Valve has shortened its previous 42-day discount cooldown period to only 28 days, meaning discounts can be offered more frequently.
Valve outlined this and other new rules for discounts on Steam in a blog post titled “Discount Rule Changes” and will come into effect from 28 March.
Some of the most significant changes are targeted at exploitative tactics, like a new minimum discount limit of 10%, which will prevent developers and publishers from artificially pushing their games into the spotlight by discounting negligible amounts.
Additionally, developers will not be able to change the price of a game during a promotion, meaning that increasing pre-discount prices to exaggerate discounts will no longer be possible.
The complete list of changes are as follows:
- You can run a launch discount, but once your launch discount ends, you cannot run any other discounts for 28 days.
- It is not possible to discount your product for 28 days following a price increase in any currency.
- Discounts cannot be run within 28 days of your prior discount, with the exception of Steam-wide seasonal events.
- Discounts for seasonal sale events cannot be run within 28 days of releasing your title, within 28 days from when your launch discount ends, or within 28 days of a price increase in any currency.
- You may not change your price while a promotion is live now or scheduled for the future.
- It is not possible to discount a product by more than 90% or less than 10%.
- Custom discounts cannot last longer than two weeks, or run for shorter than 1 day.
To conclude the blog post, Valve said that the revised discount period of 28 days will apply to every type of promotion except Steam’s four big seasonal sales, namely the Lunar New Year, Summer, Autumn, and Winter Sales.
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