Steam Winter Sale With No Daily/Flash Sales Was Big Hit - Report

With the Steam Winter Sale over and done with, Valve has now reportedly sent out a memo to developers detailing the results of the sale period. This sale broke with tradition and did not offer daily and flash deals. The memo, obtained by SteamDB, says the sale period was a huge hit.

"More customers bought more games across more of the Steam catalog," Valve said in the address.

Part of the reason for the uptick in sales came down to dropping daily and flash sales.

"Our hypothesis was that this new format would be a better way to serve customers that may only be able to visit Steam once or twice during the 13-day event," the company said. "We also saw this change as an opportunity to showcase a deeper variety of titles to customers each day, while having confidence that any game being highlighted would be at its lowest discount."

Valve encouraged users to scan through their Discovery Queue by offering free Steam Trading Card, which users could do up to three times per day. As a result, shoppers visited more pages (three times as many, Valve said), which in turn led to greater sales for developers.

The company went on to say that it was at first concerned that offering a Steam Trading Card might encourage users to simply click through the queue and not pay much attention to what was in front of them. However, the results show that shoppers did in fact pay attention--wishlist additions were up almost 200 percent.

"It turned out that customers found a lot of value in using the Discovery Queue, resulting in a huge uptick in sales and wishlist additions," Valve said. "Looking back over wishlist data, we typically see only a slight increase in the rate of customers adding items to their wishlist during sales versus during non-sale time periods. However, this year we saw a 197 percent increase in the rate of wishlist additions during the sale. Some of these additions were then subsequently purchased during the sale while others remain on customer wishlists as indications of future interest in those games."

Not only did big-name games sell well during the Steam Winter Sale, but games outside of the top 500 based on revenue also performed better than last year.

"This group collected 35 percent of product page traffic during the sale, which is over 4x their share of traffic from the previous winter sale," Valve said about games outside of the top 500. "And these weren't just idle views--we also saw 45 percent growth in the revenue generated by this group of games as compared with the last winter sale."

Steam's fall sale also did not include daily and flash sales.