Steam Sale Chaos

Steam's annual summer sale has started. As usual, the summer sale comes with a gimmicky community event: The Steam Grand Prix. In a break from recent (several years') tradition, however, the event does not consist of collecting Steam trading cards to level up a summer sale badge. In some ways, it's a throwback to the Steam sale events that we used to see before the introduction of Steam trading cards. It's just a thousand times more convoluted and broken.

The mechanics of the event are difficult to explain, but I'll try my best.

• You selects one of five teams to participate in a race.
• You have a "Boost Meter" whose capacity increases by 100 for each day of participation and each dollar spent during the sale.
• You complete "quests" in order to earn a number of points which is limited by your Boost Meter capacity.
• Some quests are special actions in select games, worth 10 to 100 points each.
• You can also just play, for at least 30 minutes, any game in which you have ever unlocked achievements, in order to earn an amount of points which scales to the quantity and rarity of the unlocked achievements.
• You spend your points, as well as the corresponding amount of Boost Meter capacity, to gain distance for your team in the ongoing race and to earn a number of Grand Prix tokens equal to the number of points spent.
• You spend your Grand Prix tokens at the "Pit Stop" store, where you can level up your summer sale badge for 100 tokens per level, buy a $5 coupon for 15,000 tokens, or buy other digital junk (like profile backgrounds for 1,000 tokens each and emoticons for 100 tokens each).
• A very small number of random users from high-ranking teams are selected each day to win games from their Steam wishlists.

Needless to say, people are confused by all of this. My explanation is verbose, but the explanation on the official event page is longer and less clear, and there's really no possible explanation which doesn't make it sound completely absurd. You essentially need to go through three kinds of fake currency (Boost Meter capacity, points, and Grand Prix tokens) in order to get your prize from the Pit Stop store.

Perhaps Valve is just trying really hard to obfuscate the very direct relationship between money spent on Steam and Grand Prix tokens earned. Beyond what's given for free just for participating in the sale, it essentially takes a $1 store purchase to get 100 more tokens. The $1 actually translates directly to 100 Boost Meter capacity, but the Boost Meter capacity is exactly the number of points you can earn, and that number is then traded for Grand Prix tokens at a one-to-one exchange rate. Several layers of nonsense exist seemingly just to dress up the fact that each Grand Prix token is a virtual penny. Now, of course, the money in question is spent on games, which you were presumably going to buy anyway, so the tokens are free — but if, for some reason, you just really wanted to accumulate 15,000 extra tokens, you'd have to spend $150 to get them.

The absurdly complicated method of disassociating money and tokens was the first thing about the event that struck me as odd. The second was how points are earned. In all of my recently played games on the first day of the event, the unlocked achievements were worth thousands of points. One game, in which I had unlocked all but a few achievements, was worth tens of thousands of points. But earning tens of thousands of points is meaningless, if your Boost Meter capacity is only 100. Boost Meter capacity, clearly, is the real bottleneck, whereas points — the currency rewarded for playing games, i.e., actually having fun during the event — are so easy to earn but so quickly capped by the Boost Meter capacity that they might as well not exist.

If you try to claim tens of thousands of points from a quest and your Boost Meter capacity is 100, you keep 100 points and the rest are thrown away. I guess this is supposed to be a psychological trick to make you feel like you're wasting something if you don't upgrade your Boost Meter by buying some games from the store. However, I don't think any sane person would actually buy games just to get more points. The end result is just that participating in the event feels unsatisfying. I think the average Steam user (with normal shopping habits and normal achievement completion) would, like me, find that completing a single quest is enough to exceed the Boost Meter capacity. Earning points this way is so much easier than doing the other quests, assuming you've actually played more than a few games, that the other quests are practically meaningless. Completing quests is the only part of the event which actually resembles fun, and the majority of the quests being pointless makes the event less fun, as does the perceived wastefulness of throwing away those imaginary points that exceed one's imaginary capacity.

But so far, honestly, none of this is really a big deal. Steam is a store; of course its interaction with its users revolves around spending money. So the event isn't fun. Who cares? It's a game store; if you want to have fun, then buy fun games from it. However, we can't really blame the Steam community for attempting to participate in something that's plastered all over the top of the main store page. When there's an event happening on Steam, even if it's silly, people are going to try it out, just to see what's going on. But it seems everyone who tried to participate just ended up confused and annoyed. The event itself is confusing, the official explanation of the event is badly written, and one bit of terminology, in particular, has caused a lot of unnecessary confusion.

