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The Steam Summer Sale: another thing Valve is half-arsing?

It’s 19:30 on Thursday night. I have it on good authority that the Steam Summer Sale is due to begin soon and I’m bashing F5 like it insulted my mother.

The Steam Summer Sale, Valve’s promise of a site-wide sale that will bankrupt and satisfy me in equal parts is about to commence.

…Oh, that’s it?

Once the page finally loads I see the sale and I haven’t experienced a let-down like this from a single webpage since the cup entered the video in 2 Girls 1 Cup. Where are the daily and flash deals? Where are the great meta games that turn the sale of games into a game itself? Where are the massive reductions that make me think I’ll be missing out if I don’t buy a game?

Yes, load up the Steam store now and all you’ll be greeted by is an animated banner and a few highlighted deals. Some of which are very generous, like the newly released Doom (reduced by 40%) . Some of which aren’t. But ultimately, all there is to do is to buy games, go through your Discovery Queue to earn cars and that’s it.

The Steam Summer Sale: How it used to be

If you’re new to Steam or PC gaming in general, let me tell you of the halcyon days in which the Steam Summer Sale was something of a annual pilgrimage for gamers everywhere.

The Summer Sale was the de facto way to buy cheap games, so popular that Valve made it an annual event. The entire Steam store would be re-skinned according to a theme. This theme would run through a series of meta-games on Steam that users could play. It was a community-driven affair spurred on by the promise of fun, trading cards, badges and buying cheap games if you had the time (and money).

When you bought games, you didn’t just buy them at the discounted face value. At the start of each sale most games in the store would be set at a discount. But the real time to buy was during the flash and daily deals.

Valve-Steam-Sale-Flow-Chart
None of this applies any more.

Every so often a group of games would pop up, heavily discounted, in a flash sale. These were usually the cheapest game bundles on offer, but you’d only have a very small window to grab them. Daily deals, on the other hand, happened every 24 hours. The discounts were less impressive in exchange for a longer buying period.

Valve even made the sale into a user-driven experience. Visitors to the site could usually vote on which games they wanted discounted and included in these deals.

For the time the Summer Sale lasted, players were engaged and excited. They’d try try to catch the best deals, rally friends to vote for a game to go on sale, and essentially work out how to play the meta game to make the most off of the market.

While games are pieces of art usually intended to be fun, Valve made the process of buying them fun too.

The Steam Summer Sale: How it is now

Unfortunately, this all changed when the Fire Nation attacked Valve revised the way it organised all sales.

In the December 2015 Steam sales, the flash and daily sales were gone, and there were no elaborate themes or games to be played. Only a static sale lasting a predetermined amount of times. All the games that went on sale did so at a certain percentage, and that was that.

Valve released a statement explaining these changes, saying:

As you already know, the format of discounts in this year’s Winter sale was a little different from past years. This year’s sale was centred around discounts that ran for the full length of the sale, rather than changing from day to day for featured titles. Our hypothesis was that this new format would be a better way to serve customers that may only be able to visit Steam once or twice during the 13-day event.

In place of the frantic “refresh as often as possible” sales of the past, we now had a “come as you please” system where you’d miss nothing if you weren’t sitting on the PC the whole day. And thus The Sale becomes merely a sale.

Those that did visit daily got a consolation prize in the form of some free trading cards. Log on, check out your Discovery Queue up to three times, and you earn three cards that you can sell or turn into badges.

Unfortunately, this set a precedent. Not just because it meant there was no more frustration from fans who missed a daily deal or flash sale, but also – according to a leaked internal memo – because Valve and the game developers apparently made more money by conducting the sale this way.

Am I falling out of love with Valve?

The Summer Sale is, unfortunately, just another one of Valve’s casualties. It seems the developer retailer is so busy making money hand over fist that quality control has gone off the boil. Once, Valve could do no wrong. It was the developer par excellence, thanks to the ever-innovative Half-Life franchise, and set the benchmark for digital distribution of games. While every other publisher was creating awful shopping apps that would regularly crash your game/PC/will to live and – in the case of GTA IV – require three separate sign-ins to function properly, Steam just sat in the background and made gaming, patching and sharing easy.

It was the DRM it was OK to like.

But with the playful heart ripped from the Summer Sale, Steam – and by proxy Valve – is in danger of becoming a disjointed mess of sub-par services. There’s Steam’s Godawful customer support, which Valve seems to be unconcerned about fixing. Instead, it just implemented a no-questions asked automated system to refund games.

Then there’s the Steam customer who spent four years trying to regain access to their account.

Steam’s Early Access and Greenlight systems are a joke. In theory Early Access aims to gather player input on unfinished games as well as generate revenue to further fund their development. In practice players are saddled with some games that spend their existence floundering in Early Access, raking in money as developers promise further improvements while none come.

No game symbolises this better than DayZ. It started life as a mod for Arma II and was intended to be expanded into a standalone game. It was put on Early Access in December 2013. Fast forward to the present and the game is still in Early Access, still beset by problems on PC while at the same time being ported to consoles.

In the meantime, the developer has taken the odd decision that has incensed the game’s community. That’s just one issue glossed over quickly, but there are many, many more.

The best example of Valve’s lack of quality control in its store is probably Steam Greenlight. Greenlight asks the Steam community to vote on games that can be released on its platform. In theory it works great: let the players decide on what they want to play. The only problem is that Valve lets almost anything be submitted to Greenlight, and a handful of trolls can vote on it to enter the store.

It’s because of this that we get extremely low-effort entries that sometimes don’t even contain an .exe file that can be launched. If you need some horrifying examples, check out Jim Sterling’s Best of Steam Greenlight Trailers video series. It will make you laugh – well, hopefully, because if you don’t laugh, you’ll likely end up in tears.

Family library sharing is just another great idea ruined by bizarre implementation. You can share games with members of your family by authorising their computer and account, but if they want to play any of them you get logged out of your account.

Steam, punk’d

Valve has a near bottomless pit of money in the Steam Store. Despite the likes of EA and Ubisoft trying to compete with their own versions, there’s no denying that Steam is an integral part of modern gaming, and a huge part of the PC scene and even though it’s increasingly flawed, it’s better than all the alternatives. That’s because Steam has classic first-mover advantage. There’s simply no way you can access as many games in one place, and it’s almost ubiquitous for new releases too.

But my feeling is that Valve’s success with Steam has made it complacent, because no matter how poorly it manages it, how terrible the games are or how frustrated its user-base may be, we keep returning to buy games from them.

The fact that Steam Summer Sale is down in quality, along with everything else, does not and will not matter until it affects Valve’s bottom line.

 

[How to survive Steam sales flowchart – Reddit]

 

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