Valve’s Problematic Summer Sale Ends
The Steam Summer Sale has now come to an end and surprisingly for some, brought with it some rather confused and bewildered gamers. The specials that Valve’s platform had on during the Summer Sale period were admittedly pretty good, but the confusion came in with the Grand Prix.
Throughout the Summer Sale, users were asked to select a team from one of the five taking place in the Grand Prix. Those teams were Corgi, Hare, Tortoise, Pig and Cockatiel. Obviously, everyone who has ever used 9GAG or a similar platform will go straight for the Corgi purely because of the memes. Valve’s inability to understand this from the beginning led to a strange competition.
The way the Summer Sale Grand Prix worked (as we understood it, using a team of decipherers), was that players would join a team and then contribute towards the race. You’d do this by increasing your Boost Capacity by spending money on the sale, and then playing qualifying games to earn points. You could also earn achievement for qualifying games to earn points too. With these points, you could then boost your team to get to the finish line first and at the end of each day, a winner would be announced.
Why win? Well, Valve decided to randomly select a percentage of players from the teams placing on podium spots and give them their top wishlisted game. While this wasn’t entirely clear at the start, people were under the impression that Valve would give them a randomly selected game at the start. This saw thousands of users completely pruning their wishlists until only one game was listed.
The first few days had Team Corgi running away with the competition in its entirety. The first two days had Corgi thousands of KMs ahead of the nearest competitor purely because so many people were acting at the start of the sale and were on the Corgi team, so their dog always finished first in the race.
After a few days, Valve managed to clarify certain things about the points and the grand prix, and also managed to even out the teams a little bit more. However, all was in vain as Team Corgi still took the win at the end with the most points. In order to make up for the obvious blunder, Valve has announced that they will be giving out the top wishlisted product to 5,000 users within 48 hours at the end of the sale.
Unsurprisingly, Cyberpunk 2077 was the most wishlisted game across the entire Summer Sale duration and each of the twelve days showed it was the most popular wishlisted game.
