How Valve (And Apple) Broke Game Sales | Design Club

Good time zone internet. Hello and welcome to design club, the only game design show on the internet where I try really hard to get chat to sing the SpongeBob theme song but they won't and I'm sad about it. I am Rambo as well joined as always by my pal Jeff. Say hi to the people Jeff.
Hi to the people Jeff. Hey everybody, welcome to our stream for today. I'm Jeffrey Zatkoff, the studio director of extra credits and long time game designer Eric here with my friend Will Voice of the people.
Yeah. We're going to be talking about Steam sales. Well, sort of Steam sales. Right, sort of Steam sales, sort of Apple, sort of the way that games get sold cuz we were noticing something and it's it's kind of an interesting phenomena and I don't think Steam is wholly responsible for it and I don't think Apple is wholly responsible for it but I think they're two great examples of sort of

breaking the way that we understand and think about game sales. So, that's our plan for today. Now, we're going to be talking about some amount of statistics and some amount of stuff that's happening right now. So, for the sake of posterity, today is the 30th of October and we're looking at
One day before Halloween.
One day before Halloween.
One day before Halloween and
and we're looking at sale data and other numbers that are present on Steam today. Like live data, right? So, if you're wondering why you're watching this later and things don't match up at all, that's why because there's currently like the Steam Scream Fest 2025 on which is a sale that's up and that's relevant to our conversation. So, um
Hey Will.
Yes.
Oh, wait. Wrong button. That button.
We're not No, we're not we're We're doing statistics. Statistics is outside of the scope of most content creators.

God, we're not Matt Parker. Although we could totally
I'm happy to get down.
Right, yeah, okay, great, awesome. I'll get I'll get him on and then you two can talk stats while I try and interpret for like half of chat who never took stats.
Today, since we're not doing P value, the P value will stand for Pikachu since we have a um
Yeah.
We have a Pokémon game that and Pokémon since we have one of those that launched in the past couple weeks.
That's true. ZA is making big waves.
Yeah. So, the P value may be shocking.
Yeah. Okay, so let's let's lead in with All right. So, back in the beginning we taught rocks to think. And after we taught rocks to think, people wanted to do things that weren't work on the rocks that thunk. And so, video games came along and you bought them on these ancient devices called floppy disks. And you bought them at a store or you mailed away for them. You mailed money away and then got the

game in the mail, like the physical mail. Okay, great, awesome.
I shouldn't talk about the one older to actually to shock some really old people. Some games used to be
Oh, yeah.
short enough that they would actually send you a printout of the code and you would type it in manually.
Yeah.
Because they it was pre-sending floppy disks.
Yeah, okay, great, awesome. Um
That that that's super old, like
Okay, great, awesome. And then we got uh CDs and then we got and consoles emerged onto the scene and there but at some point this little itty-bitty company that you know, was making a decent name for itself in the PC gaming market Valve released a new product, Steam. And I don't think
Specifically because they wanted their own store.
Correct.
Their own digital store. They were tired of selling everything completely physical.
Correct. And there there had been ways to purchase games digitally before Steam

or to manage your applications, like your games, before Steam. None of them have really survived, mostly because Steam came along and ate their lunch. So
Oh, and quick note, there were still things like web games and other things. Steam was specifically addressing things like, "Hey, we have Half-Life.
Yeah.
We have Counter-Strike. We would like our own store to sell Half-Life and Counter-Strike.
Yeah.
And soon Team Fortress in.
Yeah. Yes. So
That was the original version of Steam.
Yeah, correct. In ye olden days, back when it was Who members Who members when Steam was green? Some of you are now having flashbacks and some of you are going, "Wait, Steam used to be green?"
I forgot that.
Steam used to be green. Like an olive green, like at one point. All right. So And over And over the course of this history, the way that we sold games has

evolved, right? Steam used to do I would say majority majority was allowing you to activate a product code on from like a CD that you'd purchased at your local retailer, and it would handle updates and for some games it would handle save data, which was a pretty big deal cuz you could back up your save data because that was always nice, right? If you lost everything on your computer, at least you had your Civilization save, right? So So it was a good thing. And over time
Let me mention that it to many people who don't who never played before Steam or weren't a big one, PC gaming had this huge dip
Yeah.
in the 2000s to 2010s. Um where consoles was just honestly eating their lunch. And for a while people thought PC gaming was kind of going away.
Yep.
And Steam helped save that. Because one

of the things that PCs didn't have that like if you'd bought an Xbox or a PlayStation, you had your dedicated hardware, you put your you know, CD or DVD you your disk
media, yeah.
Media, there we go. Into your console and it just worked. It did the updates, it handled your saves, all of that. And it was so convenient. And gaming PCs were expensive enough and consoles at the time were comparatively cheap enough that it was a really good solution for most people who just wanted to play. Like a lot of the people who played PC games were more technical people. Because every time say your War Warcraft 3, every time Blizzard put out an update, that's not even a great example cuz of Battle.net, but even so, you would have to manually download and install the update, the patch for your game.
You would have to in some cases you would have to go find it,
Yeah.
download it, install it.

Mhm.
Yeah.
And do that and there was no save game to cloud. So if you had like a PC and a laptop, you were manually transferring save files from one to the other to be able to continue playing.
Remember those crossover cables? Anybody crossover cable to get your game from one computer to another? Yeah. So it used to be in the olden days that Ethernet had two versions. One of them if you were talking to like a router and one of them if you were going straight from computer to computer. Yeah, dark days. Um so
Anyway, so Steam, part of Steam's magic besides being a storefront, was they basically said we'll handle the back end for you.
Yes.
Publishers and developers could upload their game to Steam, um the new version, the you know, you know, version 1.23 instead of 1.21, and Steam would automatically handle the download, the patching, later the cloud saves, all of the stuff that had made PC games tricky to work with, the day one

patch, all of that just automatically started working for consumers.
Yep.
And suddenly, it was as convenient to play as on a console for handling all of the back end.
Yeah.
So, as much as people talk about Steam being, "Oh, here's the place that like you can go buy it." One of the biggest things for both consumers and developers was it also handled all of the crappy stuff nobody wanted to deal with.
Right. It's not exciting to patch a game for most people. I I assume that there's like some people who get their, you know, uh who get a great deal of satisfaction from making patches work and modding and all of that. And like kudos to you, but the average consumer doesn't want to do that, right?
Yeah.
So, so
And Steam got paid for this because anybody who sells a game takes a percentage of the cost. If you go went and bought a game at GameStop or Target or Walmart or on the Xbox store, Steam, anywhere else, the storefronts take a cut of that. And so, especially for a

digital storefront, they didn't have to worry, like say GameStop, about physical inventory or shipping CDs out or getting returns brought to your store or paying employees to sit at the cash register or any of these other things, Steam could win by volume.
Yes.
They had this set up, and the more business they could do, they scaled at a not a linear rate. It wasn't like, "We need to open five new physical stores and staff them up and everything else, and here's our cost per store, etc." It was just like, "Oh, if we can move 400,000 copies of this game instead of 200,000, we make more than double, you know, equivalently the cost don't scale in the same way because it's all digital.
Correct.
And so Steam was incentivized to get people to buy on their store.
Correct. And so and part of that was getting people to adopt, right? So many people may remember that the Orange Box was an absolutely absurd value and I will

