According to SteamSpy, a really cool website that shows interesting data and statistics from the Steam store, discounts were actually reduced from 2015, but the overall revenue was way up. Which basically means they’ve made a lot more money with a lot worse deals.
About 36.8 million copies of games were sold during the 2016 Summer Sale, compared to 33 million sold in 2015. There was also a huge increase in Steam users at the time of sale – over 175 million people this year, up from the 130 million last year. Although this could be linked to new free to play titles published on Steam and, therefore, those users are less likely to purchase any new games on Steam.
The game developers and publishers earned over $223.2 million, a 40% increase – in 2015, developers earned $160 million.
Additionally, remember the Limbo promo? The game was free for a day just ahead of the sale so we can assume that all of its new 1.9M owners are coming from that promotion even though some people obviously purchased it after the giveaway period was over.
What does this all mean for us, old school gamers? Worse deals in the following sales, that’s for sure. If they can sell games for more than last couple of sales why would they bother making the prices even lower?
I’ve personally only got one game on the sale to play with my buddy – How To Survive 2. I really wanted to buy something else but I couldn’t find anything worth my time and money. I’m also not quite sure if I’m not going to request a refund for that one because it doesn’t seem to be such a high quality title as I thought (ahhh the beauty of Early Access).
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When I’ve asked all of my friends they basically couldn’t find any good games on the Steam sale as well. Maybe it’s because we’re all old pricks or maybe that we all have way over 500 games subscribed on Steam (yeah remember you don’t own that shit, you only have subscriptions for the titles, it’s not yours to keep, unlike GOG where you can backup the files and you’re all set).
I’m really glad that we have some good alternatives online that at least give as an option to get the games cheaper. Even though Valve hates them they can’t really do much about it.
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