple friends immediately bought this or that, and we all collectively moved on. I originally made a Steam account during a Steam sale quite a many years back, and in a lot of ways it shaped my perceptions of Steam as well as how I interact with friends regarding Steam. The big sales used to be an influx of discussion within my peers, with each of chattering about what we hope goes on sale, wondering if a game is worth it and mocking poor sales that over-estimate a game's remaining value.
There's no rush to f5 at 10 PST and there's no real excitement. No one really cares. It lacks the proverbial punch that previous sale models did, and it all seems to come down to one thing. Or two things. Well, a couple things.
That being, the addition of refunds to the system. The refund concept is a pretty easy going one. It's strange for me, because I rarely buy and play Steam games as quickly as I should and even more rarely from Steam itself. But it changes the entire dynamic of sales in a way that catches you off-guard. Since you could just refund - and frankly, should refund - games you got caught out on, the idea of rapidly changing prices is kinda ... Ambitious?
In real life, rain checks and refunds on price drops are actually quite normal. On major sales, I think, you can sometimes see a no refunds and no price adjustment, but that's owing to the fickle elements of consumer sales. Steam's brass supposedly (it's all hearsay, really) feels that ambushing people only to have them seek refunds does the system a disservice. As such, they strip away the things that make the big sales exciting and turn them into something rather mundane.
Do I mind?
It's nice to be able to just enter the sale and know where prices are, but the loss of excitement will - I think - lessen the sales for me. Whether or not that matters, I don't know. The part where sale prices are worse is bad, but that brings us to point two.
The Rebirth of Steam Sales
I can't really appreciate how other people react to Steam, but here's a basic fact of life: Steam wants eyeballs. Steam gets those eyeballs via being exciting. See, on our end Steam is mostly a free excursion - yes, the games cost money, but Steam in and of itself has little cost tacked on. The metagames, the various features, the cards and market, Steam doesn't ask you to pay for it.
This is how many stores function. One thing Steam does sell, though not to us, is advertising space. Publishers big and small pay money to have their games featured on Steam in a variety of ways. Some of them are more obvious than others, some of them have more impact than others.
Remember when Fallout 4 came out, and Steam had a big banner across the top? That is to my understanding a paid advertisement. (Even if it isn't, it is in Steam's best interest that you buy from them and them alone, as opposed to seeking keys elsewhere - but I believe indie developers have made points about the cost of eyeballs on Steam) And that advertisement is only valuable at hitting people who don't realize FO4 is out, and therefore only works if people check Steam on a daily or near daily basis. The leverage here is your excitement toward checking Steam on a regular basis.
It's an important thing to remember about Steam. They need to keep you excited and checking the storefront on a regular basis. And big sales take away from it, or at least historically have for me. Knowing that all the big numbers are going to come altogether at a point where they can't sell advertising space (or are selling it as part of the sale, but I'm not sure they do that, or exactly what they do in general) they must also realize it isn't that useful.
Having the big ticket sales - the big % off deals - be individual sales, either daily, weekly or publisher weekends, returns Steam toward attracting eyeballs on all days of the week. It also makes snap or "bad decision" purchases easier over the course of the year, rather than ... Well, rather easy to push from your mind. Which in turns lowers the eyeballs on a day to day basis.
I'm not saying this, mind you, like it is a bad thing. All of your excitement focused at once is in a way less exciting. And all of your sales coming at once tends to lower the individual excitement of a "game you want" being on sale, and also makes you more sensitive to the idea it should be on sale for less than it is. When a game is on sale during a weekend, you're more hyped for it, and you don't wait around.
In some ways this is a lot better and spreads out the consumer delight a little more. I feel a little weird looking forward to the games I want going on deep sale over the course of the year - as that is, ultimately, an inconvenience - but if everything just was on deep sale all the time it starts to lose all meaning anyway.
The Queue emphasis baffles me
Can I say something harsh here? Do you mind? Steam, really? You seriously want to put this garbage feature in front of me? I mean no, of course it isn't the worst steam feature jammed into the storefront - that would be the atrocious curator system, which is actually just barely worse than the review system - but it is absolutely awful.
The discovery queue doesn't do anything. Look at the reasons it puts games in front of you, and most of the time, it's because the game "is popular". Seriously? Are these just paid advertisements? Steam brass have gone on record saying they won't add advertising, but how is this not? Do I seriously ever need to be reminded Fallout 4 and Call of Doot doot doot exist? I mean seriously?
Do I ever need to "discover" Fallout 4? It's like discovering America as Christopher Columbus, but as a crazy person in 1974 wearing a disco ball on your head. Just some crazy coot falling over a rock in Pennsylvania and shrieking about discovery. Yes, more so.
It's just not a very good feature, and putting it in in lieu of auctions (which are already coded) or literally any of the other stuff makes me seriously question if Steam is shifting gears on its sale emphasis. I understand they may want people to use "a feature", but there's no improvement to the feature maybe the reason people don't use it is it sucks.
I don't know. Maybe there's some weird sub-section of gamers that somehow don't hear of Fallout 4 and it pops up in their queue and then they just buy it? Is that their plan? Because it seriously looks like the dumbest thing ever to me. Mainstream titles have huge advertising budgets and huge amounts of word of mouth. On the other hand, minor indie titles which otherwise wouldn't be sold don't have that going for them. The discovery queue will, after enough passes, maybe suggest something I haven't heard of. Given I read no gaming news whatsoever and mostly just watch like, superbunnyhop or listen to the occasional best friends podcast, the fact it shows me stuff I've already seen is just dismal.
It's bad. It should feel bad.
Actually maybe early access is worse. Maybe. Nothing is worse than the curator system though, which is just incredible garbage on every level. I mean open a game and look at the curators - there will be 2-6, but clicking on most of them won't work. You can't click on much of anything or even extract what useful information there is from it.
The loss of a proper metagame is kinda brutal.
In Conclusion
I think Steam is going through a period of adjustment and experimentation; Valve has talked about how they view each sale as a learning experience, ultimately with the perhaps contradictory aims of both satisfying end users and with extracting as much money as possible. This sale, framed by the previous smaller sale, shows that things have obviously gone a little too far in one direction. It is a worse sale for end users in basically every category. .. I mean seriously, the queue has started showing me stuff because [you] might be interested almost a week after I started having to pound through them, which is just fucking surreal ... but ultimately might make Steam away from sales a little more exciting. So it's bad, but it's not bad in a meaningful way, since there's like a million billion ways to get games for cheap anyway.
Even ignoring grey market stolen key nonsense, which admittedly, is kinda defeating the point of Steam (I could just pirate if I really wanted to? And I will fuck your bioware points)
Basically: Some stuff changed. It's time to pay a little more attention to things outside the big 2.5 sales, and less to the sales themselves.
Steam got hacked on Christmas!!!
Oh nooooooooooooo... !!!
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