Contributions change with the steam store price- Discussion/Suggestion

Your argument is invalid, no one would leave skyrim in their inventory for a year.

Your idea is good in theory, bad in practice. If this is done, the guys that bought it at full price then give it away during a sale will receive less contribution credit.

I agree with you and I suggest that the 2 people posting on top read your post again ;)

I've only given away a measly amount and I honestly don't care how much my gifting amount diminishes. I think it's besides the real point of the site.

For the most part, it effects everyone nearly equally, sure the people who buy tons of <$1 DLC/games, complete packs, and archaic (lol ><) games are going to come out on top since those prices are going to stay fixed or increase (when it comes to packs) for the most part. That really just comes down to nitpicking though, because in reality it's going to effect everybody the same (yes I realize different games will lose value at different rates, blah blah blah, but in the grand scheme of things everyones gifting value will go down at about the same rate.

In the end it isn't a bad idea or anything and you aren't wrong, I just don't think it's a pressing concern.

if you're worried about contributor giveaways, im pretty sure they only include the contributions you've made within a year. So by the time the game devalues it's not gonna matter all that much

There's no different for me.

Gift is Gift and the winner are happy to get this. No differences at different price. I'm happy about winning a $5 or $60 game.

Even you got no points for your submission. So not important.

I think OP's post is valid if the reduction over time does occur that shouldn't reflect on contributions made in the past.

I don't see a reason for prices to work like that, tbh. It's not like it happens often.

I agree with you; the price/point system should be static to reflect how much the game was worth when it was given. This is especially true now that a contributor system has been introduced. There's really no argument against this. You should bring this up in support.

It is an extremely good point. If you spend 50$ your profile should reflect that. If the game drops in price after the fact, it shouldn't affect your contribution. Obviously it should be adjustable at an admin level for exploit reasons, but generally once the game is gifted the gifters contributions should be fixed. If a person spends 1000$ on gifts they should always show 1000$. It's not like you can go back to the retailer and ask for half your money back if it reduces in price.

I support this!

How about sales? The exact opposite. For the sake of argument, let us use the example of Skyrim bought in sale for $30. Now the SG takes the full price from Steam (US) which is $60. And how about people from different regions? Someone might pay 60€ for Skyrim or some people buy from Amazon, Greenmangaming, etc.

Everything depreciates in value over time (except wine). If you gave $100 worth of games a year ago, but nothing since, it makes sense your contributor status will devalue. It's just like buying a videogame for yourself; you can buy it now for $60, but good luck selling it in a year for that price.

Right now, the database just needs a single price per game. With this change, it would instead need to keep the full history of what each game was worth at what time. That just makes it a lot more complicated. Plus, as others have pointed out, sales, regional price differences, and purchases from non-Steam stores already make it impossible to determine how much was actually spent.

(And really, even if we could determine exactly how much was spent, one person's $60 could still be worth more than another person's $60, depending on the economy they live in and their financial status.)

It's fine like it is right now. How many of us buy a 5-10$ game that is counted as 30-50$ on here?

Humm... and that would require you sending proof of purchase, because a game has different prices in different sources at the same time...
Then again I have a lower paying job, so I should send my wage receipt so my giveaway can be calculated as a ratio on my income to prove how generous I a am...
But my income varies through the year, so if we are speaking on yearly terms I should submit my IRS forms properly authenticated...
Yet, my countrie's economy is totaly different than yours, so the ammount I spend in one game, versus my income, versus the ratio over my income and my national gross product...
Can we get some Major International Auditor or Consultant Support to figure how much my last giveaway was worth please?

That does seem a little unfair. But you shouldn't be contributing to get something out of it. You gift games via steam gifts because you wanna do something kind. In summary, you should be contributing because you want to do something nice or make someone's day and not because you add more money to your contributions earned

I probably spent $50 on gifts and it counts as $140. It is sort of twisted yes, but I don't really think it needs changing based on discount price, it's fine as it is. You'll be giving incentive for giving away gifts at launch but will devalue discount giveaways which consist of a large portion of giveaways here, so people who think in a greedy way will focus less on quantity, and as you can see the member count is already saturated enough as it is. If you can really afford full-priced releases to giveaway, more than likely you don't really care for your account value or about contributor giveaways at all.

Besides there's also many external methods for obtaining cheap cd-keys that would just screw up everything even further and make people frustrated. It's just too much work and change for something that doesn't really need fixing.

I could care less honestly, people should not gift to "rank up" or whatever, most contributor giveaways seem fair anyways.

Plus most people buy on sale anyways so even if it goes down it probably doesn't go down that much in most cases.

good thing i gave away bf3 FOREVER 59.99

Totally agree with u, there could be a type of an appearing (or not) indicator to distinguish the different "price periods" such as
(1)Dota 2 (25P) for the old one and
(2)Dota 2 (10P) for the new one etc.

I agree, it should remain the value at the time of the giveaway creation.

Also the contributor value for a game should be the lowest sale price for the game. So once a $20 game goes on sale for $5, that becomes its contributor value even after the sale is over. (The cost in points would remain the current regular price though)
This should be easy since the lowest sale values are already available from the sister site steamgamesales.com

Yes. Just like currency, which never loses its value over time because of inflation, game prices should remain at constant arbitrary point level. Sale prices should also not to be taken into account, because no one really buys games from sales. It is certainly the utmost core of Steamgifts to be collecting these so called points to your account as they definitely assess ones self worth.

The only point I see for the price being dynamic is for easily removing exploits, such as the recent $50 bundle from Indie Gala which was changed to $1, and affected everyone retroactively.

In most cases I agree, having your value get suddenly reduced is a problem.

I think the contribution should not decrease. It should be pretty easy to implement, just have a counter instead of recalculating it every time.