🚀 go-pugleaf

On Fri, 23 Jun 2017 14:19:24 +0100, Toby Newman <goo...@asktoby.com>
wrote:

>On 2017-06-23, Mike S <Mik...@nowhere.com> wrote:
>> On Fri, 23 Jun 2017 10:36:08 +0100, Toby Newman <goo...@asktoby.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>>> By hourly lighting sales, do you mean games that are literally on sale
>>>> for one hour and only one hour?
>>>
>>>Yes.
>>
>> That doesn't sound exciting to me. It sounds extremely annoying. I'm
>> glad they stopped doing it. I'd rather check a couple times a week for
>> 20 percent off then every freaking hour for 80 percent off. Not worth
>> it. Not for a $40-$60 product.
>
>I guess the difference is with the current way you have one sit-down
>browse of the shop and one purchase at some point during the sale. The
>old way was a fun week of checking for deals and making snap
>judgements on whether to buy something or not, always waiting for the
>next stonker deal.

The idea was that with lightning sales was that it would draw people
in for a specific game. This would create word-of-mouth for the
product (either by people talking about how the game was on sale or
because they were playing it and discussing it with friends), which
would spur further purchases after the super-discount was over (also,
some people might visit Steam in hopes of getting the discount,
arriving too late, and decide to purchase it anyway). However, after a
few years the publishers crunched the numbers and realized the bump in
the number of purchases didn't actually make up for the loss in
revenue from the discount (there wasn't a significant loss; it was
mostly a wash) and they asked Steam to stop it. And that was the end
of the lightning sales.


Still, it would suprise me if VALVE didn't see more advantage from the
flash sales. You would have people checking and re-checking Steam and
- even if they didn't buy the item on super-discount - the mere fact
that they were in the store again made it more likely that they would
be swayed by temptation to buy another product (the loss-leader method
of getting people into the store). But once Valve achieved
near-monopoly on PC game sales, they probably decided it wasn't worth
the hassle - annoying the publishers, the added server load, the
marketing - since gamers were inevitably coming to Steam anyway.

So financially it might make sense for the sellers, but as a customer
it makes for a lot less interesting sale.