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Charlie Hall is ’s tabletop editor. In 10-plus years as a journalist & photographer, he has covered simulation, strategy, and spacefaring games, as well as public policy.
Along with this year’s Steam Summer Sale came the “Steam Grand Prix.” It’s a racing-themed metagame that rewards customers for buying and playing games through Valve’s online marketplace. Trouble is that for the first two days it didn’t work right. Making matters worse, confusing rules appear to have hurt some developers.
Steam's Grand Prix Themed 2019 Summer Sale Has Begun
In a blog post today, Valve said it will make changes to the code to make the game work right. More importantly for developers, it clarified what participants need to do in order to win free games.
Here’s how it’s supposed to work: Upon logging into Steam, you’re invited to join in the Steam Grand Prix (it’s free). Step one: choose a team, all of which are themed after cuddly animals. Then you win points that you can spend on your team by buying Steam games and playing games you already own through that service. Players choose how to spend these points in the Grand Prix; they can speed the little driver on down the track, or choose to hinder opposing teams.
“We want to apologize, ” Valve wrote on its blog, “for the broken mechanics that have led to an unbalanced event. Based on your feedback, we’ve made some updates to the game.”
The Steam Summer Sale Starts Today!
In short, those “updates” have been to better balance the teams. Just about everyone hopped on Team Corgi on day one, allowing that team to get way out in front. Now Valve has done ... something ... to help make things more competitive.
“We’ve made some back-end changes to help mitigate some of the snowball effects we’ve seen that have led to Team Corgi running away with the first two days of the races despite their tiny legs, ” Valve said. “We’ve changed some code to help deal with the imbalanced team sizes across the board.”
I captured an image of the leaderboards both before and after the blog post, and things appear to have narrowed a touch. I imagine things will change even further over the next few days.
Prepare Your Wallets: The Steam Summer Sale Is Here!
... and rankings shortly after today’s blog post. Racers are still in the same order, but the gaps in the field have narrowed somewhat. Valve
This is important information for Grand Prix participants, because members of the winning team each day will be selected at random to receive games from the top of their Steam wishlist. But therein lies the game’s other problem.
People very rarely look at their Steam wishlist, and prompting them to revise it — to actually put a little time into ranking the games on their list — has apparently led users to delete games from their wishlist entirely.
Showcase :: Grand Prix Summer Sale 2019
The Steam wishlist is one way for consumers to sort through the thousands of games going up on the platform every year. But, it’s also a way for indie developers to get Valve’s attention. If a game shows up on more wishlists, it has a better chance of being featured on the Steam marketplace, earning tiny developers priceless visibility on the world’s largest online video game marketplace.
So when people delete games from their wishlists, that’s a big deal for indies. Many are reporting that the current Steam sale has led to massive spikes in wishlist deletions.
Hey @GreyAlien - Are your games seeing an abnormally high amount of wishlist deletions? I and 4 other devs all are seeing some pretty strange stats. I've never once in 5 years seen more deletes than adds/P&A during a seasonal sale. I've always left a sale with a net increase. pic.twitter.com/v1OY4MUQW5— Raymond Doerr (@RaymondDoerr) June 26, 2019
Steam Summer Sale
Right now, on Twitter especially, there’s quite a bit of hand-wringing going on. Developers are trading disturbing graphs showing their games being deleted from wishlists
Thanks to the Steam summer sale minigame, where can win a free game from your Steam wishlist, @WildfireGame wishlist deletions have skyrocketed People want to narrow the pool to more expensive games. Wildfire isn't out. You can't win it as an unreleased game. This is madness. pic.twitter.com/kon3ZPl96X— Dan Hindes (@dhindes) June 27, 2019
Reached out to several indie developers involved in the conversation on social media. Responses varied. Some aren’t seeing spikes at all, while others are clearly suffering. Valve has heard the message, and issued a second apology alongside the first.
Ini Daftar Game Yang Diskon Hingga 90 Persen Di
“We designed something pretty complicated with a whole bunch of numbers and rules and recognize we should’ve been more clear, ” Valve wrote on that same blog. “We want to apologize for the confusion that this has caused.”
That apology has come with a handy GIF, showing Steam users what they need to do to spruce up their wishlist should they be lucky enough to be randomly selected to win something. In the animation nothing gets deleted.
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PSA! You don't need to remove games from your Steam wishlist in order to win your Top Wishlisted Game during the Steam Summer Sale - just move your favorite game to the top of your wishlist and you're good to go! ☀ 2019 Steam Summer Sale: https://t.co/4TuWeBVo1O pic.twitter.com/hNrMnTSzcY— Steam (@steam_games) June 27, 2019
Weekend Pc Game Deals: Steam Summer Sale 2019 Edition
If you’re a developer selling your game on Steam, we’re interested in your experience with this year’s Summer Sale and contest. When the dust has settled, explain how your wishlist graph looks in the comments below, or shoot me a private message or an email with details.Home / Tech News / Featured Tech News / Steam Summer Sale ends in a few hours so use up your remaining Grand Prix tokens
The Steam Summer Sale is coming to an end today but if there is anything you still want to pick up, then you still have a few hours left to do it. More importantly, you should double check your Steam Grand Prix event tokens, as you can use them to claim multiple £5 Steam discounts before the event ends.
The Steam Grand Prix had mixed reception. The event was overly complicated and poorly explained to users, which led to confusion and issues with getting people to fully participate. Valve has since acknowledged the issues with the Grand Prix, confirming that Team Corgi won out in the end. Most importantly, the team promises to “anticipate the curves better” next time we are invited to the races, so hopefully next year's event will be a bit more user friendly to get to grips with.
Steam Summer Sale Geht Für Indie Entwickler Nach Hinten Los
The Steam Summer Sale ends at 6PM BST this evening. Before it ends, you can go to the Grand Prix page on Steam and check out how many tokens you've got left over. Then you can head to the Pit Stop and spend those tokens on different rewards, ranging from chat emotes and profile badges to a £5 Steam discount.
You may have tokens left over that didn't properly appear after purchases earlier in the sale. I checked mine today and had 130, 000 tokens left, which I was then able to use on multiple £5 discounts, which can stack on purchases. I was able to cut about 70% off the asking price for Cyberpunk 2077 this way, so be sure to check your tokens and redeem your rewards while you still can.
Says: The Steam Summer Sale is officially coming to a close. I ended up picking up more games than I expected to this year, although as usual there are too many for me to play all at once. Did any of you pick up many games during the sale this year? As part of this year's annual Steam Summer Sale, Valve is hosting a new Grand Prix promotion that gives participants a chance at free games if they complete certain daily quests on the platform. But confusion over how the promotion works seems to be leading Steam users to delete some low-cost indie games from their Steam wishlists in a misguided attempt to maximize the value of their potential winnings.
Steam Summer Sale Is Here
We lost 1, 500 wishlists in the first 24 hours of the sale, No More Robots Director Mike Rose told Ars regarding the four indie games the publisher sells on Twitter. Usually you lose, like, 20 in a day.
No More Robots is far from alone. Mode 7 Games' Paul Kilduff-Taylor tweeted a graph showing wishlist deletions spiking to over 1, 100 following the start of the sale on Tuesday. SixtyGig Games's Raymond Doerr showed a similar increase in deletions for his game at the same time, outpacing a smaller rise in additions and purchases from the wishlist. There are now enough anecdotal examples of this effect across multiple indie games, all starting on the first day of the sale, to suggest this marked increase is something more than random chance.
Some developers have noted that wishlist activity (i.e., additions, deletions,
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