A developer-targeted post from Valve about the 2015 Steam Winter Sale format was mistakenly made public for a short while; long enough for the internet to grab a copy. The Steamdb forums has the full version of the post.
Those who enjoy the odd peek around the sales curtain should find this fairly interesting.
In it, Valve talk a little bit about the Winter Sale format (which, like the Autumn Sale, changed from daily and flash deals to offers that extended across the entire sales period) and go into further detail about the success of offering trading cards in exchange for users looking at discovery queues.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, giving people an incentive to click through the discovery queues resulted in a massive increase in views on game pages. As Valve writes, “many customers were exposed to 36 different product pages every day for each of the 13 days of the event.” In all, the overall game page views increased threefold.
It seems people didn’t just look at the games, though. Valve reports “a huge up-tick in sales and wishlist additions” and has an accompanying graph demonstrating a “197% increase in the rate of wishlist additions” as compared to 2014.
Strangely, there’s no graph or statistic to demonstrate exactly how many of these games ended up being bought, with Valve only prepared to say that “some of these additions were then subsequently purchased”. If the buy-through rate was particularly impressive, you’d imagine they’d want to highlight that. Instead, they choose not to.
However, what they do say is that the group of games “outside of the Top 500 in revenue terms” saw a “45% growth in revenue generated” when compared to the 2014 Winter Sale. Not too shabby.
