By Jen Carman on December 16, 2014 at 7:10pm
It's here! It's here! Two days! Enjoy your potentially half-filled wallets while you can…
It is rumored that on Dec. 18, the Steam Winter sale will begin, bringing us all of the über discounted games we could ever want and couldn’t possibly ever play. If you’ve managed to work through some of your game list backlog from last year’s winter sale (…or the Summer sale … or the Autumn sale) good for you. Prepare to start over.
The source of this leak comes as a bit of a surprise because it was also PayPal Japan that leaked the start date of Steam’s Autumn Sale. It would have been expected that Steam might have slapped their wrists for that, but if they did, PayPal doesn’t seem to have minded. The thought behind keeping a sale release date secret is that your competitors don’t know when to put their products on sale to take advantage of your prices. Competitors might be able to undercut a Steam sale price buy $0.50 or $1.00, and that might be enough to draw Steam customers away to shop their sales instead. That obviously hurts Valve’s bottom line. However, in order for those competitors to have those barely-cheaper prices, they have to know when to negotiate that term with the publishers, so start date leaks are very beneficial to them.
Another interesting point on the PayPal side is that they just began their Steam Digital Wallet Code campaign. Using it, customers can send $20, $50, or $100 to PayPal and receive a code for a Steam Wallet Gift Card that they can redeem on their own Steam account or can gift to someone else. Really it just takes the middle step out of purchasing cards for other people if you yourself don’t have your own Steam account. If you’re shopping around using PayPal anyway, it is pretty convenient. So then, with this new, neat way for Steam to be accessible to, say, Aunt Millie who doesn’t know anything about buying electronic entertainment but knows her nieces and nephews love playing “those silly computer games” and will expand PayPal into Valve’s kingdom in the digital purchase market, why would PayPal Japan invite snipers to their sale … again?
Whatever the reasons, the PC gaming, Gaben worshiping, Steam faithful will be on watch for that next crazy-sweet deal.
To our wallets: We’re just so, so sorry…
PayPal Digital Gifts: Steam Digital Wallet Code Steam by Valve Corp.