posit, this is this is my intuition, I will posit that the any lost revenue that Valve had from the lowered cost of the Orange Box was written off as user acquisition cost for the nascent version of Steam and furthermore that history easily shows that that was a incredibly wise investment on their part because the Orange Box was pretty popular. Team Fortress 2, Portal and Half-Life 2 all in one bundle for like 50, 60 bucks, right? Great value at the time.
Still a bit
And actually, we missed one important thing.
Yeah.
At one point Steam said, "Hey, wait, we built this storefront
Yeah.
for our own games. What would happen if we let other people put games on it, too?"
Yep. And
Because the Steam started as Valve only.
Correct.
And then once they had it in place, they made a that was their monument to decision when they used the Orange Box

to help promote it.
Jeff, you are turning into a robot. One second. Uh Yeah, uh chat, Jeff's going to momentarily vanish into the void as I reload him. Uh and and he'll be right back. Um
It's so weird. I don't see it on Steam or on Twitch watching.
Yeah, uh you it's auditory. So unless you're listening to yourself on on Twitch, you won't
I am not.
Okay, cool. Great. Okay.
Why Twitch, why?
Yeah, no, Thunder thinks it's a node blip in California, which makes sense. There'd be more of those. Um so Okay. So, all of that to say, Steam had established itself as a presence in the gaming industry, as a place to buy games for consumers and to sell games for developers. It was a thing which was culturally relevant to a whole bunch of PC gamers, right? It was quickly becoming the one store that most gamers really wanted to buy games on, rather than buying on, you know, Uplay and uh

Origin, right? Yeah, it was
just going to the store. People used to go to the GameStop to the PC section
Right.
at the time, or Target, or Walmart, or a Best Buy, or
Right.
like any number of other places.
But see, Jeff, those all have a distinct disadvantage over Steam.
You got to drive there?
I have to wear pants, Jeff. I don't have to wear pants to buy a like a game on Steam, right? I could be in my pajamas at 2:00 in the morning and be like, "Man, I really want to buy Hello Kitty Island Adventure." And I can buy Hello Well, I don't know if I can buy Hello Kitty Island Adventure, but I can buy games like Hello Kitty Island Adventure on Steam at 2:00 in the morning without putting on pants when the stores are closed. And like, for consumer, that's great. No question.
Yep.
Right? And then Valve started doing sales, right? As ways to increase visibility for their platform.
Hold on, Will.
Yeah.
I'm going to interrupt.
Yeah.
Because there's another player here we have to talk about that feeds directly into the Steam story. And gets to the

heart of what we're actually going to be talking about. Yeah. So, sometime around when all of this Actually, before all of this was happening, there was a thing going on in Korea, which you may have heard of, Will. Korea is, I believe, the nation whose primary means of GDP production is training e-sports gamers and pop stars.
Their culture agriculture, it?
That is correct.
Culture is one of Korea's, if not Korea's top export, it's one of their top exports. Is it is culture in various forms.
And right around the or not or right around, in the early 2000s, Korea was going through a massive unemplo- wave of unemployment. And um actually even late '90s early 2000, wave of unemployment and a lot specifically of young men were coming out of university and couldn't find jobs.

And also couldn't afford computers. And so Korea has something called an internet or just a bong, which is an internet cafe. A Korean word for it. I'm probably mispronouncing it slightly. But um and there were places where you could go and rent computers by the hour. And unlike American cafes, one of the things that cafe owners used to lure young men in who were ostensibly going there to either spend time online job hunting with the nascent inter- or growing internet, was they would pirate a whole bunch of games and put them all on the computers.
Yep.
And so you paid for the computer time, but not for the games. And this made a whole generation of young Korean men specifically think that you should get your games for free and let them loose on lots and lots of games. StarCraft being one of the big ones.
Yeah.
Um and this ended up leading to a lot of Korean developers who were Korean game

developers looking at it and saying, "Hmm, nobody's paying for our games." And then realizing they were all getting pirated and starting to say, "Well, screw it. We're just going to put in in-game transactions because if they're going to pirate all our games, at least we can then make money when they play the game and they want to buy a sword or a storehouse or a mount or something or a cosmetic or something else." And this basically led to the rise of free-to-play games. And be specifically from the piracy and then moving things in. And so free free-to-play started coming out of Korea as a alternative method that things could be using. Flash cut over to America a little bit later with Apple releasing the iPhone and the iTunes store. And Apple made a strategic decision that every single every song was going to be 99 cents. Uh that was like one of their marketing things.
Yeah.
Less than a buck, go buy any song you want. And they had a huge library. And

later when they expanded it from music into apps, and they started courting game and other developers to put apps in, they continued on this marketing line of everything should be 99 cents.
Right.
And so basically Apple had primed people to think all of the everything you get on your phone here should be 99 cents. And you've heard me talk about the anchoring effect a lot of which is what people expect on a cost is built into their mind. If you go into a coffee shop and you're used to a coffee costing $5 and you see it costing 250, you're going to be like, "Wow, that's a huge deal." If you see it costing 10, you're going to be sticker shocked. This costs twice as much as it should. And it's because your price is anchored at something. And you know, despite the fact you might pay 10 to or five times that amount for a drink in a bar, you know, or like you're you have weird prices. Like

you're used to buying a Yeah. You know, you can go buy a six-pack at a 7-Eleven for a way different price than you can buy a single beer in a mid-size bar.
Right. Yeah.
Like it's just your mind your mind likes putting things into holes and say, "This is the whole. This belongs into etc."
Right. Yeah. I think it's just we're it's very worth noting as well that like the context super matters for anchoring, right? That like just go over this, right? So, coffee at Starbucks is anchored differently probably than coffee at a drive-thru is anchored differently than right or gas station is anchored differently than the amount of money it costs you to buy a K-cup to make coffee at home. Your brain categorizes those differently despite the fact that the end result for all of them is a hot cup of coffee.
Yeah. And so, when game developers started saying, "Hey Apple, it takes us a lot more effort to make a game than, you know, we can sell for 99 cents. You know, we need to be charging $4.99 for this even though our We normally charge

20 bucks for this game. We'll reduce it down to $4.99 for your iTunes store." People looked at that and said, "This game costs five times as much as it should. It should only cost 99 cents." Despite the fact that they're paying $20 for it over at another place.
Right.
Like anchoring's weird. Yeah. It's cool weird, but it's weird.
Yep. And And that was all like 2007-ish when the first iPhone came out. The first gen iPhone was 2007.
And so, the long and the short of it is between going free to play and people looking at game costs and then Apple coming in and starting to anchor game prices at certain points, people started getting ideas that games could cost different amounts than they were used to where you used to go to a store in a, you know, a triple-A or a big game or pretty much all games cuz they didn't do a lot of differentiation other than bargain bin would be pegged at $49.99 or $59.99 or

$39 depending upon the year.
Yeah.
Well, actually like from 2005 and on, Xbox and PlayStation games were uh $49.99. Like they stayed that way for a freaking long time.
Yeah.
And but anyway
So So in light of
Yeah.
Yeah. Steam enters into this whole ecosystem
Right.
for this and sees that there are different prices people are willing to pay for games.
Right. And the part of that is that Steam let individual companies choose their own prices for the games on the service, right? And that they've got a cut and like that makes sense. And so just like Apple, you could charge what you wanted except because you were doing full price bigger games, you know, I remember BioShock and Orange Box and Call of Duty and and and the price was anchored higher, right?

