Before I part to New Zealand to watch the British & Irish Lions, and therefore miss this year's sale, I found this great article in New York Magazine's "Select All" blog that just simply gave me the giggles. Because simply you and I know that we are very much part of this debauchery every year, and we yell "GABE TAKE MY MONEY!!!" and because we are never going to touch 10 of the 20 games we buy and because well, we enjoy it every year no matter what.

http://nymag.com/selectall/2017/06/the-strange-cult-of-the-steam-summer-sale.html?utm_source=tw&utm_medium=s3&utm_campaign=sharebutton-b

This year I promised myself I won't buy more then two games. I will wait until I see the games I want and I won't be seduced by all those other titles. I must be strong!

Well maybe I'll just pick up ARMA 3, I mean it has a 66% reduction so I would be loosing money if I don't buy it. Oh and Serious Sam 3 for only 3.69€? Now that is just too good to pass up! Oh my god all these prices are so low and the sale hasn't even begun! I can't not buy, it is just too frugalicious. Were is my credit card? GABE, TAKE MY MONEY ALREADY!!!!!

This whole paragraph is wrong:

But there’s another layer of meta-strategy to it. Within the weeklong sale, there are also daily deals or hours-long flash sales, which compound already discounted titles. The smart strategy is to wait until a game you want goes on sale in one of these small windows, and if it doesn’t, buy on the last day of the overall event. (Because Steam’s inventory is digital, there’s no danger that stock will run out.) It’s a canny way of getting customers to check in frequently.

Because of this meta-game, fervent PC gamers treat the Summer Sale as a game of wits, a battle against Valve, the company that runs Steam, and specifically against Gabe Newell, its founder and leader.

I'm fairly sure Steam got rid of daily deals and flash sales and instead just has one fixed sale price for each game throughout the duration of the sale event.

@paulmako: Yeah. They're done with the daily/flash sales in the middle of a sale event. Valve has shown data that indicates games are selling better since the removal of daily/flash sales, so it's very unlikely they'll ever be bringing them back.

I know some people liked playing the meta of waiting to buy stuff until the end or only when it was on a flash sale, but I vastly prefer the new style of having a set sale price for the entire event.

@paulmako: it did actually. But I think the theme of the article stands I.E.: Shut Up and Take my Money Gabe!

Thank you for not saying "feels"

@paulmako: You're 100% right. They got rid of all that stuff. Prices are higher than they used to be, but so are sales; it turns out people are more likely to buy things if they don't think that waiting until the end of the sale might net them a better price.