One of the reasons Valve Corp’s Steam client is so popular is the frequent discounts the platform gives to games, especially the massive winter and summer sales that last for nearly half a month.

But not everyone is a fan of big discounts or game bundles. Alain Puget, Creative Director of French indie studio Alkemi Games, believes that gamers have come to expect ridiculously good sales on games, and that expectation is changing the way they buy new titles.

“Systematic sales and discounts contribute with other factors (mobile stores pricing, bundles) to decrease the commonly accepted prices of games to absurdly low levels,” Puget wrote in a recent blog post. “It’s now a standard gamer behavior to wait 3 or 4 months before buying any game because you know for sure there’s a major discount coming. It’s so systematic that it’s nearly stupid not to do so!”

Puget explained that the discount trend has changed the way gamers look at prices, and many balk when a game costs more than $20, even when they have no idea how much it costs for a developer to actually create a game. The constant price-slashing is a race to the bottom, Puget says, and it will only hurt developers in the long run.

Puget’s statements echo similar ones made by Polygon’s Katie Chironis, who wrote a piece earlier this year warning that many developers were setting unrealistically low funding goals on Kickstarter, which hurts the platform overall.

“When you ask for half a million dollars when you really need $5 million, it becomes impossible for games with realistic budgets to survive,” Chironis wrote at the time. “It’s not that people don’t understand what a game costs, it’s more that Kickstarter is actively distorting people’s understanding of a sane budget.”

“There’s no certainty that this model even works”

Puget’s Nantes-based studio is made up of only five people, and it is currently working on a side-scrolling shoot ’em up called Drifting Lands. According to Puget, the studio will not be discounting its game through Steam Sales or including it in bundles like the Humble Indie Bundle.

“I may be wrong but I sincerely think that playing along the promo / discount / bundle fashion is bad,” Puget said. “Bad for us and bad for everyone. So we won’t. Drifting Lands will never be part of any sales, never be part of a bundle.”

He added, “Maybe it’s a bad idea in the current context, maybe we should do it exactly like others but there’s no certainty that this model even works. So, we will do what we think is ‘right’ and hope it will be for the best.”

Image credit: Alkemi Games