For a really long time. It was It was that Valve was like a premium place for premium games. But they started to try and drive revenue a couple of times a year. The summer sale and winter sale are the ones that stick out to me as as like big things in my memory, but they started doing big temp pole events. In fact, one of the ones that probably sticks in most people's heads is when Portal 2 came out. They did that whole thing with the potato pack where they sold a whole bunch of indie games for like next to nothing. I haven't played any of those indie games since the potato pack released. They sold a whole bunch of indie games for exposure for next to nothing. And they hid potatoes as achievements in all of those games and every potato that the community got would make Portal 2 come out
Oh, yeah.
a mere fraction of a percent of a second faster. With like the golden
Yeah, right.
To be disclosed in that case.
Correct.

Um
Oh.
Quick note. Well, I made a mistake. I said $50. It was $60. It was $59.99 from Xbox 360 and PS3. So, from 2005
Yeah.
roughly to a couple years ago, every game cost $60.
Yeah.
Like, that was the
Right.
That was the price point.
So, things like the potato pack were not uncommon in the early days of of of Steam, where there would be a cool event with some kind of either ARG layer or community interactivity layer. There would be a reason to participate in the sale even if you didn't buy anything. Um and you would often buy something, right? And and this was not a common occurrence, but not a completely uncommon one, either. And it was like a couple times a year.
was also unique. Like, Apple didn't run sales on like the iTunes store. It wasn't like, "Hey, songs are normally 99 cents.

Now they're 79 cents."
Yeah.
for a little while. And Xbox and PlayStation and Nintendo on the early stores also weren't particularly running sales.
Nintendo still doesn't run sales. Right.
GameStop didn't run sales. It would discount games that it wasn't moving.
Right. But it wasn't like a store-wide sale. Yeah.
Yeah.
Um and that kind of changed over the years. And I can't really put my finger on the pivot point. But if we look at Steam now,
Mhm.
I hesitate to say that I remember a week, an entire seven calendar days in which there was not a front page big Steam extravaganza sale on at least one publisher, category of games, theme of games, whatever, right? It's October 30th right now. We There's a sale on horror games and spooky games for Halloween, right? And and this has continued almost every week. And they've

invented new ones where it's like niche um like a you know, niche strategy games and whatever. And this is the effect that we kind of want to talk Yes.
Right. Actually, that just reminded me Ranger of the Void brought up an interesting thing, which I think outside of Black Friday
Yes.
So, there would be a couple of games, and actually, let me talk about Will, do you know the term loss leader?
Yes, I do.
So, so physical stores have long had a history of this, and video games picked it up at a certain point. Well, they will price something so that they might actually even be losing money, but they want it to be a popular enough item that will bring a whole bunch of people physically into their store.
Right.
And while they're there, the theory is that while you're there to buy your loss leader item, it's like, "Oh, look, you know, Captain Crunch cereal is now, you know, instead of $2 is now 99 cents. It's half off." And as people

stock up on their Captain Crunch, they're also going to then go buy milk and orange juice and bagels and all of this other stuff that goes along with it. Using a silly example there, but
Right.
it is the thing that gets them in the door. The low-price TVs on Black Friday, the bundle packs or the Yeah.
Yeah. Two side notes on that. One, never buy a TV on Black Friday. It's almost always a specific model made with fewer features specifically for Black Friday. Don't buy those. And second, the psychology goes really deeply on loss leaders. There's probably like a whole There's There's like a whole episode somewhere on um how how stores use loss leaders because usually they're in the back.
Mhm.
They're in the back of the store. Physically in the back of the store.
so you can't see everything. Yes.
Right. That's That's one of the reasons why meat is in the back of many stores in addition to the fact that it needs to be around the perimeter to get access to like a loading dock. Refrigeration. Yeah, meat and milk are usually in the back so that you have to go through the

store and look at all of the shiny attractive packaging to get to them, right? Less of a thing. That's not that's less less of a thing. It's not not a thing in digital sales, but the location of it is sort of
Digital location is weird.
Yeah, because you have a search bar, right? And so that's that's kind of hard.
But anyway, so there had been like the sales are in the game industry had typically centered around like a Black Friday kind of thing or other things with some groups like Walmart negotiating independently with 2K games or their Microsoft negotiating with EA to have specials during these where they kind of voluntarily co-market and eat some of the cost together to bring people into the store and sell more and do other things.
Right.
And so that's what we were used to for sales at to a certain point.
Yeah.
And then Steam looked at that and realized they didn't have a physical store. They couldn't send people at a loss leader
Right.

to the back of the store and like pass all the other stuff, but they could start doing discounts enough to bring people in who might then look around for other games or Steam's other big thing was once on a digital place like Steam is your digital library once you have a certain amount of games in there, people start being reluctant to buy in other places because they don't want to have five different digital libraries. They just want their one place where everything's there.
We we actually had this live on stream this week for Rogue Review. I finished the first game in about 2 hours and was looking for a game for the next 2 hours of our Rogue Review. It's on Tuesdays here on Twitch.
Okay.
Someone recommended a game that was on Epic. And the game looks really cool. It looks like an interesting roguelike. And the hitch that my brain hit even though I know what's going on. I'm consciously aware of this, was I don't have Epic on my computer. I don't want to go through the hassle of installing Epic when I could buy game that looks

almost as cool on Steam for a roughly equivalent price. Right. Look, I experienced that cognitive like hiccup live on stream, and I knew it was happening, and knowing that it was happening didn't stop it from happening even, which is weird.
Epic is so aware of this that Epic since they launched the Epic Store has been giving away a game a week every single week. Some of them mean pretty big games.
Yeah.
Where just to make you build up a library there. Like Epic is eating tens of millions of dollars because they're reimbursing the developers.
Yes.
Tens of millions of dollars, possibly more, as marketing and user acquisition costs to get people in to the Epic Store ecosystem because they know how much people want one big library one place. Like, if all you did was show up on Epic every single week and download their free game,
you'd have thousands of dollars of free games.
Yeah.

