As big and important as Steam is, we rarely get any kind of official word from Valve on how it’s doing or how it works. Today, that changed, if only a little.
The company accidentally (?) posted a developer message to a public Steam page (grabbed by SteamDB), and it claims that Valve’s decision to opt for constant discount prices for all games during the recent Winter sale (rather than swapping the discounted games each day) was a success.
Because of the change—and a decision to rotate the games being promoted on Steam’s splash pages—more customers looked at game pages, more customers added games to their wish lists, and there was “45% growth” in sales of games outside Steam’s Top 500 charts.
Or, as Valve says, “In short: More customers bought more games across more of the Steam catalog.”
Good news for Valve, good news for developers (especially those for smaller titles), good news for fans. Well, except for the being broke part.