Everything You Need to Know About the Steam Sale (Topic)

There is a sale on the Epic Games Store now. This is the first big sale from Tim Sweeney's brainchild and we have to admit that they did it in a big way. Here is a 650 rubles discount on all games in the store, including pre-orders. Basically, the store continues to break into the industry by kicking down the door. However, this is only the beginning of its story, and in principle, the 650 rubles discount is the whole description of the sale. Another thing is sales in Steam. The Steam Seasonal Sale is already a tradition, a true industry event that dates back to 2007.

For 12 years now, gamers around the world have been opening their wallets during this period to give their savings to Uncle Gaben. We decided to collect for you everything you need to know about the Steam sale.

Holy discounts. Steam Sale History

It would seem, well, the sale of games, what exactly is this? The fact is that Steam has always tried to treat such a banal thing as a period of discounts with creative, really making it a big event, adding interactivity to the whole process. In addition, this particular site was the first where they decided to arrange them in a similar format.

It all started back in 2007. He was a turning point for Steam in principle, since it was by this time that they stopped hating him. Yes, yes, imagine, there was once the same bad attitude towards Steam as it is towards EGS today. In the year when September was burning, a normal library appeared on the site, such a dark gray design so dear to us, and most importantly - a huge number of large publishers: Electronic Arts, Activision, Sega, Eidos. The first sale was held the same year.

The first few years, they were held once a year and did not differ much from what we now see in the Epic Store, but already in 2007-2008, discounts of 75-80% were on the site, which was quite powerful. In 2009, the "Offer of the Day" was introduced at the sale. This was a small selection of several games that only had the lowest price on that day.

In 2010, with the release of the updated Steam 4.0 client, a colorful sale appeared for the first time, in honor of which the background of the site was changed. A year later, Valve went further and made several sales at once. Since that time, many gamers mistakenly think that because of the name "seasonal sale" it is timed to different times of the year, but often they are dedicated to different events: Christmas, Halloween, Black Friday, etc. The only thing that can be highlighted is the summer sale, dedicated to the summer [not always original].

Since the summer of 2011, each sale has a distinctive visual identity. In addition to discounts, Valve has made interactive. So, at the summer sale of that year, gamers received gold tickets for the Steam camp for purchases. After collecting three of these tickets, users could receive a set of equipment, for example, in Team Fortress 2. To stimulate the knockout of golden tickets, the studio organized a raffle for one hundred people. Winners received 10 free games from their wishlist. Availability of tickets increased the chance of winning. Users liked this, and in the same 2011-2012 at the Christmas / New Year sale a new chip "coal steam" was introduced. You received them by completing different tasks that appeared every day. Coals can be used to craft a gift that could contain discount coupons.

Gifts - that's what gifts, and you could give them to friends or just strangers. The “red crane lovers” did not hesitate to distribute a huge bunch of games. Then a little more than 1100 people won in the drawing of gifts. A thousand received all the games from Valv for free, those who were in third place got 5 games from the wishlist for free, the winners of the silver place - 10 games from the list, but the one who took first place got access to all the games that were then in store! And if you think it's not powerful, then you are downright greedy.

And as a small bonus - in the same period, prices were finally converted into national currency in the CIS. I no longer had to track the exchange rate of my currency against the dollar to know how much the game costs.

In 2012, at the Summer Sale, the company introduced the Community Choice feature. Every day a vote was taken between several games. The projects with the most votes received the maximum discount.

At the same time, lightning-fast discounts came into use, which were valid for only a few hours. You could snatch some very solid projects like Total War Shogun 2 at a 75% discount. By the way, this was my first sale, where I bought myself a couple of games.

At the next sales in 2013, Valve introduced badges, which, in principle, became common on the site. Then it became a real must-have to craft yourself a badge about participation in a sale from holiday cards. You could get them for purchases and completing various tasks. For the badge, you were given an item in your inventory or, even better, a background for your profile. I will never forget the beautiful visuals of the Summer Sale with Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite.