Yeah, absolutely.
And you can build up like And I will say that for a while I wasn't doing that.
Right. Or even possibly setting up two or three emails to do that and be like, "Oh, son, you are now old enough. Here is your Epic account with 400 games on it."
Right. But even then it's not like that's not enough to overcome the effect of
it's just such an interesting
Yeah. That whole psychology thing is a whole different episode.
Right.
But But anyway, storefront.
Yeah. So So Steam is
Steam's like, "Let's get people to buy more games on us."
Correct. Get Get in here, buy games, right? And someone correctly pointed out that Steam uh Valve would often use their own games as a loss leader. So, for instance, they would do There's a There's a bundle on Steam called the Valve Complete Pack, um which is everything that Valve has ever put out. Uh it is the 230 uh it is bundle ID 232

on Steam. There were only 231 bundles on Steam that came out before it. Um and it is
Some of which may have been test bundles or other things knowing how development works.
Correct. Uh and um it is like everything they've ever put out, and it would normally be, you know, hundreds of dollars, and it's it's um cheaper than that, and usually goes That's one of the things that they put on sale to bring people in, right? As an example. So, they do try and do loss leading. It just works a little differently because they have to bring you to the platform rather than into the store, and then you see all of the sales. But, I don't know I don't necessarily have a great reason on the why, and I don't think we're really here to discuss the why of why Steam has gone this route, but they've increased the frequency of these sales. They've increased the frequency of these sales significantly. They've increased the amount of uh the discount, right? Used to be 10%. That's a pretty good

deal. 20% That's a really good deal. And now we're looking at like 50, 60% off the sticker price for a game, and sometimes it's become so commonplace that I go, "Oh, that's I mean, it'll be better." Right?
Right.
And that's
to come back and get to that because I want to talk about why that's happening,
Mhm.
but I think the big thing that's happened over time. So, remember that anchoring effect I'm talking about prices and other things. Steam has, because they continue to do so many sales and increase their frequency, and a couple of the other reasons on bigger discounts that we'll get to in a minute, trained an entire generation of gamers, possibly two generations at this point,
Uh-huh.
that if you're buying a PC game, you will get it on discount, possibly significant discount, if you wait long enough.
Right.
Hold the day one sales. Well, we'll get to that.
Right. So So there's And there And there is
it's good.

There is an exception to
of Now they're like launching with sales on day one.
Correct. That is more common in the indie space than it is in the AAA space, but it is still happening, right? So there are games that are saying, "Now, uh, you know, 10% off for the first week."
Launch day special. Or launch week special.
Wild, by the way. Um, that's not normally how you would do that, although I can see the logic in it, right? They're attempting to end up in the black as quickly as possible by driving sales in the first week.
Or spike their sales to get them up in the algorithm.
Correct. Or get enough reviews. Get it Spike sales to get enough reviews to be reviewed favorably, etc. Um, so in my In my experience, right? There are two, like, real categories of game sales on PC. I bought it day one {slash} pre-ordered it. That is a whole category, right? Sometimes immediacy is the big deal,

right? Absolutely bought I bought so many copies of Silksong day one. I bought my copy. I bought all my mom's copy. I bought so many copies, right? Day one. Don't care. It's I owe Team Cherry so much money anyway, right? Or it's on sale. And sometimes it's both. And the sometimes it's both is wild, right? But the those, in general, are the way the two ways that people look at games on PC now.
And it did not used to be the case, like we ran through the whole history, but I cannot think of anybody who buys games on Steam at this point. And I know a lot of gamers who are not trained to think I will wait for a sale. Like there's either the game that they so so want that it's the day one purchase. Everything else is I wait for sale.
Correct.
Like Steam has basically broken how people think about game pricing.
Mhm.
That they you will never pay full price for a game unless it's something that you just have

to have to have to have to have day one.
I would say unless it's something that like you is part of your gamer identity, which sounds really weird, right? But if you like you think about like the games that really matter to you. Like um I don't have it with me, but like I have a gamer patch vest with like patches from like all of the franchises that like are near and dear to my heart that like kind of lets viewers know at a glance when I'm gaming what I'm about, right? Um it's the physical version of the 10 games to know something about me meme. Uh and I can think of examples where like for all of those games I've been like, "Oh yeah, day one. Obviously I'm getting, you know, whatever." Um
Aqua, you know what's so sad? I haven't actually bought the new Civ yet. I have such a game and let me this Thank you for the transition. This also transitions this so nicely into I have so many games in my Steam catalog.
Yes.
That for example, I'm finishing up Baldur's Gate again. I want to hit

Cyberpunk cuz I still haven't played it. Um I've been doing some Monster Train too. I'm like And there there's this whole grouping of games that I know I don't yet have time for Civ 7.
Right.
So I haven't even bought it yet because I know I don't have time for it yet. And so my mind has been like, "Cool. Let's see when it hits its first big drop or so."
Yeah.
And that's for a game like for people who haven't seen I have thousands of hours on both Civ 5 and Civ 6.
Yeah.
Thousands each.
Yeah.
I've played a lot of Civs.
Yeah.
There's also the port thing which for Civilization usually until your one to two expansions in
It's bad.
like the game hasn't really hit its stride yet, but that's another story.
Right. So, we've got other examples, right? Disky is also pointing out correctly that sometimes games release with bugs.
Yep.
Truth that is a truth thing about games

in in the modern year. And so in addition to waiting, you will get a more polished game for less money. Why would I not wait other than the immediacy? Now, I should also point out that I am largely I will fully admit and I probably should have done this at the top. I am not in this category because the overwhelming majority of games that I buy are games that I buy to put on stream or to play for content or to play to understand a topic that we're talking about. I buy games professionally, not recreationally most of the time. And we'll talk about why my recreational games don't fall into this category in a bit.
But
that is that is a thing that I also have to own when we're talking about this is that my purchasing habits don't look like this.
Um
But the weird thing going along I'd said I'll come back to is the amount of discount has also increased where you know a 10 or 20% might be an interesting thing and now you know we're seeing 30, 40, 50, 60 or more. Part of this is also

old games are still good and they're still made. So, let's go look at oh, I don't know. 2K. Uh wait, who puts out Borderlands? It's 2K, right?
Gearbox.
Gearbox. Wait, are they published by?
I think they're published by 2K.
Okay.
Oh, that's right. Oh, no. That's that's yeah. Uh do do do do do Yeah, it is published by 2K and Aspire. That's who I I was I was thinking of. Yeah.
So, 2K is publishing this as long as well as a whole bunch of other games. Borderlands 1 with its expansions is done. So is Borderlands 2. So is Borderlands 3. 2K is sitting on a significant amount of Borderlands content game that is still good to play and that plenty of people have not played Borderlands 1, 2, or 3 yet. Even though,

you know, we got 4. So, even setting aside 4 for the moment, there is when 2K initially put some discounts on it, but as more games have come out and basically they have this thing just sitting around, they can be like, "Well, we used to sell it for 60. Tell you what, now we're selling it for permanently, you know, for 30, permanently 50% off. You know, now we're going to sell it for, you know, 80% off because they the game is so old, they just want to move it. Any dollar they make off that by deep discount is most likely more people buying it cuz they see that 80% off and get that dopamine hit than would have gotten bought it at higher prices.
Right. And that's
They've done the math.
And that's pure profit, right? Because the game has paid for itself a long time ago. To to Jeff's point, Borderlands 1 Game of the Year enhanced edition is the bundle. Uh is it the one
the Year. So, this was, as a reminder

