How Steam turned sales into a cultural phenomenon that can’t be replicated

More than ten years ago, Valve CEO Gabe Newell articulated in an interview with PC Gamer that seems obvious today: Steam’s main competitive advantage isn’t its catalog, its convenience, or even its 30% commission. It’s the sales, which turn the very process of buying games into entertainment.

According to him, Valve has deliberately experimented with turning sales into more than just discounts—into events with their own narrative. The Summer and Winter Sales featured storylines, mini-games, a points system, and special sections in the store.

Since then, the culture of Steam sales has grown into something that no competitor has been able to replicate. EA, Activision, Ubisoft, and Take-Two have all tried to create their own stores and ultimately returned to Steam. For years, the Epic Games Store has given away free games and acquired exclusives, but the store, that set out to become a “second Steam”, never managed to break players’ habit of living within Valve’s ecosystem. And this isn’t speculation: Epic Games Store General Manager Steve Allison admitted that Steam is impossible to beat. It has gotten to the point where Epic sends scouts to "every gaming show possible" to find new free Games for its store.

Steam researcher and marketer Chris Zukowski describes the platform’s mechanics as “Steam’s breathing cycle”: the inhale consists of wishlists that players fill up through promotions and festivals, while the exhale is the money they spend during sales. Zukowski puts it even more bluntly:

Newell is saying the same thing, just more subtly: all developers’ revenue grows when the sales mechanism itself is entertaining. And that’s the whole point—Steam has turned the wishlist into a collection of imaginary adventures, the library into a collector’s digital shelf, and sales into a celebration that gamers look forward to as a seasonal event. Planning purchases during a sale has become almost as much fun as playing the games themselves. And Newell has long since become a meme—the “patron of discounts and wallet-drainer.”

Today, Steam remains the largest platform for PC games—and Gabe Newell’s journey from visionary to system clearly doesn’t end there.

Valve continues to develop the ecosystem: in addition to seasonal sales, the platform supports genre-themed festivals, publisher sales, and a flexible discount system for developers.

Right now, this machine is running at full capacity. This week, Steam kicked off the Bandai Namco Publisher Sale with discounts of up to 90%, and Activision launched a sale with discounts of up to 67% on the Call of Duty series, Crash Bandicoot 4, Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3 + 4, and Prototype. The next major seasonal event is the Steam Summer Sale, which will run from June 25 to July 9. Between seasonal sales, Valve hosts dozens of genre-themed festivals—from Steam Medieval Fest to Steam Cyberpunk Fest—and publishers can launch their own weekend sales at any time. All of this creates the impression that there’s always something on sale on Steam, and it simply doesn’t make sense to wait for full price.