Does anyone else think this Steam sale is retarded?
17 replies, posted
They've had some bad sales like this before, but this one feels like even more of a cash grab with the reward points.
I'm not that really interested on this sale, kinda busy with two old games at this point. My first reaction was "what? spending cash to receive tokens in exchange for cosmetics?" it seems like they are pushing some sort of aggresive-sale towards their users under the guise of time-limited cosmetics.
Don't you want to spend 150 dollars to get a 5 dollar coupon on your next purchase? Doesn't this sound like an exciting sale feature? ARE YOU ENTICED???
I got a whole bunch of stupid pig emotes, I'm satisfied.
gold name for a week and pig emotes.
didn't even pay a cent.
I clicked on of the backgrounds to unlock for 1,000 tokens and the thing took 2,000 on me.
I still got the dumb pig emotes I'll never use so whatever.
I got 5,000 tokens based on my previous spending on Steam apparently (I don't even want to know how that's calculated). With it I got the badge and every single emote, plus a background.
So basically... that's everything you could 'want' I guess?
And ya the coupon is a complete joke (Especially since they seem to be applying the currency conversion rate for USD to the tokens, so $1 CAD = 89 tokens)
Valve has done "spend money get bonus dumbshit" sales promotions many times before, but they usually have handed out sale-specific trading cards and unique badges/emoticons/etc. straight across for spending money, $10 gets you a lootcrate or card or whatever.
Tying the cash sales to points allows them to introduce a floating exchange rate for different currencies (instead of giving, say, Canadians a trading card for spending $10 CDN, while Americans have to spend $10 USD for the same thing) and bypass using the Steam Marketplace for obtaining the things you want by making it directly purchaseable from the sale's points store. It's just optimizations to drive sales and keep the profits pointed at Valve. If Artifact didn't explode on the runway they probably wouldn't be driving this so hard.
The golden account buff and especially the extension option that costs $100+ in games worth of points, though, that's directly aimed at milking the Chinese cultural need for conspicuous consumption. It's not specifically aimed at only the Chinese market, because people around the world like to have dumb bragging rights like a golden name, but explicit displays of wealth are an important way of conveying and maintaining status in China, and Valve's rather transparently pandering to it.
If Valve hadn't just gone through the most embarrassing episode in recent memory with releasing a game nobody asked for with near-abusive microtransaction policies literally no one asked for, I think it wouldn't really be that big of a deal and would have people defending Valve for "recognizing" China. But with recent events still fresh in memory, it's another indictment against what Valve has become.
Trading cards and event-specific badges aren't working anymore, I guess, so they had to mix it up and give the Skinner box a new coat of paint.
If you go mad money frenzy on the sale and spend like $700 because you're gifting your ten closest friends their entire wishlists or some shit, you'll have every icon and background and still have tokens with nothing to use them on, so a discount on the next purchase is at least something they can do to drain tokens once they've exhausted the profile fluff.
And the structure of the sale makes it clear Valve is leaning on the whales and doesn't give a shit about Johnny Ten-Token who's bought one game a year with Christmas money for five years.
If you'll never use them, then how can you tell someone you want to pork them?!
Seems like any other mini-event sale so I don't mind it much. All the coin stuff is just bonus.
check whether you have a duplicate of that background. same thing happened to me except it spent 200 coins and gave me 2 of the same emote. good thing theyre not tradeable or marketable, guess i'll just have twin emotes then.
I got a russian doom mod for 66 cents and a pig in a blanket emote. Its not quite as good as scamming people for coal, but pig in a blanket and the race to make as little money as possible from selling your game is stiff competition.
These events/sales have been shit since the russian coal scandal
best pig emoji coming through
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/211198/4ee59997-3370-4218-875c-de034e1e5b00/Steam_2019-02-06_19-43-04.png
make way for the REAL best emoji
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/228511/b10db800-6694-42b1-a64f-4e8f91e54c23/9ef5cc1a99705d48ab5fa096438bc09945ccdc16.png
Sorry, you need to Log In to post a reply to this thread.