Many Steam users had mixed feelings about Valve Corp’s decision to eliminate Daily Deals and Flash Sales from its seasonal sales on the Steam Store, but the move seems to have paid off in a big way for the company.

In previous years, Steam Sales would offer moderate discounts on a large number of games for several days, but it would also offer several temporary deals with even better discounts for a limited time. This resulted in many users holding out on making a purchase until the last possible moment of the sale to ensure that they did not miss out on a better deal.

While this created a lot of excitement when the new round of deals were revealed, it also meant that users had to vigilantly watch the sales page for nearly two weeks so they would not miss out.

Valve’s sale hypothesis

Shortly before the Autumn Steam Sale, Valve revealed that it would no longer be offering temporary deals anymore, and going forward game discounts would remain the same through the entirety of the Steam Sale.

Yesterday, Valve accidentally released a post explaining how successful the change had been on the SteamVR page. The information was intended for Valve’s partners only, but before the company could yank it back, SteamDB founder “xPaw” managed to capture the text and post it online.

“Our hypothesis was that this new format would be a better way to serve customers that may only be able to visit Steam once or twice during the 13-day event,” Valve said in the post. “We also saw this change as an opportunity to showcase a deeper variety of titles to customers each day, while having confidence that any game being highlighted would be at its lowest discount.”

Encouraging users to discover new games

One small change Valve made that had a huge impact on user behavior involved rewarding users with up to three holiday sale trading cards if they browsed through their discovery queue, which suggests games they may enjoy based on games already in their library.

This not only resulted in a massive spike in visibility for many games that might otherwise been ignored, which is a constant struggle for games on Steam, but it also led to more game sales overall.

“One of our concerns going into the Winter Sale was that extrinsically motivating customers with a trading card might encourage people to just click through their Discovery Queue and not actually pay attention to the games being presented,” Valve said. “It turned out that customers found a lot of value in using the Discovery Queue, resulting in a huge up-tick in sales and wishlist additions.”

Stopping the Indiepocalypse

Much like on the App Store and Google Play, game developers are finding it increasingly difficult to find an audience amidst the crowded market on Steam. This has led to a fear that the independent development boom of the last few years is starting to dry up in what some have dubbed the “indiepocalypse.”

According to Valve, that is exactly why rewarding users for utilizing their discovery queue is extremely valuable.

“As with past years, popular hits continue to sell well during major sales events. But what about the thousands of other titles on Steam?” Valve said.

“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. ”

While some users have lamented the loss of the excitement that Flash Sales and Daily Deals used to bring, it seems clear from the Steam Winter Sale’s resounding success that Valve has little reason to bring them back.