At the seventh Christmas sale, a similar approach was taken with cards in the form of snowballs. In 2014, the company created Summer Adventure in honor of the summer sale. Players were randomly assigned to one of five teams, and by completing certain tasks, a person contributed to the movement of his team. The winning team played several games from the wishlist.

The peak of the flow of ideas was the clicker [in 2015 the genre was very popular on mobile]. To knock out badges, you went to the arena, where you had to call a monster. You got experience and could upgrade your abilities in this clicker, level up, getting new cards. For you to understand, this sale is very special to me. I put dolma stew in the kitchen, and at this time sat down for a clicker on a sale. As a result, I forgot about it and it started to burn, the smoke completely filled my apartment ...

And after 2016, all of a sudden everything became somehow rotten. Nothing special came up until the 2018 Summer Sale, where we were invited to participate in the Summer Saliens minigame. We costemized our "Stimoplanite" and went to fight with other aliens for cards and bonuses in a kind of tower defense. However, the whole process was not as fun as the same 2015 clicker.

The Steam Awards happened in the fall of 2018. Steam invited us to choose the game of the year by voting. Only against the background of all the problems that flooded the site: the decline of its popularity, the opening of EGS and, in the end, the approaching The Game Awards 2018, it all looked pale.

The final sale so far was the Lunar New Year Sale, and to its credit, it had a cute visual design.

What's the point?

In mass hype. It's not hard to guess that the sale is arranged not only for our joy. Despite the discounts, the sale, especially the summer sale, brings Steam a very lump sum. Although the projects are cheaper, gamers buy them with great joy. Often, the keys for the games are cheaper than the games themselves in Steam, however, on the sale, projects can already cost less than keys [at least it was like this before].

A bunch of useless goods are also on sale, because when a player sees a big discount on a game, he simply does not want to miss it. “Wow! Just Cause 3 for 5 buts! " - think thousands of gamers who would not have given money for this game before.

And one more thing - the number of transactions increases several times. Steam takes a 15% commission from each sale of a card, which costs $ 0.14 on average. Every day of the sale, 1 million transactions take place, for which Steam receives 21 thousand dollars from this alone.

According to Kotaku, Steam generated 50 million in revenue from the 2015 Summer Sale alone.

Like everyone else

Unfortunately, in recent years, sales have become less interesting than they originally were, namely, they have ceased to be distinguished by something bright. Just remember the last sale and I think you were less happy with it than you were a few years ago. Why is that?

The discounts are not so big anymore. Perhaps there are people among you who grabbed the Dark Souls sale in 2014 for 5 rubles with a 99% discount? So, this simply does not exist anymore. The price of games increased by about 33%, and due to this, any discounts do not significantly lower the price, and on average the discounts do not exceed 50-75%.

No updates . Steam has stopped regularly updating discounts. Lightning discounts are a thing of the past long ago, and now, when you saw a project that you have wanted for a long time, but its price has been reduced by only 20%, forget it, the percentage will not change until the end of the sale.

Nothing special. We didn't see any innovations except Summer Saliens last year. For this reason, the significance of the sale also disappeared. It's just there, but nothing special about the discounts at the nearest grocery store.

Taste. After 12 years of sales, one way or another, your library is already filled with hundreds of titles, and you essentially have nothing to buy except for new projects. And you probably bought them on release. Yes, and you have already developed a taste, and it is unlikely that you, as a few years ago, will buy the game for the reason that it costs as much as 30 rubles.

Sale is coming

As we can see, the sale is not what it used to be. Karoche and the grass used to be greener and the air was cleaner, and there are more discounts. Okay, let's put the duckling syndrome aside and stay objective. Steam has a competitor that continues to hit the sick. Yes, the Valv store has an army of fans who, from a principle and a library of a hundred titles, will not move to another store, but it's worth a counterattack. Therefore, let's hope that with all the decline, they can squeeze something interesting out of themselves.

The Topic of Article: Everything You Need to Know About the Steam Sale.
Author: Jake Pinkman