from Hacker News

Ask HN: Are misleading sales tactics rampant on Steam?

by Scirra_Tom on 9/23/19, 12:53 PM with 1 comments

Here in the UK I was under the impression that to claim that products are on sale, you should show the previous price and should have been selling at that price for a meaningful period of time.

It appears to be rampant practise on Steam to list an item and put it on sale almost immediately. I understand why sellers do this to attract more attention to the product, but ultimately I don't think it genuinely serves sellers and buyers positively.

  • by benologist on 9/23/19, 2:10 PM

    The games are only temporarily marked down, what you are observing is discounting as a promotional tool because discounts get in front of more people than full-price games.

    These are not perpetual discounts that would make the defacto real price be the discounted price. After the launch week/s the game price will revert and eventually fluctuate from being occasionally discounted, included in bundles, given away etc.

    Discounts are an important sales tool for games - you can see major publishers today are pretty much constantly offering big discounts on one store at a time. Steam etc all have discounted game lists, websites track game deals, there's a huge subreddit for them at r/gamedeals, there's sites tracking the lowest-ever prices for games etc.