Steam Bundle Changes

There’s a big shake-up coming to how Steam’s bundle purchases work, giving them dynamic pricing. In official documentation given to developers, Valve have outlined a redesign of Steam bundles so that they automatically give buyers that already own some of the products within a discount.

This scales based on the number of products, and is already available on some bundles in the wild, though remains officially unannounced. This also has the knock-on effect of making sure that bundles are properly discounted when their components are on timed sales.

The benefits of encouraging more people to buy for those that are selling should be obvious, but it’s pretty great for those of us on the customer side too, as Valve continue to explain, “Past Complete Packs were sometimes a bad deal for customers that already owned one or more of the products in the pack.

Either it made bad economic sense for those customers to purchase the pack, or they just felt bad about doing so since it looked like they were paying for products they already had. The new Steam Bundles system addresses this.”

I’ve definitely seen and felt this phenomenon. Even if it’s only a couple of quid more to buy a complete pack containing some game I want, a dozen I don’t have and some I do, it feels like a waste over just buying the game I want.

Now, not only is it possible that complete pack will be cheaper to begin with, but the feel bads are banished. Plus, because of the way the new bundles are coded into the system, big sales won’t result in odd pricing anomalies with bundles being more expensive than a group of singular purchases.

Check out the details of this change over at PCGamesN!