Those who had more than 100 Boost Meter capacity on the first day of the event, as a result of having spent money on Steam, were surprised to see their Boost Meter capacity drop back to 100 on the second day of the event. Increasing the "capacity" of something sounds permanent; in this case, it's not. When you "boost" your team in exchange for Grand Prix tokens, you spend the points you earned as well as the corresponding amount of Boost Meter capacity. Any unspent Boost Meter capacity presumably rolls over to the next day, but if you fill your Boost Meter with points and then spend those points, you lose all of your Boost Meter capacity and will star the next day with 100 again.

The other major problem with the event is that, even when we understand the rules, it appears to be completely broken. Boost Meter capacity, or so the rules claim, is increased not only by money spent during the event but also by money spent before the event:

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/grandprix

Sounds great, right? You're a loyal customer, and you've spent lots of money on Steam before, so you should get something even if you're not buying things right now. The problem is that many people started with a low Boost Meter capacity despite having a large number of games on Steam. Others report users with very few Steam purchases starting with huge amounts of Boost Meter capacity. The sum of anecdotal evidence posted online, for what that's worth, seems to throw into question any coherent method of computing what a user's starting Boost Meter capacity ought to be.

(It's worth noting that the 2019 Lunar New Year event had similar issues. The tokens given to users at the start of that event were also supposedly scaled to prior purchases on Steam, but based on users' self-reported numbers of tokens received and games owned, it almost seemed as if tokens were given out at random.)

My own personal experience with the Grand Prix event is just confusing. I started with a Boost Meter capacity of 100, despite having over 730 games on Steam. I wasn't surprised, at first; I just figured my Steam store purchases weren't recent enough. Many of my recently added games came from third-party bundle sites, so many those don't count. All of my recent Steam store purchases were made with store credit loaded from Steam gift cards, so maybe those don't count either, for some reason. Maybe adding keys from third-party bundle sites, and gaining store credit by selling Steam trading cards on the Steam market, actually subtracts form a user's starting Boost Meter capacity. How should I know how these things are computed? I just assumed that my 100 was correct.

But then I scrolled to the bottom of the Pit Stop store page (under "Frequently Asked Questions"), and found this:

Source: https://store.steampowered.com/pitstop (while logged in)

Atrocious grammar aside, it says I received 2,000 Boost Meter capacity, but I never did. I'm not sure where they even got the number 2,000 when I consider my recent purchases, no subset of which add up to exactly $20 — but, regardless, it's wrong. I started the even with only 100, so now Steam is lying to me. Others online have also reported starting with 100 despite their Pit Stop store FAQs promising much more.

As a result of everything described above, people are mad about this event. People on the Steam Community forums are mad. People on Reddit are mad. People on 4chan are mad. Nobody is mad about which team is winning the race, or about the individual odds of winning free games; everyone is mad about the completely broken Boost Meter mechanics. The amount of frustration this has caused is actually somewhat amusing, considering that this Grand Prix event is just a stupid gimmick to promote the Steam sale. Keep in mind that Valve could have just done a regular sale — you know, discounts on games, and stuff. They don't owe us Boost Meter capacity and Grand Prix tokens. However,

1. When you present something as a game, people expect it to be fair, and tend to get mad when it's not.
2. When you say you're going to give something to somebody, they tend to get mad when you don't.

By orchestrating a completely optional community event, consisting of users collecting free digital stuff (which is still free even if the amount of it scales with the money you happened to spend on other goods), Valve has made the community feel worse than they would feel if there were no event at all.

Post-Sale Update

After I originally posted about this event, Valve made a number of changes as described in three news posts. These changes included some attempts at clarifying the rules, a new feature allowing participants of one team to "steal" another team's boosts, a "Switch Teams" option, and other unspecified adjustments to address team imbalance. Starting on the fourth day of the event, they also stopped forcing users to throw away over-capacity points gained from achievements. I don't think it really mattered to anyone who had achievements unlocked in a sufficient number of games -- but, as explained above, it was an annoying psychological trick that didn't really make the event more enjoyable, so I can understand why this was changed.

On the third day of the event, they also gave 1,000 extra Boost Meter capacity to anyone who participated in day one and to anyone who participated in day two (i.e., 2,000 to anyone who participated in both of the first two days), presumably to apologize for the sloppy and confusing event kick-off. However, in my opinion, it still remained confusing to the end.

They also considered "fixing" the Grand Prix Badge which was apparently awarding more experience points than intended. I didn't realize it when I wrote the original post above, but this event made it easier than usual for Steam users to level up their Steam profiles. Indeed, even before I had spent any money on games, I was able to level up far more than during a typical sale event, and the levels I gained were nothing compared to those who spent a lot of money during this sale (either incidentally or, perhaps, for the purpose of leveling up). Personally, I don't really care about my Steam profile level, but some people apparently do, and some felt that the ease with which users could level up during this event was causing Steam levels to be devalued. Ultimately, however, Valve backtracked on their decision to fix the amount of experience points awarded by the badge, which shouldn't be a surprise because Valve would seek to please those who spend the most money.

