Steam Sales and their different approach
As physical technology is abandoned in favor of digital, a great deal of content is being stored online. Some companies sensed this trend and started up online platforms for storing their respective media. Valve is credited for making the first successful online gaming platform back in 2003. It has amassed a sizable player base with games from every genre. While their catalogue is very impressive, part of what really attracts users is the steam sales. Steam sales are massive sales that are known for bringing fairly new and expensive games, ranging in the 45 to 60 dollars, and taking them down to around 5 to 20 dollars.
There are constant sales like any online shopping platform, yet they typically differ in terms of interactiveness. The different types of steam sales range in price drop and themes. The most common steam sale is midweek madness which happens within the middle of each week usually featuring a particular developer or genre. The midweek madness is the only recurring occasional sale event to not have some form of user interaction available given its frequent occurrence. The larger sales are the holiday and seasonal sales. Most holidays receive a minor event of some sort with little gimmicks that enable the ability to add little seasonal cosmetic items or special emotes. The larger holidays get that, and typically a mini game that can be played to earn special seasonale points. These points can be used to unlock a plethora of things some of which includes more things for the mini game, special seasonal gimmicks like a new icon border or GIFs that play whenever someone visits their profile. The real draw to these mini games is the ability to earn extra saving once enough of these event points have been earned. While this does an excellent job of attracting people to spend more money, yet it has not always worked out for Steam. On one special occasion during the 2019 Steam summer sale, there was an exploit that allowed users to gain unlimited 5 Dollar vouchers, and multiple vouchers could be redeemed at once.
This event was unique in having the points be earned by playing regular games instead of event exclusive mini games, and the points earned were spent in a strategic mini game. With having the points earned by doing specific tasks from a list of games, a lot of people saw potential to use mods to make tasks, which would take time consuming objectives, and change it so they were easily done in seconds. When it was discovered that the game Starbound had the task of drinking soda, modders quickly went to work seeing an easy exploit. In Starbound it is fairly rare to come across soda, but with a mod that gives the player infinite soda and using the item taking only a brief second, changing the time it took to get the 5 dollar voucher from a couple days of grinding to being done in a mer couple minutes. It did not take long for the moderators of Steam to see this and they swiftly put a bandaid over the issue with putting a cap on how many points can be redeemed per day. This was not a great solution as it inhibited those who had put the time in to earn points, as well as failing to negate those who had cheated from using some of their points. That being said even with the unfortunate exploit it still helped gain new users to their platform and the sale is still considered a success.
