I feel like they cheat by keeping their regular price high.
Back in the day, a game was $60 new and $20 without sale after a few years.
IMO that’s still better than keeping your prices high and doing crazy sales. This way it gets lots of people to buy it out of impulse hence the popularity of the unplayed library meme.
Its almost like gambling and the gamification of a sale brings out the gamers who feel savvy by buying a cheap game instead of quality releases, not saying thats every game on sale
Not much these days with sites like isthereanydeals providing historical price data. Might be in the old days where retailers could say something is on sale, and consumers being in the dark on if it really was a discounted price and they weren’t overpaying compared to buying from another store.
Now consumers know what the usual sales price is and can wait for it when it comes to games of interest. And with many different storefronts sales are frequent enough now you can wait until the next sale pops up without waiting too long.
One area though that has been like gambling though has been pc parts. With sudden events causing parts like ram to suddenly sky rocket.
I’m pretty sure there’s actually an EU law that says that you’re not allowed to do that. If a product is on discount more or less forever then it’s not in fact on discount.
There is a maximum amount of time a product can be on sale before that becomes just what price is now.
I remember those days.
Release at $60, lower to $20 after a few years, $5 on sale with “only” 75% off.
Though I’ve noticed that every major steam sale has 10 selected deep discount games that are at least 90% off. The prices for these select 10 feel like steam sales we used to have 15 years ago.
And same with consumers. We aren’t a charity throwing away money for no reason. We actively seek out discounts to get more for our money. We want discounts to be given priority.
By knowing most consumers don’t have the self control to not spend money and fall for marketing hype. Probably call those who don’t get sucked in and end up being more price sensitive and waiting or not buying karens for not being part of the initial revenue made.
UUhhhh no? Steam doesn’t automatically change games’ visibility if it’s never on sale; it makes games on sale more visible, which encourages Devs to put their games on sale, meaning people who have never seen your game have seen it and might buy it. So in the end, MORE People have bout the game than would have otherwise, and if set at the right price, the Devs still get their cash and now have a larger market. I’m so glad I took Microeconomics in High School :)
And maybe if you studied beyond highschool level you would be aware this is a well studied thing in economics. If you sell a priority service and there is a limit to the resource in some way you are shutting out the people that don’t pay. Like its the same problem as dating apps that sell priority matching, if enough people buy I to it you either have to buy into it as well just to get a fair chance, or except you will never get seem.
Yes the Devs that buy into it get more sales. The entire point is it works for those people, if it didn’t they would have no reason to buy into it. But the people who don’t buy into it are then inherently disadvantaged.
Why would consumers want the store to not prioritize giving visibility to games on discounts during sale events?
If people want to discover games they can go to steam queue and see what is recommended that they may be interested in. But, the last thing I want a company to do is hide sales for me and pushing full retail products.
That to me would be anticonsumer. Might not be what sellers want, but visibility to discounts so my money goes further is what I want as a consumer. I go as far as using isthereanydeals to check to see if other stores sell for cheaper than Steam and alert me to targetted price drops.
That works when we’re talking about big businesses and AAA games, but the problem is when we consider indie developers, who struggle to get attention so are pressured into putting their game on sale when they don’t want to just get some attention.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals. Not to be paying full price for games as an act of charity. Many look at the store because they are looking to see what is discounted for the day. And wishlist and use deal trackers like isthereanydeals.
People who get hyped and preorder are the ones willing to pay more because they value first access. After that its mostly value based consumers left with different price thresholds. If you want the full price paying demographic you have to front load your marketing budget before the game launches.
Its like you want the store to be advertising old full priced games and suppressing sales which is the opposite of what consumers want to see.
And why would consumers who are trying to get the most value for their money care about that financial aspect? They aren’t a business. They are consumers looking for deals.
Sure if you don’t give a shit about other people, and then you can use the same logic to justify sweatshop clothes and any other shitty businesses practice you like.
You consider sales to be equivalent to sweat shops?
So do you go out of your way to avoid sales and pay full price for everything?
Anyways, pretty confused why you expect the store part of a business to not prioritize promoting sales, since that’s what consumers want in that section. The discovery queue is where titles that might be of interest is shown without regard to discounts. Its like going to the mods section and being upset there’s only mods being displayed.
