The Steam Store has been known for the quality and diversity in their game store, and seasonal sales are much awaited by fans of their games. Valve has made it a point to give special discount on games, especially over the summer.

Being the first without flash or daily deals worked in the favor of 2016's Steam Summer Sale. There has been growth for the Steam Summer Sale since removing flash deals.

As what was already stated, Valve's latest Steam Summer Sale was a huge success, with an almost 50% more revenue, bringing in a grand total of $236 million. A full financial report has been posted by Sergey "SteamSpy" Galyonkin regarding the Steam Summer Sale, and an interesting theory surfaced - Valve gained more revenue by eliminating long-established flash and daily deals.

In Steam sales, Valve usually have flash and daily deals which are additional but temporary price reduction which lasts anywhere in the margin of 8 to 24 hours. In speculation, this promotion encourage customers to visit Steam across the entire duration of the sale constantly, because some of the most anticipated game may end up with a good discount. While the concept of this type of sale makes sense, Galyonkin thinks it actually is harmful for sales in the long run.

For this theory, Galyonkin has written in his report that this may sound exciting, these promos incentivized customers to patiently wait for the best price possible instead of purchasing readily available discounted items. For last year, the sales were peaking somewhere around the first and the last day of the sale. This year, statistics were a bit more evenly shared across the whole sale period with an increase around the first weekend.

Galyokin's report also stated that the elimination of daily and flash deals also urged developers to be more cautious with their promos. On an average, the discount for this year was 50%, instead of the 66.67% which was from last year. Although one could question if it is a bad deal for buyers. With this in mind, Galyokin also states that consumers will fare much better if the game developers don't go under and be bankrupt in the long run.

While flash discounts sound like a good idea, they encourage customers to only make bulk purchases on the very last sale day instead of spread out smaller purchases across the week of the sale. Eliminating them freed players to make usual and impulse purchases, even if the actual discount wasn't that important.

In addtion, SteamSpy's statistics actually support this theory, with smaller discounts bringing in a much significant increase in revenue, according to VG 24/7 "The median revenue for the games with a 75% discount was $33.5K this year ($40K last year), $40K for 66% ($75K), $60K for 50% ($90K), $106K for 33% ($90K) and $120K for 25% ($90K last year). There was only a handful of games discounted by 10%, most of them being recent releases."

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Topics Valve