Steam wishlist is buggy and sometimes lies about discounts

DocMcStuffin@lemmy.world to Games@lemmy.world – 33 points –

Edit: KingRaptor helped me figure out it's a bug in steam's wishlist. It can bundle games without telling you then shows the combined discounted price.

Original post follows.

Title: Steam is lying about their discounts

This is a troubling trend I noticed today while browsing my wishlist on steam. One of the games seemed to have a double discount, but the price before discount was much higher than I remembered. The original price should have been under $20, but they had it listed as over $30. Checked steamdb.info, which is completely independent of steam, and sure enough the list price is $16.99.

I checked another game that had a double discount, and it was the same trend. List price of $7.99, but steam was showing $19.98 discounted to $7.63.

When did steam start engaging in this shady practice? Has this just started or has it been going on for a while?

8

I believe the developer is in complete control of the pricing on steam, so it would be the developer being shady

Could be, IDK. I've seen that with a regular discount and the price gets raised when a sale starts, but never with a double discount.

Perhaps someone that has published on steam could shed more light.

In the store I'm not seeing what you're seeing. I think what you're looking at is actually these two bundles, not the base games:

https://steamdb.info/bundle/35041/ https://steamdb.info/bundle/23853/

Also, as it was pointed out, Steam does not control pricing, that would be entirely in the hand of the publisher or developer, not to mention it is against TOS (and also illegal in some markets)

That looks like it. I checked one of the bundles.

Then tried adding to cart from my wishlist. It added both games, but on my wishlist it only shows the one game. That's just really buggy, and fortunately only unintentionally deceptive instead of intentionally.

Steam has rules intended to curb this behavior.

https://partner.steamgames.com/doc/marketing/discounts

Specific Discounting Rules

You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 30 days.
It is not possible to discount your product for 30 days following a price increase in any currency.
Discounts cannot be run within 30 days of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events.
Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 30 days of releasing your title, within 30 days from when your launch discount ends, or within 30 days of a price increase in any currency.
You may not change your price while a promotion is currently live or scheduled for the future.
It is not possible to discount a product by more than 90% or less than 10%.
it is not possible to create new discounts for a product that would result in the price in any currency falling below Steam's minimum possible transaction price. See details.
Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.

This is just a hunch, but could there be a loophole possible with those promotions where you get a discount, but only if you own another related game? Maybe devs can just add discount for owning a free game and fake a permanent discount that way?

But as OP already said, we'd need a dev who's already published a game to confirm these kind of theories.

Edit: This comment is probably right and it's just an automatically applied bundle discount, but there's a bug in the Wishlist where it shows the combined price of the bundled games. If that's the case then Valve should really fix this ASAP, since it probably falls under false advertising in some countries, even if it's a bug.

Yep it's a bug. When I did an "Add to Cart" it added both games even though it only shows the one game on my wishlist.

I edited the post to reflect that.

I remember seeing ads on my phone saying "if you bought a game on steam, you could be entitled to financial compensation" since like a year and a half ago. I didn't look any further cause I didn't wanna see a thousand ads for legal mumbo jumbo, but I just thought there were a few isolated incidents of ripoff pricing or phony game sales