Revenue and units sold grew during this year's Steam Summer Sale, this year also known as the Summer Picnic Sale. Sure the increase of users is one the main reasons behind this upturn, but there might be another one.
Revenue rose to $233.2 million dollars, 40% more than in 2015. But sales went up much less, just 12% from 33 million copies to 36.8 millon copies. These are figures collected by developer Sergey Galyonkin on Steam Spy. His research doesn't account for all the money and every game, since he only included titles that shipped over 5,000 units during this period. In total 1,592 titles hit that mark, that being 22% of the 7,156 games discounted.
Galyonkin thinks that the main explanation for the change is the absence of flash deals or daily discounts. Because of that the average discount during the sale was 50% instead of 66.67% from 2015. So, people paid more money for the games they bought. He also noticed that there was more even distribution in terms of purchases, more balanced throughout instead of bunched around the first and last days.
To verify this theory, Galyonkin split the games by discount. In 2016 games with the lowest discount were more popular than games with biggest sales. The median revenue for games with a 75% discount was $33.5K this year ($40K last year), $40K for 66% ($75K), $60K for 50% ($90K), $106K for 33% ($90K) and $120K for 25% ($90K last year).
Is this the future of Steam Sales?