![This year’s Steam sale has been awesome. I’ve been taking advantage of the fire sale like prices to further load up my backlog with a whole hell of a lot […]](https://steamaddicts.com/wp-content/uploads/a-christmas-story.jpg "Steam Sales Suck")
This year’s Steam sale has been awesome. I’ve been taking advantage of the fire sale like prices to further load up my backlog with a whole hell of a lot of games that I will likely never ever get through. But that’s okay, because it’s nice to have them there. It’s comforting to know that $20 bucks can all but guarantee that I will never run out of the hottest titles of 2009 to play.
It’s been similarly comforting to know that come the end of the sale, not only will I have a plethora of games that will likely be taken off of my hard drive and forgotten, but I will also be swamped with a deluge of worthless coupons.
Well technically they aren’t worthless. The lions share of them are just for less of a discount than they games are already at.
So now my Steam inventory is slowly turning into something out of an episode of Extreme Couponing. But instead being prepared to buy thousands of gallons of discounted Gatorade, I’m your go to guy if next month you happen to want a copy of Global Ops: Commando Libya. Particularly if you would prefer to pay 50% of the asking price as opposed to the 25% it’s at now.
Coupons are supposed to save you money.
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If this asshole can figure it out… well I’d have thought Valve could too.
The forums are rife with jag-offs who in lieu of harvesting Gabe spunk have chosen to keep themselves busy defending the coupons.
Look: I get it. They are supposed to be a test to see how coupons will work. I really do get that. But you’d think that if Valve is attempting to test coupons they’d want people to, you know, actually use them.
I am also aware that the coupons function as a prize without actually losing Valve money. That’s fine. But I don’t own part of Valve, and consequently I don’t give a shit about their bottom. As long as they stay in business, that’s about as far as it goes. And given the recent valuation of Team Fortress 2‘s hat economy, I think they are doing just fine.
The larger point here is this: as it stands the coupons don’t feel like a prize at all. Instead they just feel like an icy cock slap in the face.
It’s really worse than no prize at all. Because that’s exactly what it is, but we’re being told otherwise.
Beyond that, would anyone have been pissed if they just got coal instead? Probably not.
It would definitely make crafting your coal into exactly not-jack-shit a little more tolerable.
My closing message to the inevitable Steam fanboys crying about how Steam is doing us a big favor and we should be thankful for anything free and that I should just stop whining:
Totally have to agree with you, regardless of the whole thing that they don’t need to do this for us or whatnot. They’re still making a killing with the sales. Everyone is. And the Great Gift Pile is supposed to enhance that. It’s supposed to enhance the experience for users, it’s supposed to enhance interest for the sale, and it’s supposed to enhance their bottom line. But there are literally dozens of ways they could have configured this sale without the coupons that would have gotten them roughly the same bottom line, and everybody would have been happy. It would feel like an actual achievement to complete objectives and then craft the coal you get into a game, regardless of whether you have the game or whether the game is even good. I really hope to see another sale like this one, just without the coupons. Otherwise, it would have been amazing.