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[dogstile]

I actually thought most of the puzzles in portal two were self explanatory. I blasted through both portal games in about 6 hours. 

Shadow, you're about 2/3rds of the way through.

[Enzo]

Went to work, Terraria was $2.49. Came home, Terraria was $4.99.

FFFFUUUUUUU--

[Darkmere]

Went to work, Terraria was $2.49. Came home, Terraria was $4.99.

FFFFUUUUUUU--

Join the club. Can't even register on steam forums to post about it. But it did save me some cash.

[breadbocks]

It was a screw up. Poor workers at steam are marking shit down constantly. A mess up was to be expected.

[Darkmere]

It was a screw up. Poor workers at steam are marking shit down constantly. A mess up was to be expected.

And I would have been completely fine with that, if they had simply said "oopsie." As it stands it just looks bad, customer-relations wise. I'd still have paid the $5 price if I'd known what happened. Utter silence is not good.

[KaelGotDwarves]

Steam wouldn't leave a mistake up for 5 hours.

Blame the publisher or whoever decided to place it on steam, in other words, probably the Terraria devs saw the ridiculous amounts of sales they were making and oopsie'd the price up to $5.

The last mistakes like X3 terran conflict for $5 way back and valve complete pack for $25 only took like an hour to fix last time.

[breadbocks]

So the devs do get a say in the price? Huh.

[KaelGotDwarves]

Terraria = Indie game placed on steam by devs.

[breadbocks]

Yeah, but I thought the way it worked was devs get the game put on steam for X price, then steam pays 25 or whatever percent of the sales to them. I thought it was Steam's choice about sales. Obviously, if devs get dissatisfied with the income from it, they can take the game down and do it themselves, or get a different platform to sell it.

[Darkmere]

Yeah all that's the reason this disturbs me. I don't know who has the right of way here. Still won't buy on the chance that the Terraria devs called off the sale 5 hours in to make more money because they could (and did).

[Shadowlord]

If they're getting paid 25%, then that explains how steam's able to run these sales with what appears to be such ease. Unless, of course, they had to prepare for half the year by getting permission to change the price temporarily from everyone.

Of course if getting 25% is what Valve gets for selling/distributing the games, cutting the price by 75% gives them no profit at all, so Valve probably just changed their mind (I expect it started selling even more like hotcakes) and brought it back up to 50% off (so as not to lose almost all the potential future profit).

(I don't know why you're getting upset. Somebody didn't want to screw themselves over and lose all their possible future income for the game. It did only come out in the past few months, for $10, and being marked down by 75% is a bit crazy for it, considering how well it was selling.)

[Darkmere]

If they're getting paid 25%, then that explains how steam's able to run these sales with what appears to be such ease. Unless, of course, they had to prepare for half the year by getting permission to change the price temporarily from everyone.

Of course if getting 25% is what Valve gets for selling/distributing the games, cutting the price by 75% gives them no profit at all, so Valve probably just changed their mind (I expect it started selling even more like hotcakes) and brought it back up to 50% off (so as not to lose almost all the potential future profit).

I doubt the cut would be that large, and that's not exactly how it works. You assume the sales numbers with the event discount are equal to the sale numbers without the event discount, which they aren't.

Running a sale is trying to move volume of products by cutting profit margin and hoping consumers bite.

Say you have a warehouse full of masterwork turkey roasts. Each roast costs 3 dwarfbucks to make, and the vendor takes 10% commission on every sale, so 1 dwarfbuck. Selling them one at a time for 10 bucks nets you 6 bucks profit. If you sell 10 roasts at 10 bucks each in one week, that's 60 dorfbucks.

The next week you have a sale, 20% off and sell, 25 roasts at 8 bucks each. Suddenly you make 100 bucks profit.

Now imagine this with steam, where you don't even have production, transportation, or storage costs for solid media.

[Bdthemag]

Man, Valve must be rolling in dwarfbucks then.

[Shadowlord]

I was under the impression before that Valve would have to buy X copies of a game at whatever price the developer sold it to them at, and then sell it themselves for whatever price they thought they could get the best profit (including rate of sales) at. Which, I think, is the same way an actual store would do it.

Still makes sense to me, considering how they seem to over-sell and give out bad keys to some games during these sales, but I don't actually know how they actually do it, so yeah. Are we all speculating or does someone actually have accurate information?

[Darkmere]

I was under the impression before that Valve would have to buy X copies of a game at whatever price the developer sold it to them at, and then sell it themselves for whatever price they thought they could get the best profit (including rate of sales) at. Which, I think, is the same way an actual store would do it.

Still makes sense to me, considering how they seem to over-sell and give out bad keys to some games during these sales, but I don't actually know how they actually do it, so yeah. Are we all speculating or does someone actually have accurate information?

Wild guessing on my part, though none of my steam games actually have CD keys, save Arkham Asylum which uses GFWL (it was a gift). I hadn't taken that into consideration, I just assumed there weren't "copies" per se and you just authenticated on a valve server that checked your login against the list of games you own and cleared you to run it. Digital distribution removes the need for copy protection, so it would be more economical for both parties to just give steam the master data files for the current release to distribute, and charge money to have that game linked to your "authentication approved game list."

Man, it's getting late and I'm babbling. Sorry.