They did remove the ability to upgrade the badge infinitely, capping the badge level at 2,000, but those who had already gotten the badge past level 2,000 were able to keep it.

I suppose the take-away here is that Valve did try to fix the event, and in doing so, made some effort to please everyone. However, I think most users still came away from this event with the opinion that it was a poorly planned and poorly explained mess. First impressions are everything, I guess.

On Game Launchers

If you're a consumer of PC games and you're not clinging desperately to the past, you probably have a Steam account. Valve Corporation's digital distribution platform may have been controversial, when it was first established in 2003 and when the highly anticipated Half-Life 2 launched using Steam for DRM toward the end of the following year — for, at the time, PC games were still most commonly sold on discs, and the thought of digital distribution overtaking physical media was anathema — but over the past decade-and-a-half, those who were resistant to digital distribution in general, and to Steam in particular, have either changed their minds, accepted defeat, or abandoned PC games as a hobby. Digital distribution won, and Steam cornered the market.

Digital Distribution: Deal With It

Of course, some still refuse to use Steam, and some even refuse to pay for digital distribution (whether that means missing out on most PC games or getting them illegally). Among those who do use Steam, however, many believe that the leading PC game store has justified its place at the top, if not earned it outright. As a store and as a download client, Steam is pretty solid; Steam sales are famous for a reason, and the Steam client is a prime example of why digital distribution really isn't that bad.

Yes, I am old enough to remember the good old days when games came on discs. I especially remember entering product keys, manually downloading and installing patches, and needing to put the disc back into the computer every time I wanted to play certain games. Modern digital distribution eliminates these particular nuisances. In many ways, having a fully digital game collection is just more convenient than having a shelf full of discs, so it's no surprise that so many of us have forgiven the fact that we don't really own the games we buy from digital distributors. If Steam ever goes belly up, we will all lose our Steam libraries — but in the meantime, at least Steam games have one-click installation and automatic updates.

Steam's other features help too. Some of them have come to be fairly common in game launchers, such as friends lists and achievements. Others are less common and, when brought together in one (slightly bloated but still user-friendly) package, they make Steam a pleasure to use, even in comparison to other digital distribution clients. Among the Steam client features I've used personally are user reviews, cloud saves, family sharing, in-home streaming, profile customization, group chat, voice chat, an in-game overlay with a web browser, community forums, user-submitted guides for each game, a system for sharing user-created mods, and the ability to add non-Steam games to the Steam interface. (There's also that community market on which you can sell those silly trading cards for store credit, or buy cards if you actually want them for some reason, but I think most causal Steam users ignore that.)

In summary, what was once an annoying launcher for a mid-2000s first-person shooter has become something actually useful that we don't mind having installed. But Steam isn't the only digital distribution platform for games. It's just the biggest. What about the other platforms? Are they worth using?

Everything in One Place

If you just think of each digital distribution platform as a store, it's easy to justify straying from Steam to buy games elsewhere. Whenever you want to buy something, you should at least compare prices on a few different stores. (PC games are no exception; if a game is sold in more than one place, Steam isn't guaranteed to have the best price for any given game at any given moment.) However, a digital distributor is not just a store. It's also an online repository for all the stuff you bought from the store.

Maybe this doesn't matter if you manage to avoid ever downloading anything twice, but digital content is ephemeral and disappears if you press the wrong button, so you might need to download it again. Doing so will require logging in to the account you created at the store from which you bought your digital product. Shopping around and always buying from whichever store has the lowest price on a given thing seems like a good idea, but if you end up using a dozen different stores to buy games then you'll need to keep track of a dozen different accounts in order to maintain access to all of your games.

Most major digital distributors also make you use their client software to download, install, and launch your games, so buying and downloading games from multiple digital retailers also means installing multiple launchers. (GOG is one of a few exceptions, as their games are DRM-free and thus their Galaxy launcher is optional, but if you buy games from Uplay, Origin, Battle.net, and the Epic Games store, you'll need the respective launchers if you actually want to play those games.) Are we okay with having two launchers installed? How about having three or four of them?

