🚀 go-pugleaf

Zaghadka  <zagh...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Meh. Games will still be on sale, just not on "obsessively click the
>refresh button" sale. I'll wait to see what the longer term sales look
>like. I'm guessing, pretty good.

Well, you only had to refresh once every 8 hours.  You also had an 8
hour window to do that in so, so you didn't have obsessively refresh
when what went on sale switched either.

But I'm guessing they're doing this because the trick isn't working
anymore.  Back when they started doing this presumably there were more
people buying games at the sale-long price, as they didn't know it might
get cheaper later in the sale.  Ideally all the people who are willing
to buy the game at sale-long price would pay that price for the game,
leaving only the people wouldn't buy the game unless it was deeply
discounted picking it up at the lower price.  My guess is that Valve's
reasearch is telling them that pretty much everyone knows to wait now.

It'll be interesting to see what replaces these sales, because in
addition to being a form of price descrimination, it was also a form
of marketing.  During these seasonal Steam sales pretty much every game
goes on sale, but only a fraction of them make it onto the front page.
They can toss up a list of a dozen or so games up there and change it
every day, just like before, but what's going to drive vistors to check
the list each day?  They'll probably have some sort of game or contest,
but will that be enough?

Also those deep discount sales had another marketing benefit.  They cause
a lot people to buy games that never would have otherwise.  Even if this
doesn't directly make up for the people who would've paid more for the
game, it can when the people who would've never have bought the game
tell their friends about it.  That's the theory behind Sony's "Instant
Game Collection" and Microsoft's "Games for Gold", the developers and
publishers usually get nothing in return, but end benefiting when friends
of the subscribers buy the game.

We'll have to see how it goes.  I'm not sure it'll actually make much
of a difference to me.  The amount of money I've been spending on these
sales has been on a slow decline anyways.  I've bought most of the
"back catalog" that I'm interested in, and it seems the trend already
was for smaller discounts of newer games.

					Ross Ridge

-- 
 l/  //	  Ross Ridge -- The Great HTMU
[oo][oo]  rri...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
-()-/()/  http://www.csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~rridge/ 
 db  //