people, Game of the Year Borderlands was a huge hit when it came out.
Right. There are still 541 people playing and the game is 30 bucks. Mhm.
Right.
And regularly gets discounted way more than that.
Correct.
Uh but so, part of the problem and the reason we see the big discounts is there is such a back catalog
Right.
in so many big publishers. 2K, EA, Sega, Sony, Microsoft, Tencent, Ubisoft. I mean, just that look at all of these digital games they have and are really happy to on a game they used to make 64, now make five four because it's just it's extra money they never would have gotten otherwise cuz people won't pay $60 for a 15-year-old game anymore, but they might pay five.
And I want to bring up Space Gardener's point here, right? By the way, chat's on fire. These are all great examples. Thank you so much. Um Space Gardener feels like the discount percent has gone down in the last year

and I think that that's kind of true, but I think it's also that it is um smaller discounts aren't registering anymore, right? Oh, I'm sure it'll go deeper. Um especially when we have games at 90% off. Frostpunk is $3 right now, right? Um there is a game right, there is a game that's temporarily free on Steam. Distant Space is temporarily free. Also not helping this, by the way, is the um the fact that the internet remembers. So and and you may you may remember this. Have you ever been in a in a big box store or a or a chain grocery store and you'll see the little label in front of the item on the shelf that's like you know, have 50% off, $5, used to be $10 and you lift it up and the base price is still on the tag under the sale label and it says $5, right? That's banned on Steam, by the way. You're not allowed to adjust your price and put a sale on within a certain

amount of time together cuz Valve thinks that practice is scummy as it is. Um but the the percentage off needs to be bigger to like overcome that. Um and so we're seeing discounts frequently to get people to buy it at all, but when you want to get noticed, it's like 70, 90, 95% off for like when you really just want to get noticed. And that's a fascinating phenomena, too.
What doesn't help people for this is like I just opened up the SteamDB app.
Yeah.
And I'm looking through the sales and like Hollow Knight currently is 50% off. It's $7.49 and SteamDB has a little note to it next to it, current two-year low.
Right.
I look at that 50% off, I can also be like, "Oh, this is the lowest it's been." Or Sons of the Forest above it, 68% off and there's a little note, new historical low.
Yes.
So, like as I'm browsing through some of these, the fact that it is easy certain

groups now just have databases that track pricing, I can look at that and be like, "Oh, Hades is currently at an all-time low." Um Excuse me, it is it is 66% off $8.49 right now with a little note next to it that the all-time low was $6.14 24 at 75% off. So, I know that I'm close enough. Like there are tools that track these now. And as since people have again, back to the hypothesis, people have been so trained on Steam sales, they won't buy full price anymore most of the time and continue to look at these like for most people, if you really want a game, a lot of these prices, whether it's 40, 50, 60, 70% not bring it low enough that it puts it in your threshold of buying. Like it's gone over the tipping point of, "Oh, okay, sure." Like the difference between end up spending $6.24 and $7.33 or $8.21,
I'll I'll tell

I'll tell you what it is, Jeff.
Mhm.
It's the dopamine hit.
Oh, yeah. But I'm just saying that for most people, that $2 range
Yeah.
for a game that they want
Yeah.
isn't going to be the moderating factor. But, you know, seeing it go down to that, you know, 80% or 75% off when that's the lowest it's ever been, you're like, "Oh."
Now, and and there's there's some psychological value there because now that game is associated with the the good brain chemicals that you get from getting the best deal possible, right? And like that's its own sort of like feedback loop, which is also a thing that companies can use, right? Especially because all of those games now have sequels, right? Like Hades you just mentioned has a sequel.
Mhm.
So, they're selling their game super cheap both because the game has paid for itself and they make money. So, they're asking people to pay them to get advertising for the sequel.
Well, kind of, but I mean, it's also

like, "Hey, if you like game one, you have a higher chance of buying game two."
Yeah, that's true.
Mhm.
Yeah.
So, like But, all of this like together, the huge back catalog of games is also part of what's driving up publishers being willing to just continue to lower prices to get any amount of money out of a 5, 10, 15, 20-year-old game.
Right. Yeah, especially because um I would venture a guess that and I'll even be super generous and say excluding Minecraft, we'll go with just Steam. Okay? And you say, "Why am I excluding Minecraft?" In a second. That the majority of gamers who are going to watch this video have enough games in their Steam library that they could begin playing now and comfortably be well into their retirement, if not later, before they run out of games to play in their Steam backlog. Yes, this is a call out post. Yes, I'm in this

picture, but I think that nobody, like if if all you're doing is looking for games that scratch the itch to play games, I don't think most people need new games.
Especially if you've got say a couple of say civilization style games in there or other ones that you could comfortably play for a couple of years.
Yeah.
on one of those. And like so I want to call out an interesting thing about this. Okay, so we've talked all about Steam has trained people to do this.
Right.
And because it's also a PC store
Mhm.
I think has basically has to do the same thing.
Yes. I agree.
But we don't see the Oh, and actually let me throw out another one. The Unity store. If you're devving for Unity and you're going to go buy software on the Unity store has also fallen into this exact same thing where they run sales often enough that they have trained people who do who buy off the Unity store that as long as you don't need something right away,

anything you want enough will most likely go on sale somewhere in the next couple months. Like I've been devving on Unity for a while, but I've been most more recently as people know watching the Unity store cuz I'm making my own game and I'm buying I'm buying some back end for it to accelerate my development process. And like I have already been trained. I can get 50% off of most things I want every other month.
Yep.
Like it's just it is hard for me to buy at full price on that.
Right.
But again, anchoring, let's go over to the Nintendo to Apple again. The Apple store does not regularly run discounts in the same way that uh Steam does.
Right.
It's straight up. You are not trained to wait around saying, "Here's an app I want to buy. If I wait another couple months, it will drop it'll get a 50% off style thing."

Um I believe the same with the Nintendo store.
Yeah, Nintendo is actually This is actually a point against Nintendo in many people's estimation of the Switch 2 and Nintendo's move to more expensive games is that they are notoriously don't do sales. And while they are holding firm on that, people who exist in multiple ecosystems, right? Nintendo and Steam, Nintendo and Xbox, more realistically Nintendo and PlayStation, right? Will often hold against Nintendo the idea of that they don't do sales. When they're higher price, right? So like if a game is a higher price on PC, who cares? I'll wait 2 years and it'll be on sale for half of what it was always like it'll be 30 bucks regardless as long if I wait long enough, right? Versus Nintendo where no, it's going to be $70 forever, right? And that's that's a thing that they're known for.
But also like I think as much as people

rail against it, it works to their advantage. Nintendo continues to because they have told people we never do sales.
Yeah.
Well, we'll throw an asterisk. Like I'm sure there are but
It's It's It's usually not first-party sales. When we're talking about Nintendo, by the way, we're not talking about Nintendo like other We're not talking about people who launch games on Switch. We're largely talking about Nintendo first party.
But even the amount of people who run discounts on Switch, I would say are significantly less than on a group like Steam.
Yeah.
Like Nintendo has just trained people if you are in our ecosystem games are going to cost.
Yeah.
And your brain doesn't hiccup on that as much because you know that's just how it works. You are anchored the effect that games in the Nintendo ecosystem behave differently than they do on Steam.
Yeah.
Just straight up. And I haven't played a lot on the Xbox and PlayStation stores in the past couple years, but I believe they're somewhere more in the middle
Yes.
between Nintendo and Steam.
Especially because both of them have subscription services which give access

to free games or free access to games, excuse me, um day one in the case of Xbox. And yes, they just doubled their price and that's a whole other episode, right? Um or that uh the subscription will come with a discount on certain games as one of the benefits of the subscription. Right? So, they tend to be in like I would call it almost a third model where their subscription is really the thing that's driving the monetary interaction with the store.
Right. And that specifically, like they carved out an alternate version
Mhm.
with the Xbox and PlayStation passes.
Yeah.
The And so, their storefronts can behave a little differently because their big thing is, "Oh, just pay us X amount of dollars every single month and you'll get all of these games you can play."
Yep.
But as a quick note, it's a way of locking you into the ecosystem, too, because you're not buying the games.
Right.
You're getting access to them for a certain amount of time. And if you stop paying your subscription, that access goes away.