Personally, I don't think it's a big deal, but a lot of people don't like it. Some see all launchers as bloatware (and would prefer direct downloads of DRM-free games, as from stores like GOG). Others appreciate the convenience of a launcher, but believe this convenience is greatly diminished as the number of launchers increases. The latter view is actually more common, as most of us have accepted the futility of trying to build a fully DRM-free PC game collection in the digital distribution era, and just want to settle for the next best thing: an entire game collection consolidated on exactly one launcher.

I can absolutely see the appeal of it. Having all of your games in one place keeps your collection organized, and gives you one-click access to every game without logging in to more than one online service. On the other hand, you're also ensuring that you'll lose absolutely everything if you lose access to that one account. Those of us who use more than one platform, on the other hand, would at least have something left if we lost our Steam accounts. Maybe it's a good idea to diversify your game collection instead of putting all your eggs in one basket. The idea of Steam going permanently offline is very hypothetical, as there's no indication that it will happen in the near future; and individual accounts being banned, stolen, or otherwise lost is extremely unlikely unless the account's owner does something very wrong — but all of these things are still possible.

For what it's worth, if had to tie my entire game collection to one launcher, I would choose Steam as well, and not just because it's the most feature-rich and fully developed platform. Unfortunately for its competitors, Steam's main two advantages: the most games and the most users. The appeal of the latter is obvious; your friends are more likely to be on Steam than on any other digital distribution platform. (GOG Galaxy has a friends list too but, for me, it's empty.) Meanwhile, Steam having the most games tells its users that they don't need to go anywhere else, even if they don't really mind creating accounts on other sites and having their game collections split across multiple libraries, and those who do want to limit themselves to one account and one launcher would be crazy not to choose the platform with the largest number of games for sale.

Competition versus Convenience

So competitors with no hope of competing with the volume of Steam's catalog need to find another way to stand out. GOG has its own niche, specializing mostly in selling old games updated for modern systems and selling them DRM-free. Humble Bundle also sells some DRM-free games (in addition to lots of Steam keys) and, as the name implies, still specializes in limited-time indie game bundles (even though the site has long had a full-time store). Both GOG and Humble also describe themselves as curated in order to differentiate their offerings from Steam's nauseatingly long list of games.

Some other digital distribution platforms might not even be considered direct competitors to Steam, as they act primarily as single-publisher stores — namely Blizzard's Battle.net, Ubisoft's Uplay, and EA's Origin. Playing games which are exclusive to these platforms or require their DRM is really the only reason to use them, but people do use them. These stores don't need to be better platforms than Steam, because they know customers will be drawn in by the few popular games over which they have exclusive control.

Steam's newest and most controversial competitor, the Epic Games store, is similar to Uplay and Origin in that it clearly intends to thrive on exclusive games as opposed to trying to create a better user experience than what is offered by Steam. What makes Epic Games controversial is that they're not content to have exclusive control over the games they publish. They've been spending a massive amount of money on exclusivity deals for other companies' games, essentially paying those companies not to do business with Steam. This isn't a new tactic, but they've used it on games which were days away from release on Steam, as well as games which were crowdfunded with the expectation of a Steam release. The fact that Tencent (and thus, allegedly, China itself) owns 40% of Epic Games doesn't help its popularity, nor does the fact that the Epic Games store and client are so pathetically bare-bones in terms of features because Epic Games is more interested in buying exclusivity than improving the user experience, nor does the fact that Epic Games' recent "Epic Mega Sale" was such a poorly planned disaster that some publishers pulled their games.

I started writing this post because the dominance of Steam, the (often exaggerated) rise of Epic Games, and the benefits of a single consolidated game library versus the need for competition among retailers seem to be hot topics lately. In particular, I've noticed an increase in complaints about PC gamers needing too many launchers to play all of the games they want to play. These complaints often boil down to frustration over games not being released on Steam; the "no Steam, no buy" crowd has always existed, but now it seems to me that they're either more numerous or more vocal. Either way, it's clearly a backlash against Epic Games, driven largely by the company's recent attempts to strongarm its way to the forefront of PC game retail.

Epic Games has done some nice things, both for consumers (like the ongoing spree of free giveaways), and for developers (like taking a smaller revenue cut than many other stores), but they've doubled down so hard on the one thing that pisses people off — buying exclusivity for games that were already advertised on other stores — that it's hard to see their negative reputation as undeserved. And yet, despite their credibility being in the trash, there are people who defend Epic in online debates — vicious Epic-versus-Steam debates which, of course, tend to frame the issue as if we each need to choose exactly one store from which to buy our PC games. I don't agree with that premise, but I'm not in a hurry to give Epic Games any money either, given their business practices. The pro-Epic side often cites healthy competition between companies as a good thing for consumers, but I'm not sure how much that really applies when Epic's main strategy thus far has been to take away consumers' choices regarding where to buy certain popular games. Boycotts rarely work, but I must say I'm inclined not to buy any Epic exclusives.

