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Comment by mrguyorama | Hacker News Reader

>Steam has also repeatedly shown to be on the side of the consumer

Except when they only added any sort of return mechanism after violating consumer rights laws in all sorts of jurisdictions for like a decade.

Though that was significantly less painful back in the day when a steam sale was actually meaningful.

Steam's pro-consumer-ness is absurdly overblown, but the rest of consumer facing corporations are so fucking awful in comparison that they look like angels. They're also mostly just trying to keep anyone from looking at the closet full of profits explicitly from enabling underage gambling.

Not that I'm a hater, but people need to keep perspective. Valve is just a company that is slightly less abhorrent in it's practices.

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Nowadays their return policy is really generous though. And it gets me to buy more games, a couple hours is long enough to figure out if a game works on my end.

Of course, I’d never use their generous only-superficial-questions-asked-if-you-don’t-play-much return policy to, basically, get a demo of a game. Because that isn’t what it is intended for. But, I wonder if that ability has gotten them more sales…

>back in the day when a steam sale was actually meaningful.

Curious what you mean by this?

It used to be normal for steam sales to be somewhat rare and surprising, but the tradeoff was that it was the norm for big and popular games to have staggering discounts.

In 2012, Terraria went on sale for 25 cents. Valve sold the entire Half Life family for like two dollars. AAA and big name games would go for 80% off or more, back when that actually got you a full game without microtransactions or significant DLC to buy.

People got excited about the sales because you might wake up to find the game you really wanted for $60 was now a few dollars.

Objectively "Incredible" deals are a lot less common, and old stuff doesn't have massive discounts anymore, sticking with "just" very good discounts.

I still see some pretty staggering deals now and again, but maybe not to the extent you remember (I don't really remember that, but I was also primarily a WoW player back then, and didn't pay as much attention).

How much of that is to blame on steam vs. the publishers, though? I would imagine the publishers have much more control over (if not total control?) over pricing. So, unless I'm wrong, it seems misguided to put that at steam's feet.

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