The reason Steam does sales is because they make more money: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe-newell-on-game-pricing/ http://www.roc

The reason Steam does sales is because they make more money: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe-newell-on-game-pricing/ http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2011/10/24/less-is-more-gabe.... From the article, they expected that cutting Counter-Strike by 75% would result in 4 times the number of people buying it, thus being revenue neutral. Instead 160 people bought it for every person that regularly did, this increasing the revenue by 40x! He's right about charging less in alpha and beta: those players are taking a bigger risk and for a multiplayer game he needs to build critical mass. But after the game is launched, Valve's results show that sales make you more money, not less.