Sales page prioritizing visibility to sales is coercion? Damn everything is coercion then. You must hate sites like isthereanydeals deals with them encouraging coercion. And sites like pcpartspicker encouraging coercion showing discounts. If only consumers were kept in the dark about sales. Must fill you with rage using visiting places like GOG too and seeing them showing games on sale or any site for that matter showing sales.
Again you’re only listen to a part of what I’m saying to make it more convenient to argue against.
Pc part picker is not a distributer with a functional monopoly on the pc hardware market, nor are AMD Nvidia and Intel small indie teams. That’s the key here.
Steam use their position as THE retailer of PC games as leverage to make small indie Devs put their games on ridiculous sales even when they don’t want to, just to get featured, in order to benefit themselves by being the place that has the crazy sales.
If you want a more apt example think of companies that use unpaid or underpaid inters for work in return for “the exposure” it’s very similar and widely considered exploitative.
Damn GOG is evil too for leveraging their platform to show sales? I didn’t know sales were so evil. Maybe consoles…oh no sales are everywhere being promoted. The horror. Can’t escape it. Where is the sanctuary where everything stays at retail price.
Honestly this sounds like some logic EA or Ubisoft CEO would make up to try to push the idea of sales as evil so games stay at retail prices longer or go up in price.
There are plenty of examples to the contrary of this. In particular, I know that factorio has literally never gone on sale on principle, and has only ever gone up in price upon leaving early access. Despite this, it shows up with some regularity in the store.
It’s certainly the case that Steam can be a rat race for developers to get attention, but I don’t believe your framing is accurate.
I thought about mentioning factorio in the original comment, but yeah as you say there is some exception, factorio. Being wildly popular and the game that more or less birthed an entire genre helps and even if you don’t play the same game it’s still entirely possible to succeed through word of nouth. But for less popular indie games it’s still true.
I never buy games at retail price anyways, so I do kind of get it past launch. I don’t care about buying a game until it is on sale and its a big part of why I wish list games to keep track of when they go on sale to see if its hit the price point I want.
You mean the game will only show up in the list of games that are available on sale if the games are actually in the sale? Because that’s just literally how that works
Wow, it’s like people want the games that are part of the big sale going on! How are you twisting the ability to sort by what’s on discount into being evil?
Because the big sale only happens because steam presses Devs into it in order to get promoted. So Devs that don’t buy into the sale, get sent to the back of line.
That’s not the point of this thread. It’s people who only play AAA titles complaining that “gaming is dead” because AAA games are all annual recycled bullshit, despite this being the best time ever for indie/niche/mid-size games.
QTE “final bosses”. Seemed to be a much bigger problem in the PS3/360 era.
“Open world” or “Sandbox” games that don’t care about your progress, where it’s painfully obvious that your actions don’t matter at all. Yes, this is mostly about Starfield
Games where you can win by a landslide but the computer/story goes “Hah, you were just lucky!”
Definitely with you on controller rebinding! Now that I’m an old man I also absolutely hate how damn tiny the text is when playing games on a TV. Gamers are getting old, we don’t all have young eyes or sit in front of a monitor to play games!
3D level design where you can get stuck on elements when you just want to move past them. Especially frustrating in racing games or sections where you have to move fast. Controls are just not precise enough to deal with this under stress.
Visible polygons and interactable polygons are not the same thing. Play Banjo Kazooie and Yookah Laylee (including the remake) to see the difference. The latter has you constantly bump into things because the environment is not smoothed out.
On the other hand some studios take it to the other extreme and make you walk almost on rails, childproofing every corner. A good middle ground is needed.
I do not claim to be a 'gamer'. I prefer to be best described as someone who plays games, but not nearly as often as one branded a 'gamer' would play games by. But I've been partly turned off from video games because of the culture surrounding them. The streamers who play games, the RGB droolers, the tech-junkies, the whales, the hype-train types, the multi-hour essay level of delivering an opinion on a game .etc
Not to mention, all of the gamer-branded merchandise from chairs to even drinks. It just turns me off and I do not ever associate with that crowd and it's a damn shame there is so much gullibility with the culture that it is difficult to avoid.
Game-Padding
Side-quest after side-quest does a game not make. That kind of thing is what you'd find in an MMO that needs to find things for you to do. Not in a more constrained container of a game that has a fixed story, a fixed completion rate and everything. All it tells me is that the developers did not think of or have had any faith in what they were making.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze