We all love a good sale. And with Black Friday over, and Christmas almost upon us, few stores still offer discounts. So, of course, it’s time for the Steam Winter Sale to begin, but do we care as much?
Minor tweaks to the usual format
The Steam Winter Sale is back, and it’s bringing some changes to the table.
Usually, the winter sale brings more titles, both popular and indie, at highly discounted prices, and it will last until January 4th.
This year, however, they decided to shake things up a bit, and try something new.
For starters, there is no more minigame to be played while waiting for game prices to be updated. Instead, there are collectors’ cards, and users will get three of them for every day they browse the gaming platform.
People are lamenting the absence of the usually very popular minigames, but the company decided that this is a better way to go, as the cards can be sold on the marketplace.
However, this isn’t the biggest difference taking place during the sale.
Usually, gamers were on the platform day in and day out, waiting for their favorite game to get a discount, as the company offered Daily Deals, Flash Deals, and Community Choices.
Now, however, those are gone, replaced by the full discount price, which will stay the same throughout the sale.
Steam talked to the developers, and convinced them to offer the full discounts throughout the entire sale.
This means that the front page is now used for the promotion and discovery of new games only.
Why it’s getting old
Most of the critiques related to this year’s winter sale refer to the very low or even lack of discounts for some of the most major titles of the year, like Fallout 4 and GTA V.
Gamers can just go to different sources and purchase the game at a much higher discount, rendering the platform useless.
Not only that, but now with the albeit pointless but fun minigames that Steam used to provide now missing, there really is no reason to partake in this year’s winter sale.
People have started to get tired of the sales for a while now, and with the modifications to the system that motivate people to use the platform even less now, they have had enough, at least for a while
Perhaps next year they will get back on track, and come up with ideas to motivate their users to participate in the following sales, but for now it seems that Steam has kind of run out of… steam.
Image source: Wikimedia
