I'm not loving it!

Leaving aside the fact that the clue-hunting game was broken for part of the day it's just... kind of boring and irritating.

I'm not expecting a lot from the summer sale theme. It exists to drive users to engage with the storefront for longer periods of time, and anything else is secondary. But this is the first year I've actually resented it for wasting my time. Am I too crabby? Am I not crabby enough? Where do folks come down on this?

I agree that it took a little too long to complete, but I got a laugh out of at least a few of the games. There’s a nearly zero percent chance I end up using a single reward, though.

Hm, now that you mention it, why *did* I complete this gimmick challenge?

I looked up the first game because I couldn't tell what it wanted me to do with that clue. Was I looking for one game? Or did I have to click on two specific games in order? It took me way too long to figure out that the "games" are fake. Fun fact: even if you look up the answers, the pages won't show up via the search function. I will say, the some of the fake game tags got a reasonable chuckle. "Simulated fishing, simulated failure" is pretty amusing.

It's definitely not the best gimmick they've done.

I have never noticed any sort of gimmick to these events outside of some unique art for the main page. Am I just really dumb and unobservant? The heck are you all on about?

@allthedinos said:

I don't know either, but I did it too!

See, they showed up for me, but then clicking on them would bounce me back to the landing page for the scavenger hunt and nothing else would happen. Seems to be one of the ways the whole thing was broken for a while.

There's been some sort of gimmicky metagame associated with the summer sale for years now. It always allows you to unlock some specific badge for your account. That's largely worthless, of course, but hey, so are achievements and people love those.

In years past there would be special trading cards that would drop as you played the game/ bought stuff on Steam during the sale. They've stopped doing that, probably because people like me would sell the cards for a few precious cents to defray the cost of the games we bought. I made a whole dollar once!

There's a gimmick?

I just bought some of the games in my wishlist and didn't even look, lol.

Most of the games I would've gotten, I either already have, or could play on PC Game Pass or PS Plus. Though there are some good old games for less than 10 bucks.

I enjoyed it. It is not as elaborate as other years, but it was also less manipulative, and was nice having a gimmick that I could 100% complete in less than an hour.

The sale itself is meh... most of the things I would like are not heavily discounted, and a lot of games that are I already own. I guess being in the ecosystem for years ends up with diminishing returns, as most of the games that get advertised due to the bigger discounts are the same year after year. I also think they lost some engagement without the flash sales.

In terms of end intent (get users to browse games with purpose) it was decently well-structured (ignoring how ridiculously the pages were set up, like arcade and rhythm being a single section,) but it feels at best like a thin veneer of effort over-top the sale, same as most sale gimmicks since the Monster Summer Sale ended.

Maybe it's the presentation (none of these more comedic sale gimmicks have ever done it for me, but especially not this one's mesh of dudebro cyberism jokes and toilet humor), maybe it's the fact that it's just there to get you to browse some pages in exchange for some uninteresting profile trinkets, who knows.

It's a weird conundrum, because the Steam sales that stick out in my mind as having been great (Summer Camp, Monster Summer, even the first Spring Cleaning sale) have their own pros/cons (bespoke games take time and effort to code, Treasure Hunt/Summer Camp relied heavily on users buying expensive recent games to participate), but they at least felt (much as public perception saw Steam sales at the time) like something cool and worth getting excited over.

This year's gimmick is barely offensive I guess, better than the recent ones where the gimmick was mostly "spend money for profile trinkets and maybe a 10% cashback", but it feels just as unenthused and forgettable as Steam tends to feel.

The only three games that I've bought during Steam's summer sale are Forza Horizon 5, Super Woden GP & Cyberpunk 2077.

They still do that, most big sales have two badges to earn; one for the event and one for buying games and/or going through your daily queue. The latter uses trading cards.

Valve loves people buying and selling cards because some people put a lot of money into collecting them and each transaction is taxed.

@eccentrix said:

True! I was reminded of that shortly after posting, when I paged through my discovery queue and was rewarded with two cards that I sold for eight real-life cents. I'm rich! (Actually, Valve is rich.)

Like most years, I really never engage with any of the gimmicks, but for me, Steam is also just a launcher and storefront, I don't really engage with any of the other features, I think I only have like 2 peole on my friend list. Most of the recent sales I don't even browse, I put everything I would want into my wishlist so I can keep track of them during sales.

If you don't like the Steam profile stuff this seems like a complete waste of time. Also, it reminded me of how shitty it is trying to find shit on Steam without the use of search and how much bullshit is on Steam these days.