Steam Winter Sale a Gigantic Success, According to Leaked(?) Report

The Steam Seasonal Sales (Spring, Summer, Fall and Winter) have been a thing for nearly as long as Steam has, and most of the time, they follow a fairly predictable route--some games go on sale for the duration, while others are shoveled into the ‘flash sale’ compartment, where they momentarily take a huge plunge in price but after that window go back to normal. While Steam has done quite a bit in the past few sales to shake things up (Playing games to earn discounts, voting on what goes on sale, putting people into teams) the last Winter sale saw one of the simplest, yet most radical change: a removal of the timeliness on the sales.

Everything that would go on sale started on sale, for as low as it could go, and stayed that way until the end. No time pressure, no urge to rush and buy the game while it was still cheap… just a sale, pure and simple.

A lot of people liked it, but there was a fear that removing that time pressure would mean people who were being more relaxed and leisurely over the whole ordeal might just glaze over the whole things. Turns out, those fears were unfounded.

Valve accidentally (kind of?) posted what was supposed to be a private steamworks forum to the public, giving us a rare and welcome look into the inner workings of Valve… and telling us that, indeed, Valve’s gambit paid off. All sales all the time earned them money--a lot of money.
 

“We looked at performance of the group of games outside of the Top 500 in revenue terms. This group collected 35% of product page traffic during the sale, which is over 4x their share of traffic from the previous winter sale. And these weren’t just idle views--we also saw 45% growth in the revenue generated by this group of games as compared with the last winter sale.”

That’s not all. There were also three times the number of product page views when compared to the autumn sale, and more wishlist additions. Now, mind you--this could be a product of the holidays, since people are naturally looking for gifts to give and Steam is a convenient chance to do that for PC gamers, but still, that alone probably can’t explain that much growth.

So, in summation--you can expect the spring sale to follow a similar trend. Something I’m not heartbroken over, personally, I liked this more relaxed approach… and I’m obviously not the only one.