Steam Sure Has Saved Me a Bundle

June 7th, 2010

This is largely a response to a news post at Gamasutra that described the psychology of Steam Bundles. Unfortunately, I don't have much experience with Steam bundles themselves other than having bought the Half Life 2 Silver bundle, which included the original HL and a number of original and "sourced-up" remakes that I never owned, having only played them at net cafés or friends' houses. With the exception of the Deathmatch games, I wanted everything in the bundle and got good use out of it all. Other bundles? Nope. Every other bundle I've seen either included too much junk or games I already had.

Rather, I want to address one of the points made in the original Gamasutra article, that of "sales." There's another psychological effect at play, one that doesn't seem to apply to most Americans, but has certainly caught on to Quebecers. I read an article long ago comparing "brand loyalty" versus "sales" marketing strategies, and for the life of me I wish I could find it again to prop my argument up with a reference. Basically, the article suggested that in some markets, the use of "prizes" and "contests" build brand loyalty which in turn drives sales of those products; in other areas, brand loyalty is extremely difficult to buy because consumers are only interested in getting the best "deal", no matter which brand meets the need. Moreover, in such areas where consumers are driven by a sales mentality, the sales mindset becomes so strong that they will often refuse to buy a product not on sale, since they know that, in a few weeks, it will go on sale. The drive to buy a product is rarely strong enough to encourage a non-sale purchase, but rather merely strong enough to buy a "less than the best" sale price.

As a very common home-grown example I grew up with, a box of 12 cans of soft drink will normally sell for $5.99, but will go on sale anywhere from $5/box to $2.50/box. Generally, the $3/box was the upper range of "normal price" and anything over that was expensive. If you were really feeling the pressure for some pop, you might break out the wallet at $3.33 or $3.49 a box, and $3.99 was the upper limit for those emergency "we're throwing a party and we need pop NOW" situations. Anything higher than $4 and you'd just go without.

The thing is, the frequency of sales on Steam has really driven home the same mentality in Steam games. When I saw the new expansion for Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, I said: hey, great. I want that. Now I just have to wait for it to go on sale. I waited and, sure enough, it went on sale. Bam. 50% off. Steam's predictable sales cycle saved me $15, which is still a bit more than I'd have liked to pay; I'd rather have taken it for $10. Maybe there'll be a 66% off sale in a few months and I'll be going "tisk, I should have waited" but I guess even my patience has limits.

Anyhow, my rebuttal to Jamie Madigan is: how many of Steam's customers refuse to pay full price and wait for products they want to go on sale because of Steam's predictable sales cycle? The psychology of sales and bundles goes both ways.

Posted by: Soulrift