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Blindspots and unintentional elitism among SG users

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Gothemasticator

Lots of hoopla over Steam's decision to stop the gifting from your inventory option. Sure, it will hurt SG. Sure, it will hurt traders. But, I see all the opinions like, "This is bad business for Steam."

I disagree. From Steam's own stats and from Steamspy, we can learn:

There are 231,357,155 active users
avg games per user 11

How many users does SG have? Just under 1,000,000
That's less than 1/2 a percent of Steam's user base.
We don't matter as much as we think we do.

Sure, average owned games of SG users is much higher than 11. But, most of our numbers are padded with bundle trash. And I don't think all the bundle trash we consume on this site amounts to a hill of beans for Valve.

If I think from Steam's point of view, pushing back against traders, scammers, bots, and the whole 3rd party economy around Steam - it makes sense. We are all exploiting Steam's system. And, in turn, the fact of our exploitation creates a market for people catering to our exploitations. So, you get Devs creating trash for card farmers, etc.

The unintentional elitism comes in when we think we are indicative of Steam's core users, or of their users in general. Steam's main business is from mainstream gamers.

7 years ago

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94 Comments
Koitenshin

Steam WILL lose sales from me, there's no way around that.
If I can't store my gifts and gifting is now restricted, they clearly don't want my money.
During the Winter Sale alone I purchased $125 worth of games, some for my account and many others for gifting.

7 years ago
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DamageInc

it is not just steamgifts being affected by this change though. there are other giveaway sites also and many types of users from traders, gifter's and resellers.when you combine the number of people who will no longer buy on steam because of these changes I believe it will have a hit on profit margins. steamgifts will continue with bundle games. valve has locked their self's out of the majority of gifting and trading sectors.I would buy games for giveaways and trade with coupons from badges. but now its buy now and send instantly or piss off. I shall do the later and coupons will now go to waste unless I want it a particular game. the grey market will still continue without steam gifts also, so many dev's now have deals with bundle sites for game releases. and now twitch and youtube are after a slice of the digital sales pie. it wasn't the greatest idea on their part to alienate so many users in one fatal blow. so we shall see if these new regulations will hurt valves bottom line soon enough. I know what i spend yearly will drop enormously now. and the number of activations of keys instead of steam store items will increase by a ton just sucking bandwidth when they make no money from them.

7 years ago
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