>> they can't do anything fun like they once did like community-voted flash sales where something will be super-duper discounted for an hour while for the rest

>> they can't do anything fun like they once did like community-voted flash sales where something will be super-duper discounted for an hour while for the rest of the two weeks it'll only be merely super discounted. Flash sales were an important part of the classic deep-discount Steam sale, but it's easy to upset people with them. Put another way, you buy at 60% off, then tomorrow it's 80% off. What do you do? What can you do in some circumstances (e.g. you already started playing for a few hours)? I guess I should clarify that this wasn't the only factor (the increase in alternate distribution and visibility channels is another) but it contributed. A side effect is that because of there being little you could do, wiser gamers would wait until the last day to make sure none of the games they wanted ended up on one of the flash sales, then buy things. Valve makes a lot more money if people are buying throughout the sale -- and they've since added a lot of search, filtering, and discoverability to the platform that flash sales once had a role in that encourage those impulse buys.