That’s a 6 word alliteration!

The Steam Summer Sale just concluded, so here’s another look at the sales stats for The Signal State:

We had our biggest discount of 30% for this sale, but it didn’t translate to a particularly large sales bump compared to prior discounts. I suspect there’s 2 reasons for this. The first is that 30% is a very minor increase to the previous discount of 25%, so buyers who would’ve bought at a 30% discount have likely already bought at a 25%.

The second reason is somewhat related to the first. This sale is pretty late into the game’s lifespan, and so the remaining wishlisters are only mildly interested in the game and we would require a much larger discount, maybe 50%+, to entice them into buying the game.

As the chart shows, the daily deal resulted in a much much larger sales bump than any sale event. The reason is obvious: the daily deal brings new visibility to your game, as only a small fraction of games are on sale during those 2 days and your game’s discount is exposed to all steam users. On the other hand, users are spoiled for choice during sales events, so the only users who become aware of your game’s discount are those who have already wishlisted. This results in a smaller pool of potential buyers.

One interesting sales event we don’t have any experience with yet is genre-specific sales events. Steam regularly holds sales events for specific genres of games, e.g the recent Simfest. We’re hoping to be involved with one later this year so the sales data from that should be quite interesting too!