Valve Dropped Flash Sales and Increased Revenues by 45%

Valve’s experiment with the new type of sales has paid off, and the company has reported a huge increase in page views and revenues.

Details about the fact that Valve will no longer include Flash Sales in its regular campaign were leaked before the major fall sales. It was a decision that didn’t sit too well with the Steam community, but no one said anything because they imagined that they simply are replaced with something else. That didn’t happen, but somehow Valve was right.

Instead of promoting a few games each day with even lower prices, Valve decided to have a single price for the duration of the promotion. It turns out that Valve took the right decision, and they found a way to increase sales and page views in a single swoop.

Too many games on Steam

Steam has a new problem that is actually kind of an irony. There are too many games in the Steam library, over 7000, which might make it difficult for the company to have meaningful sales.

Since any promotion can only show off a few dozens of titles crammed in the first page, the rest of the games are left sitting on the sidelines. Fortunately, the introduction of Recommended, Wishlist, Personal Queue, and other such features have made smaller games a little but more discoverable.

A Valve report about the modifications made to sales was published by steamdb.info, and it comes with some pretty interesting information.

“This year we saw a 197% 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,” Valve wrote.

All in all, the latest Winter Sales was four times more popular than the one in 2014, increasing revenues by 45% and that is a result any company will be proud of.