Yep. So, this is all kind of been like lead up to like where we are now. And I think the next this this next part that I I want to talk about is kind of the I'm to put it bluntly, the so what, right? Like so, why does this matter? What is this doing? How is this affecting things? One of the easiest ways I think that it's easy to see is when we talk about how much money a game makes or needs to make or um what a game's profit like reve- like uh profit margin is or how much they need to price it at, right? So, the Some of the
curious where you're going with this one, okay.
Okay. So, there there's a couple of things that I think are in play here and I want to run them by Jeff and see what Jeff thinks. Number one, prestige pricing. If you're not familiar, prestige pricing is this thing is quality because it costs more. Now, you might be thinking that's silly. It should be it should cost more because it's good. No, no, no, no, no. It's

quality because it's expensive. It's not expensive because it's quality.
If a Call of Duty ever came out instead of for $70 for $25,
Yes.
people would look at it and say, "What is wrong with this Call of Duty?"
Exactly.
Activision must think this one was so bad that they're hoping to get any amount of money out of me. Right.
Now, weirdly, there's a there's a mental carve out in that for free. Free is like a whole different part of your brain. So, like if if um I think Battlefield just released a new like free-to-play Battle Royale, right? Like there's Battlefront Tactics, whatever.
I think they have like a free weekend or something or a free or a free or a free week going on, coincidentally timed when their opponents or rivals' game is launching.
Yes. Right. So, so that's a whole thing. And uh to to to point out correctly, perceived pricing is a scam. It is a psychological tactic that some brands use to make you overvalue their

product in the face of arguments to the contrary. Yes. Right. So, that's that's a whole thing. There's another thing, too.
But part of that goes back to the anchoring effect. If you're used to like premium AAA games costing 70 and one comes out significantly below that, part of your mind wonders why.
So, like Claire Obscure came out at 50. Oh god, it's been a hot second. I think Claire Obscure came out at 50. And had to do some preloading of a narrative, which is largely true. I don't want to accuse them of of telling a single untruth here, that they are a scrappy indie company and that that's why it's $50. That's partially true. Part of it's that they got a grant from the French government, and part of it is that it was a really great marketing move. Like the way they did it, and the way they positioned themselves to be a $50 game in a year that's full of 70 and $80 games was a masterpiece in how to use your pricing to be free advertising, but

it was a risk because it could have come across as being less. I think one of the other things that went for it is if you haven't seen the prologue for Claire Obscure, it is breathtakingly gorgeous and made me cry on stream in like 20 minutes, right? Which really helps to cement the quality of the game early on so that people won't refund it and will still believe that it's good. So like prestige pricing's a whole thing. The other one is that people now need to build into their list price the idea that when the thing goes on sale, they still need to make money.
Yep.
The the especially on Steam where the um It's really a question of how much money they make after platform cuts, right? But like how much can they discount the game and still make money off of every copy before they've broken even on development costs is a real question that people are asking now because sales are so expected,

right?
I can absolutely say, having launched multiple games in the past decade, that um there's been a studio conversation every single game with myself and the other people running it that we put out, which is how much do we price this like knowing that at a certain point we're going to be char getting half of that. And we're going to be expecting to, you know, run sales for 1/3 to 50% off on a regular basis as often as we can.
Yep.
And so, you know, if we were looking to for an indie game get 10 bucks it. We're probably pricing it therefore at 20 because we're baking in the sale price. If there never were sales, we might have been charging 10 or 15 for it. Because we know how they are, we're going to start charging 20. And therefore know, and that's one of the reasons too on that $70

price point, big games are loath to go below that because they know at a certain point they're going to be doing 20% off, 30% off, 50% off. They're going to be getting $35, not 70. And of course store cuts and other things, too. But um like why would they start lower? Because with As soon as they start doing discounts, you know, they would rather start at 70 and do 50% off and get 35 because they know they can sell more copies. If they just priced it at 35, people would be like, "Oh, it's 35." But when your brain sees 70 down to 35,
It's a whole different ball game.
that's a really good deal.
Yep. And this this whole um that conversation is one of the reasons why I use the math that I do when we're talking about estimating game profits. It's not the most scientific, but I find that it's I would say it's the best way I've seen, which is you take the estimated number of copies sold cuz no one will give you that number or the number of copies sold

if they'll actually give you that number, and you multiply it by the lowest price the game has ever been
Okay.
in its entire history, and that's roughly a you are in the right ballpark for take home um after platform fees and uh taxes and everything else. That's not always the most accurate, but it's helpful when we're talking about like orders of magnitude, right? When we're talking about like how much money did Team Cherry really make on Hollow Knight?
I would say, well, that's accurate for anything that's in the one to say seven or eight year old range.
Yeah, older than that it's much harder.
Well, because they start The older a game gets, I was talking about you start getting deeper discounts put on by the publisher just because they're like, "Well, let's see what else we can ring out of this game."
It's also much easier to see on games that don't have a publisher or that are independently published because there's a much closer correlation obviously between the devs knowing how much money they are making. There's like one less person involved in the conversation about what that lowest sale price is.

Not to say that publishers are good or bad in that respect, but there is another voice in the conversation that there isn't one in self-published.
Yeah.
So, um like that's the number that we really have to be looking at when we're talking about what games want to make. And I think that, weirdly, misses a bunch of consumers. The whole conversation we just had about what a game company actually wants to make per unit sold is completely lost on a large number of consumers because it doesn't matter to most people because the psychology works, right? 70, 50% off down to 35 in most people's minds is so much better than just 35. Right?
It is It is
Cuz it's telling you you're getting $70 worth of value for half of that.
Yeah.
That is what that little splash 50%
Yeah.
or slash over initial number 50%.
Yeah, really Yeah, it really does. One of the other things that it's done that