Epic does have a chance with me, though, if the company can stop acting like a super villain for five minutes. Each of Steam's other competitors has found its place in my game collection by doing what they do best. I made a GOG account for the DRM-free games, a Humble Bundle account for their bundles, and a Uplay account because I wanted to play some Ubisoft games, and an Origin account because I bought some Origin-exclusive games. I even have an Epic account, not because they bought exclusive distribution rights for a game I wanted to play, but because (as noted above) they've given away a bunch of free games and I figured I might as well grab them. So congratulations, Epic, you got your foot in the door. Now find a niche that isn't "games whose publishers were paid to stay away from Steam" and you might really have my attention.

Of course, getting me to create an account is the first hurdle, and getting me to install the desktop client is the second. I haven't installed Epic's launcher, because I currently have enough games to play without the free ones they gave me, but I do have GOG Galaxy and Uplay installed on my PC right now. I don't see why it's a bad thing to have more than one installed. The vast majority of my games are still on Steam, so the other launchers are more seldom used, but having them on my hard drive doesn't bother me. Neither does having my game collection split across multiple services, although I realize that's simply a matter of personal preference.

Solutions

The only real problem I've had with using multiple services is that sometimes I forget which games I own. I'm really, honestly, not kidding. Part of the problem is that I buy so many cheap games that my backlog is large enough for me to forget what's in it, but the inability to see all of my games in one library can turn forgetfulness into wastefulness. When Steam had its summer sale last year, I almost bought Oxenfree and Beyond Good and Evil before realizing that I already had both games, on GOG and Uplay, respectively. I hadn't remember purchasing them because I had gotten both in free giveaways, and I hadn't played them when I got them simply because I was too busy. Not seeing them in my most frequently used PC game launcher, I forgot I ever had them.

Given that I had acquired these games on GOG and Uplay precisely because those stores had given them away for free, whereas both games still cost money on Steam, I don't think using only Steam would have been the right solution. Besides, it's too late for that now. To keep better track of what's in my Steam library in the future, I've started using Playnite, which can automatically import games from various accounts — Battle.net, Bethesda, Epic Games, GOG, itch.io, Origin, Steam, Twitch, and Uplay — and act as a front-end for all of those launchers, with the ability to install, launch, and uninstall games. It has some limitations, such as the fact that the current version can only import Uplay games which are already installed (whereas it can import all owned games from other platforms), but it's still pretty nice.

Playnite has been criticized as being simply one more launcher, and thus an unsuitable solution to the problem of having too many launchers. For those who take that point of view, the ability to import all of their games into one of the launchers they're already using would be a better solution. Steam users can import non-Steam games into the Steam client, but that's a manual process, so it's worthless if you have a lot of non-Steam games. The upcoming GOG Galaxy 2.0, a major update to the existing GOG Galaxy launcher, will do much better by including many of the same features as Playnite. This is a pretty smart move for GOG, because many of the people using GOG Galaxy are using it as a secondary launcher alongside Steam. I, for one, don't open GOG Galaxy nearly as often as Steam, but maybe GOG Galaxy 2.0 will be my go-to launcher after I import all of my Steam games into it. It might even make Playnite obsolete.

If GOG Galaxy 2.0 catches on, then there might be a day when every major store's launcher can automatically import games from users' accounts on every other major store. Of course, GOG Galaxy 2.0 will still launch Steam games through Steam and so on, so we'd still need all of our launchers installed in order to make any use of such features.

Conclusions

I've already acknowledged that I think Steam is rather nice while the Epic Games store is, in some ways, obnoxiously bad. However, I'm pretty sure I don't need to choose one. If I really want to play some game that's only on the Epic Games store, I don't need to delete my Steam account in order to play it. Take that simple fact and apply it to every rational consumer, and you'll come to the conclusion that the "Epic versus Steam" debates often miss (intentionally, I'm sure, for the sake of sensationalism): Even if Epic Games' giveaways and exclusive games convince every Steam user to create an Epic Games store account, Steam still won't go out of business. There's really no reason to get so worked up over it.

If you like old games, indie games, or DRM-free games, you likely have a GOG or Humble account (and if you don't, you should). If you happen to like certain Ubisoft or EA games, you probably have a Uplay or Origin account. You might even have an Epic account now, as well, if you noticed the 17 games they've given away for free this year. I have accounts on all of these stores for various reasons. So my game collection is fractured, spread across multiple services, but it saves me the trouble of agonizing over whether a game is available on, or cheapest on, my one service of choice.