Steam Summer Sale 2013

We're well into the summer season right now which means amongst the humidity and high temperatures it's also time for all gamers to get out their wallets and proclaim to Valve:

In a gaming world where DRM remains a hot topic I do find it interesting that so many people are willing to spend so much in these sales but it's hard to beat the value that is offered and the sheer amount of titles available to you is something hard to ignore. I like what the guys over at GOG.com are doing with their no-nonsense (and also no-DRM) approach but they certainly do not have the user base nor the momentum that the Steam platform has as of yet. Valve has these sales figured out pretty well where they spread things out far enough and reduce the price low enough to where it feels like you don't spend a lot of money, but over the course of the entire sale you've probably spent a decent bit more than you might realize.

Barring any last minute flash deals or must haves, my breakdown for this sale is as follows:

• Total Games Purchased: 25
• Total Spent: $79.89
• Avg. Spend per Game: $3.20
• Total Transactions: 9

I'm somewhat surprised that my credit card company didn't freeze my account and call to find out if I had indeed authorized all these transactions but considering how much I've spent with them over the years I guess it's really not all that surprising. Sometimes I think about why the publishers/developers of these games are willing to sell them at such a steep discount and if it really works out better for them in the long run. My guess is if you could calculate the ratio of (Total Purchases of Game X During the Sale / Total of people that finish the game or spend any considerable time with it) the number would probably be pretty low. Think about it - how many games have you purchased in a Steam sale and then never touched or only played for maybe half an hour? I went through my Steam library as it stands now and did an honest breakdown and I came up with the following:

• Total Steam Games: 125
• Number of Games Completed: 15
• Number of Games Never Played: 57

So if you do the math that means I have completed approx. 12% of my Steam library and I have not even played about 45.6% of my library. Nearly half of the games I have purchased I haven't spent any time with whatsoever. So think about it from the dev/pub's perspective - under normal pricing I might have never even thought about buying their game but if they bring the price low enough I start to think to myself "Well hell I might want to try it at some point" so I buy it. They got less money then they might have wanted from me, but it's better than getting nothing at all.

I don't think I'm throwing out any unknown wisdom here but sitting back and really thinking through the mechanics of these sales is interesting. To me, at least.