Steam Updates Discount Rules, no more discounts below 10%

Image Credit: Valve

As one of the biggest digital market for video games for years now, Steam has been a largely accessible platform for PC gaming. While its user-friendly gaming eco-system is not as generous as Epic Games Store which offers free games every week, it does have its fair share of big sales on different occasions of the year that enables players to grab many games for a reasonable price.

Recently though, Steam has updated its rules for discounts which might restrict game publishers and developers from being able to price their products freely. 

What did Steam implement for the new rules?

These new rules will thoroughly affect the frequency of which developers and publishers can discount their games as well as the percentages they can discount them by. This means that game creators can only discount their games by less than 10% or more than 90%. 

The new rules state that:

• You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 28 days. 
•  It is not possible to discount your product for 28 days following a price increase in any currency.
• Discounts cannot be run within 28 days of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events.
• Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 28 days of releasing your title, within 28 days from when your launch discount ends, or within 28 days of a price increase in any currency.
• You may not change your price while a promotion is live now or scheduled for the future.
• It is not possible to discount a product by more than 90% or less than 10%.
• Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.

This crackdown by Valve is derived from past game sellers using underhanded means of offering discounts of 1% to get their games featured on the sales list without offering meaningful price-cuts. Big publishers will also now be prompted to give bigger discounts (like more than 10%) to their games few weeks after the launch dates but these changes will definitely affect smaller indie developers more. 

Image Credit: Valve

The new rules will be implemented from March 28, 2022 onwards, right before the next major Steam sale. It is worth nothing that the newly implemented cooldown period will apply to all Steam sales except for the four major seasonal sales, namely Summer, Autumn, Winter and the most famous season of all, Lunar New Year. 

Source

Pokdepinion: Much can be said about how these will affect small indie developers in the long run, however, the new rules dictate that game devs and pubs can only offer a minimum of 10% discount, so all discounts should now be offered in good faith.