Valve targets dodgy discounts in new rules for Steam game sales
Taking effect on March 28th.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Valve has provided further information regarding upcoming changes to its rules surrounding games sales and discounts. These new rules affect the frequency with which developers and publishers can discount their games, and the percentages they can discount them by.
These rule changes wereoriginally announcedearlier this month, but Valve only offered details about changes to the “cooldown period” between discounts, sharing plans to reduce this period from six weeks to 28 days. Now, Valve has unveiled the full list of rule changes, which you can see below:
The upshot of these changes is basically that developers can run discounts more often. But one alteration seems geared more toward cracking down on anti-consumer behaviour. This is outlined in the sixth bullet-point, “It is not possible to discount a product by more than 90% or less than 10%.”
Previously, the rule simply stated, “It is not possible to discount a product 100%”. This led to unscrupulous game sellers offering discounts of 1% to get their games featured on the sales lists without offering a meaningful price-cut. The new rules restrict devs and pubs to offering a minimum discount of 10%, meaning all discounts should now be offered in good faith.
You can read Valve’s full announcementhere. The new rules come into effect on the 28th of March. The newly implemented cooldown period will apply to all Steam sales, except for the platform’s “four major seasonal sales”, namely Summer, Autumn, Winter, and the most famous season of all, Lunar New Year.
The biggest gaming news, reviews and hardware deals
Keep up to date with the most important stories and the best deals, as picked by the PC Gamer team.
Roblox is banning kids from unrated experiences and Social Hangout spaces in an effort to protect them from paedophiles
Steam Game Recording is now available for everyone, and it’s packed with neat features
The first PUBG spinoff with real promise is a top-down take on Rainbow Six Siege
