Steam Bundles Receive Dynamic Pricing; Lowering Prices for Owned Games

Published: March 2, 2016 3:46 PM /

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Steam is the largest online digital gaming platform in the world, and some of that is due to the amount of sales we see from Steam Bundles. Tons of games at a discount is hard to pass up, and for years this has worked in Steam's favor. Now, however, Valve has announced a change is coming to Steam Bundles, one that will finally include dynamic pricing.

Dynamic Pricing is simple, Steam Bundles will automatically reduce their pricing based on games you may already own. So if a bundle contains a few games you have already bought, the bundle will effectively reduce in price to reflect your previous purchases. 

"Past Complete Packs were sometimes a bad deal for customers that already [owned] one or more of the products in the pack," according to a Valve representative in documents acquired PCgamesN. "Either it made bad economic sense for those customers to purchase the pack, or they just felt bad about doing so since it [looked] like they were paying for products they already [had]. The new Steam Bundles system addresses this."

It should be noted that this dynamic pricing has been a part of digital distribution for a few years now. Both GOG and Humble Bundle have allowed consumers to pick and choose which games to include in their bundles in the past, and have marked off games already owned. Other distribution platforms also handle bundles differently than Steam; Origins for example has permanent bundles that package specific game franchises into one big group, instead of mixing and matching titles. 

For Valve the inclusion of dynamic pricing for their bundles is another step in improving Steam as a service platform. Valve has not publicly commented on the new system, although it has been seen in action already. Changeses will likely be ongoing for a short time, to let developers know about the new policy.

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| Staff Writer

A longtime player of games, creator of worlds, and teacher of minds. Robert has worked many positions over the years, from college professor to education… More about Robert