Steam sales are equal parts awesome, and the bane of most gamers’ existences. On the one hand, there are fantastic prices on nearly anything you could possibly want to play. On the other hand, there are fantastic prices on nearly anything you could possibly want to play, meaning you’ll buy all of them and sit with a backlog the size of Kentucky. Or, maybe that’s just me. Part of the insanity of Steam sales are the developer bundles — packages of games covering in some instances the entirety of a developer’s catalog at heavily discounted prices. Steam has recently taken some steps to make these bundles even more appealing to users by adjusting the price based on games in a user’s library.
PCGamesN got their hands on some documentation sent to developers about the change. Valve explained it thusly:
With Steam Bundles, if a customer already [owns] some items in the Bundle, they will pay for and receive only the items not already in their account. This allows the best fans of your series or franchise to ‘complete the set’ and get a deal on the remaining items in the Bundle.
Past Complete Packs were sometimes a bad deal for customers that already [owned] one or more of the products in the pack. Either it made bad economic sense for those customers to purchase the pack, or they just felt bad about doing so since it [looked] like they were paying for products they already [had]. The new Steam Bundles system addresses this.
The benefit to users is obvious. If you’ve purchased 2 games in a 10 game bundle you’ll receive a discount, and be on your way. You wouldn’t normally get extra keys for the games you already owned so that was really just money vanishing into the ether. I for one can absolutely think of a few times where I didn’t buy a bundle deal because I already owned games in the bundle, so I am squarely part of the target audience for this change.
The benefit for developers is pretty obvious too. People like me will be more likely to buy your bundle if a discount is applied for games already owned. That should cause an increase in sales, meaning more money for developers. Some may argue that the discount takes money away from the developer, though I’d counter by saying that chances are good that games in a users library are more likely to have been purchased at full price, or at least at a much less drastic discount, so the developer should come out ahead either way.
The new bundle pricing has already been seen in the wild on a couple of bundles, though it has yet to be rolled out across Steam’s entire library. If they’re already talking to developers about the change, it should probably be available soon though.
Have you skipped a Steam bundle because you already owned games in the bundle? Will this change cause you to reconsider? Tell us what you think in the comments below, or on Facebook, Google+, or Twitter.
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