If you’ve ever scoured the vast catalogue of games on Steam, you may have come across a few of these. One being games at discounts so low, like one percent, that they may as well not be there. Or another example, massively inflated price with a 99% discount, bringing the final displayed price to about the same as a legit listing with no discount.
Steam is fighting scenarios like this with a new set of rules on discounts that will be going into effect on 28 March. With the new rules, games cannot have discounts smaller than 10% or larger than 90%. Game makers will also only be able to put a game on discount 28 days after a price increase.
If a game was recently discounted, it cannot be discounted again until 28 days have passed. The exception to this are the Steam seasonal sales, which are the summer, autumn, winter and Lunar New Year sales. Off-season discounts also cannot last longer than two weeks, or shorter than a day.
Overall, these rules apply more to game makers than customers. But they do show what sort of benefit we can get as a result. It’s not a particularly big benefit, but it means that dodgy indie games will have to compete on even ground against the honest ones.