I think is really noteworthy is the wish list phenomena. So, how many of you have More I'll I'll start low. How many of you have more than 50 games on your Steam wish list? Right?
No, interestingly, I don't. I keep mine somewhat curated.
Okay. I have mm Hold on. Let me give you an actual number. Let me give you Let me give you an actual number real quick while while chat chimes in. Uh store.steampowered.com
This This of my favorite ones, right here.
Yeah, no, that's great. Yeah, correct. Uh definitely me. Okay, I have 390 games on my wish list right now.
Wow.
Now, I'm also
get a lot of notifications, Will.
So, let's talk about the wish list games. So, there are two things. One, it has become more publicly aware. It has become more known to the public outside of like our little niche of like people who deeply care about games. Cuz again,

if you're watching two guys in an animated coffee shop talk for about an hour and a half about the impact of Steam prices on video game sales, you are not the average consumer, and that's not a good or a bad thing. It's just a thing you need to be aware of. Um more people have become aware that wish lists are a metric which are tracked and having more wish lists is beneficial to games.
Mhm.
That some some people really care about that. And the other one is exactly what Jeff said, which is that the 20% discount has become so incredibly ubiquitous because every time a game goes on a 20% sale or more, everyone who has that game on their wish list gets an email. Now,
Mhm.
I don't actually get those emails cuz they're in a separate email box which doesn't send me notifications, but I've looked, and I get notifications every day. Pretty much every day. It's like, "Hey, here are all of the games from your wish list that are on sale this day." And if

it went to my primary email box, I'd probably buy more games because I'd get reminded of the games that I put on my wish list that are on sale, right? Yeah, if you if you look, this is a great one. If you if you look, you can see how many um you can scroll
you can scroll down your wish list.
You can search for all with discount.
Mhm.
Uh and I have, you know, dozens, probably more than 100. Yo, whatever happened to Clank? Yeah, I'm still scrolling. It's a bit. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I have I have a lot of these. Um So, yeah, that that's another whole phenomena is that instead of it feels backwards, right? Instead of loss leading with things that you were going to go for this go to the store for anyway, it's not really loss leading. It's sort

of like sale baiting you into going to the store by telling you that the thing that you want has finally reached the stage in which you're prepared to buy it. That's how it feels to me. Maybe it feels different to you, Jeff, but like hear me out on this.
Okay.
Steam is building this um behavior loop where I see a game, it's not on sale, I'll put it on my wish list, then Steam tells me it's on sale, and then I buy it. They've set up the circumstances to perpetuate the very thing that we're talking about on purpose, right? Which is to train people to only get it on sale, because you get a little ding. You get You get a little You get a little bell. You get a little Pavlovian response. Oh, ding ding ding, gamer, your game is on sale, time to buy it.
But and it's weird, too, because like in a perfect world for Steam, everybody would buy everything at full price. That would generate Steam the most. But they know you if you They

know you may not, so they give you an immediate button, which is throw this on my wish list, because maybe I'll buy it later.
Yeah.
The sales are a great way for Steam to say, "Hey, here's a the game you said you might be interested. By the way, it's a little bit off. Come check it." Like, it's a constant way for them to be like, "Game you might be interested in still exists. Reminder, reminder, reminder."
Yeah.
So, like it is serving their purpose in that ecosystem. They're But, for a lot of people, I think you're right. If it isn't that game you must have immediately, and there are circumstances for that, it's the hit the wish list, I'll come back later and check it out when I get a notification that it's 40% off or whatever the thing is that
Yeah. Uh YouTube I am aware We just had a hiccup on your end.
this. That's funny.
It appears to only have been on your side, so I don't know what's up with that. Uh I do apologize for the technical interruption. But, yes, I

wanted to talk about that. That if you look at the store page for like a game, the wish list button is um one of the three things you can do before you even see the price. Like if you if you just look at the top with like the um
What are the three buttons again? It's wish list,
Wish list, follow, and ignore.
Mhm.
You can set the game to never show up. You can uh put the game on your wish list, and then you can um you can follow it to see announcements from it in your community activity feed.
right back.
Yep. Um and I think that that's like we could do another entire episode on the psychology of Steam's design and how many um games fail at selling their game using the tools that Steam has provided to them. That's like a whole other episode and a whole other talk, but it is very strange. Also, I think that's Yeah, I

think that's a really um I think that's a really great point, too. Right? We now even have early access games on sale. Yeah, that's weird. Well, except it Is it? Right? Because we expect early access games to be cheaper because we're providing free labor in some way to the developer, whether we're providing metrics or analytics, or whether we're providing feedback. We are working with the developer to make the game the best it can be. I think we would agree. Right? Like, there is labor involved in playing an early access game as a thing. So, it should already be cheaper. So, why is it on sale?
Ooh.
Um
Okay, kitty cat. No more wire chomping.
Yeah. Uh so, I agree that that is that that is an odd one. Jeff, we're talking about early access games on sale. Which is also strange, right?
I just have somebody who's trying to chomp some wires and we're talking about
Yeah, no. As Please Please do keep Percival safe from gnawing on copper. Um I think that the

One of the things about early access games that I think is important to keep in mind is that games are releasing in early access sometimes not because they're early they're ready to be shown, but because the developers are out of money. And that is a problem, right? So, like a sale there can provide a quick infusion of cash. I don't know how that fits into our whole model of Steam sales, but I will agree that early access games on sale is a weird phenomenon. Um I've lost track of things between thinking about Percival and like Yeah.
So, I got my hair messed by my cat trying to figure but I think Yeah, I mean, early access serves different needs for different developers. And in some cases, people who've purchased the game also on Steam probably scores as a higher metric

as Steam recommends and others like percent of wish list of early access that converts to sale.
Yeah.
And so, maybe it is also worth losing some early money to up yourself on how Steam shows you off to get more people in like there's weird math that you start doing around some of these things.
Like um if you need kid current if it's a live service game, Fellowship, right? We've talked about it a lot. We're probably going to play it here in the next couple weeks at some point on stream. Um we just got to get a group together. Um is a live service game, so they need to have a high concurrent player count to really test and see if the game is working or not.
Mhm.
Right? 10 people playing the game probably isn't going to tell you a whole lot. 10,000 people playing the game, 40,000 people playing the game will tell you something. Um and so that's like a desired goal. So if they're not getting that with the price as it stands, they may discount to meet that goal rather than a monetary one. Right?
All sorts of interesting things.

Yeah, but I think there is one other really big thing which we have to acknowledge about Steam sales and the way that the consumer culture around Steam is driven and that is I'm going to argue that it's really driving consumer burnout.
Okay. We've come to the thesis or sorry, the tail end of our argument and one of the thesis's that we started out with when setting this one up.
Yeah. I think I think it's not just me. I have looked at Steam sales for literal hundreds of hours on stream over the past years, right? We've gone Steam shopping as a as a as a stream activity. I don't care about Steam sales anymore. Like the big ones, like the tentpole ones. It's interesting to me when a game that I want already is on sale, but I feel like I can't be the only one who's at the point where it's hard to make me

interested in a game solely because it's on sale. There has to be something more. There has to be something that like drives my interest beyond just oh hey, this game looks vaguely interesting and it's cheaper than normal. And I'm wondering Yeah, that's that's a great yes. How can I miss you if you won't go away? Yes. Right? And I think that that's I don't know, Jeff. How do you feel about all this? Cuz you buy games very differently for different reasons in the average consumer. How do you How do you feel about it?
all buy games a little Yeah, differently, but um it is like part of it is the the frequency of sales means that there's they're reducing the immediacy need. If I like if I know I can get a 5-year-old game at 40% off and I haven't bought it yet, unless I'm willing wanting to play it right then or the sale is so staggering that it

