Steam Is Scrapping Ninety Percent Discounts On Games

Anyone who has participated in huge online sales knows that many of them are kind of a scam. A lot of stores can bump up prices temporarily, for a period as short as a few hours, then base future discounts off this inflated price. This gives the effect of tricking consumers into thinking they are getting a better deal than they really are, or even getting a deal, when in fact the product is actually being sold at its regular price, or even higher.

Groovy game developer turned emperor of online storefronts, Valve, has decided that it will try to put a stop to disingenuous marketing on its platform Steam. As spotted by Kotaku, from 28 March Steam will see changes to it's discounting policies in an attempt to make pricing clearer for players.

Valve's next product - the handheld PC Steam Deck - releases this month and you can take a peek at it in our video below.

Changes include waiting at least a month between price increases and / or decreases, the inability to change prices while a discount is live, and that discounts have to be active for between 24 hours and two weeks. For fans of PC gaming, the biggest change seems to be the removal of discounts 90% or higher, and 10% or lower. This will stop games from landing on the sales page despite barely seeing a reduction.

Here are the list of changes as outlined by Valve:

You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 28 days.

It is not possible to discount your product for 28 days following a price increase in any currency.

Discounts cannot be run within 28 days of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events.

Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 28 days of releasing your title, within 28 days from when your launch discount ends, or within 28 days of a price increase in any currency.

You may not change your price while a promotion is live now or scheduled for the future.

It is not possible to discount a product by more than 90% or less than 10%.

Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.

Who knows if this will actually prevent underhand practices, or simply push publishers to find other ways of selling its games - methods such as putting a game up for two separate prices with a slightly different description to instill a sense of confusion in players. That's just a random example, and not at all based on Horizon Forbidden West.