This is great news for fans of Steam, and those delicious bundles offered by franchises and studios.
Advertisement
Conventionally, we have had to take it or leave it when it comes to game bundles.
Valve’s move for sensible bundle pricing may bring some of those completionists back – or at least ensure that the choice between GOG and Steam isn’t as obvious, which is exactly what Valve hopes for. And the more games you buy, the less appealing a bundle will look, as you may already own one or more of the titles.
Valve has not made a public announcement about this on behalf of the company, PCGamesN retrieved official documentation, presumably from a developer, confirming this adjustment. However, Valve is always looking for new ways to win over customers (except by hiring more Customer Support staff), and so it would seem that they want to reward gamers that already own a lot of games.
They gave the example of Complete Packs calling the old pricing system to have a bad economic sense or simply being a negative impression on the customers.
Valve’s new pricing structure means you no longer need to pay for products you already own in Steam bundles. Only now it factors in the total price of just title that aren’t already in your library.
While this is a crucial step forward for Valve’s Steam client, it’s important not to overlook the fact that it’s only applicable to games purchased through Steam itself, as opposed to keys obtained through third-parties like HumbleBundle. This changes depending on how many games in the bundle you already own.
This doesn’t appear to be Steam-wide yet, however. As Kotaku reports, the algorithm still needs to be fine-tuned, as some bundles are charging users money even when they own all the games in the pack.
Advertisement
The feature has not been widely implemented yet, but based on Valve’s decision to reach out to developers, there’s reason to believe that it should be fully implemented soon.
