The Steam Summer Sale is one of Steam’s busiest periods of the year, and it’s not hard to see why, thousands of games are offered at discounted prices. However, anyone who took part in the sale this year would have noticed that there were no daily or flash deals on offer, unlike the previous years where they have both featured.
As a result, the overall discounts offered on games weren’t as low as they usually are. Steam Spy has claimed that the average discount in the Steam Summer Sale this year was only 50%, whereas last year the average discount was considerably higher at 66.67%. One of the reasons though for the higher prices was down to the absence of daily and flash deals which normally offer games with higher discounts.
In previous years, it’s thought that people waited for these flash sales before spending their money, resulting in more copies being sold when they were offered at a lower price, although that saw developers and Steam receive less money as a result. That didn’t happen this year, so purchases were spread more evenly throughout the whole sale.
“Last year the sales were spiking around the first and the last day of the sale,” Steam Spy’s Sergey Galyonkin wrote. “This year they were a bit more evenly distributed across the whole sale period with a spike around the first weekend.
While that may mean that this year gamers had to spend a little bit more than previously, it was good news for Steam and developers, however, as the sale saw revenue surge by 40%. In total, $223.2m was generated from this year’s sale, up 40% compared to last year’s revenue of $160m. The lower discounts didn’t stop gamers from spending money with more games being sold and revenue being generated than ever before.
Out of the 7,000 or so games that were discounted during the Steam sale, 1,592 of those managed to sell over 5,000 copies, an increase of 50% compared to last year where only 1,050 games managed to shift more than 5,000 copies.
Galyonkin also added, “The median revenue for the games with a 75% discount was $33.5K this year ($40K last year), $40K for 66% ($75K), $60K for 50% ($90K), $106K for 33% ($90K), and $120K for 25% ($90K last year). There were only a handful of games discounted by 10%, most of them being recent releases.”
Source: *Steam Spy