In yet another case of Steamdb being amazing they've managed to catch an erroneously posted Valve message that was supposed to be a private recap of the Steam Winter Sale.

While they didn't share any actual numbers Valve was quite clear in the fact that both the best sellers & those outside of the top 500 saw a massive increase in sales compared to the previous Steam Winter Sale.

The biggest reason for this increase is the removal of daily deals and having every game start the sale on its maximum discount. With the new system customers were more likely to buy a game they were interested in on the spot rather than waiting until the final day for the possible extra discount thus risking the chance of simply forgetting about it.

The other more obvious reason is that some customers simply couldn't visit the store often enough to catch all of the daily deals. Removing those in favor of a constant discount also helped Valve showcase a greater and much deeper variety of games to a customer with full confidence that whenever they decide to look up the game it'll still be on its maximum discount.

Combining this with the trading card incentive Valve added to the Discovery Queue resulted in an absolutely massive increase in users browsing through their queues and potentially finding games they are interested in.

So instead of simply coming to the Discovery Queue for the free trading cards many users also found plenty of games they liked because the wishlist graphs are off the charts when compared to the previous sale.

As you can see, the difference is immense

So how exactly did all of this affect the actual revenue from sales? According to Valve their latest experiments were a resounding success:

"As with past years, popular hits continue to sell well during major sales events. But what about the thousands of other titles on Steam? We looked at performance of the group of games outside of the Top 500 in revenue terms.

This group collected 35% of product page traffic during the sale, which is over 4x their share of traffic from the previous winter sale. And these weren’t just idle views--we also saw 45% growth in the revenue generated by this group of games as compared with the last winter sale."

As you can see in my summary and the message itself there is no sensitive information here, no devious marketing tricks to be stolen by competitors, so why doesn't Valve post this publicly? From my point of view the fact that a much bigger chunk of the playerbase found games they're interested in compared to the previous year is a very good thing indeed.

Which makes me wonder, now that this summary is out in the open and the response mostly positive will Valve endeavor to keep their community in the loop during future events? ... Probably not given that a Valve statement occurs about as often as Unicorns but a man can dream can't he.