A Note Regarding CV and Price Drops

With all the recent topics, I'll try to summarize why the current system is in place.

First off, as many have noticed, Hitman Absolution lowered in price earlier today on SG. Why? The game wasn't automatically updating correctly, Lina pointed it out this morning, and it was corrected.

Aside from bundles, games and contributor values on SG are meant to reflect current Steam prices. It's understandable people get upset if they spend $20 on a giveaway, and the price lowers to $10 shortly after. The obvious solution is to save the price of the game at the time of the giveaway. It's simple enough, but there are a few main reasons why this hasn't been done. Let's take a look.

1. Issues with consistency. Points are tied to the value of games. If prices differ per giveaway, you might see multiple Hitman Absolution giveaways, some for 50P, others for 25P. This means, every time you enter a giveaway, you'll need to check across the site to see if others are available at a lower number of points. Also, if you've entered into a Hitman Absolution giveaway for 50P, and the price drops, well, now you might want to revisit the site, remove your entry, and enter two giveaways for 25P instead.

2. Steam doesn't provide the most reliable pricing data. Prices bounce all over the place, and it's not unusual to see inaccurate data at times. For example, let's say a game is listed as $9.99. For one reason or another, Steam decides to start displaying the price of a bundle that contains the game, rather than the individual game. The price jumps to $19.99. A week later, Steam returns to the individual price, and it's lowered to $4.99. This means we have users receiving values of $9.99, $19.99, and $4.99 for the same game. The $19.99 is incorrect, so we'd have to catch that error, and readjust the values for all those giveaways. However, we don't know what hour or day the price changed from $9.99 to $4.99, so we wouldn't know which value to assign. Imagine this, multiplied by 2,000 games, and 400,000 giveaways. Also, prices need to be accurate to the minute, otherwise we'll be hearing about it in support. For example, we'll have users catching price drops, posting giveaways within minutes before our data updates, and receiving a higher value. At the moment, it's nice when we can fix a pricing error, and know it's corrected site wide. It's not perfect, but it's consistent for everyone. With individual values, I can't say with confidence our pricing data would be at the level of accuracy we need, and I think we'd have more headaches than what we have now.