Steam Getting Rid Of Flash And Daily Sales

[Update] This change may take effect as early as the Autum Sale which starts from late November.

[Update 2] Corroborated here.

[Update 3] Many users have emailed me being confused about “flash sales”. By that I DON’T mean Adobe’s Flash but Steam’s very own flash sales that they have during the sales period. Sorry for the confusion!

[Original Story] Much of the excitement of Steam sales is in the Flash and Daily sales. Although games are heavily discounted during Steam sales, but the Flash/Daily sales are the highlight with huge discounts.

But Steam may be getting rid of it in the upcoming Winter Sale. Posting in a Steamworks developer group, Valve said that “this year, to optimize the sale for customers and to allow us to feature and recommend your products in more ways to more customers, we’re asking for just one discount, to run the length of the sale.”

The best sellers during the sale period will get highlighted at the top of the page as Valve has confirmed “We’ll still be highlighting top games on the front page for 24-48 hour spans, but those products will stay at their most competitive discount, before and after being featured.”

Part of me thinks that Valve has done this to stop people abusing the recently introduced refund system. Say I buy a game today but it just got featured in a daily/flash deal a couple of hours from now on. Who’s to say I won’t demand a refund and then buy the game at a lower price?

One advantage of the flash sales and daily deals is that it allowed big budget games to be at a steeper discount and then revert back to their lower discount throughout the rest of the sale. Now, I’m not exactly sure AAA publishers and developers would feel comfortable highly discounting their games throughout the entire sale duration. Does this mean we’ll lose out on those steep discounts? Only time will tell and I’m pretty sure Valve will tinker with the fine details in subsequent sales based on user feedback.

What’s for sure though is that the upcoming Winter Steam sale might just be a tad less interesting if Steam does decide to stick with this approach. On the upside, you can grab your favourite game the moment it goes on sale instead of waiting around hoping for a better deal.