makes a huge impact on me, I'm just like, oh. I don't need it yet. Like I know it'll come back on sale. I can just keep like it the sales happen so frequently, you know, on the how can I miss you if you haven't gone away? If it's always around, then there's no immediacy on moving
Yes.
for it.
Yes. I did I have a I have a question for a member of our audience. Um Bombarding says I mean, I'm opposite. I only get games through Steam twice a year during the summer and winter sale. Do you buy games there because they're on sale or do you build your wish list throughout your the year throughout those 6 months and then purchase the things that you wanted already because they're now on sale in the big sales? I'm I'm curious about which one it is for you cuz I can see either way, right? Um Yeah, no. I mean, I think and a lot of people are talking about their backlogs and we didn't even talk about bundles. God, Jeff, do you remember when Humble Bundle was new?
Yeah.
Right? And it was like, hey, here's 20

bucks. I have every Humongous Entertainment game ever made. And you might be like, "Will, what's Humongous Entertainment?" And I'll tell you that they're the company that made Freddy Fish and Putt-Putt and Spy Fox and Pajama Sam. And some of you are now having flashbacks to sitting in front of a big chunky all-in-one CRT iMac with the stupid circular mouse playing those games when you got home from school. And some of you have no idea what I'm talking about. And both of those groups are totally valid, right? But like, I got all those for like 20 bucks, right? Am I ever going to play most of them? No. Do I have them? Yes. Right? The Humble Bundle was like a big part of this, right?
Yeah, and Humble Bundle fulfills a lot of the time through Steam.
Yes, most of the time, yeah. In fact, they it was very funny. On Silk Song release day, they ran out of Silk Song keys. So, they had to get more from Steam

because of the way that Humble Bundle works. It's very interesting. Um
Yeah, that's an interesting problem.
It is. It is, right? Um I I and I also think the other thing that's like really driving this burnout is um two categories of game that you don't buy traditionally. Free-to-play games and MMOs.
Mhm.
Free-to-play games, Jeff, how how often are you playing League right now?
Um I actually I'm back in the swing, so maybe every other night for an hour.
Okay, cool. Right? So, so it it occupies a decent chunk of your free play time. You're a dad. You've got a full-time job keeping all of us in line here at the studio. Um right? Uh and you're you do purchase things in game, but it's not at the same way, at the same regularity, for the same reason that you would
I know what I would have said 10 years ago.
Right, yeah. Right. Or that you would have you would have 10 years ago or that you would buy a new game. Right? And so

I think that things like League, Dota, CS:GO, Valorant, uh Siege went free-to-play, Overwatch, Rivals, all of these things which occupy huge chunks of people's free gaming time and don't do traditional purchases combined with the fact that everything's on sale sort of means that people just don't. Right?
Yeah, it's it's an interesting thing, but I I think a lot of it is just the frequency.
Yeah.
I think if Steam and other groups like it like if Unity wasn't constantly running sales on the Unity store or Steam wasn't constantly running sales on the Steam store, they wouldn't have the burnout I think to the level that they do when you're like, "Oh, I'm looking at Steam DB right now. There's so much on sale. Cool. Like it's not really motivating me to go shop it."
Right. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. The other one by the way is MMOs. I spend 15 bucks a month and I get a huge part of my free

time occupation like my huge part of my free time gaming occupied by 14. So I don't need another game to occupy my free time.
Lifestyle games are their own whole thing.
But I would say that they're becoming more common and with Steam losing some cachet in gamers' minds because of the frequency, it feels like it's a one-two punch for people just not buying one-time games.
Steam isn't quite a monopoly. Like there are other good places, but Steam is definitely still like the place you go buy it.
I would argue that Steam is the industry setter, right? They're the they're the trend setter in a lot of ways just cuz of size.
Mhm.
Um and and because of ubiquity, um somewhat related to this, did you see the statement from the former head of Amazon Gaming as they're winding down the division?
Mhm.
Uh he said essentially, "We We to take over Ste We tried to take over the you know, the digital gaming sales market share and we thought we could do it cuz we were bigger, but we didn't understand why people liked Steam.

And I was like, okay, that's cool, but it does speak to the fact that like Steam though it's relatively small in comparison to like Amazon, Google,
Mhm.
Microsoft is still has a lot of cultural cachet on the well, how we do games. So, all that to say, you probably don't think about game sales the same way you did 5 years ago and definitely differently than you did 10 years ago. Uh and it's probably all Steam's fault. And I'm not saying that's a good thing or a bad thing, but I think it's definitely a thing that we have to acknowledge when we talk about the way that games get sold is that it's weird now. It's super weird. I don't I don't even know what to do with it. Jeff.
But
Part of it too is like in some ways not great for the industry because let's take well, let me take a AAA game for a minute.
Sure.
70 bucks.

They might have had a thousand people working on it for three or four years. They're just going to be getting less revenue into the studio now to pay down that huge amount of money they spent because people are expecting games to go on sale faster and for more.
Yeah.
It's getting riskier to make large games and for Indies it's they're having to basically price higher than they otherwise would have and discount down because they know that Indie games are notorious for always also being on sale. Like people just have more choices.
Yeah.
And it's better for the consumer when things are cheaper, but also without paying a certain amount to the people who make the things, it's hard to get the cool things.
Absolutely agreed. I also think that while it's good for the consumer, it also stops being exciting for the consumer.

Yeah. Which leads to its own whole It's not bad to pay less for games, but it's less exciting to pay less for games, which makes the gaming lose some of its magic, which I don't I don't know how I feel about personally. I don't know. I just I remember use I used to be happy about Steam sales. I used to like want to go and look at all the stuff on sale and run around and jump into a pile of games like Timmy Turner off the balcony on Christmas, but like now splat. No duh. Uh I think this is a good place for us to wrap up. If you're still watching the server on YouTube, uh let us know in the comments below what your favorite
rhyme. Let us know in the comments below.
Yeah. Um what your what the size of your wish list is. How many games are on your wish list? How many of them are actually going to buy relative to how many games are in your library? I'm curious if there's like a correlation cuz I have way too many games in my library and way too many games on my wish list. I'm wondering if people who are more responsible with the size of their library have more

responsible wish lists. Who knows? Um we'll be back on Monday with an extra early breakfast. Breakfast will be earlier Eastern time, which is going to throw everything out of whack because the time changes here in the US and it's changing. So we're changing the time on it week that there's a time change. Everything is going to be a mess.
a time change this weekend?
Yeah.
Hm.
We we believe we fall back this week.
of the loop.
I think it's the second. Yeah. Um so uh we'll see you all then. Uh there will be no design club next week.
I'll be traveling, so I'm sorry everybody, but
And then we'll be back in 2 weeks from today with another design club on another topic. So until then, uh please take care of yourselves. Please take care of each other. And all that remains Where Where's the thing? Where Where's the Where's the thing? Jeff, say bye to the people.
Bye to the people. Thanks, everybody.