Disaster is very good word to describe Summer Sale.
race with flawed rules, tampering race results or tokens every day, the sale itself was lame (you would get better deals any other day), steam servers kicked the bucket every 10 minutes so it was painful to browse or use steam app to play.

Steam definitely should stop these "mini-games" if they want to keep what's left from their reputation.

tbh I picked only one small sim game from that sale, that's nothing compared to list of purchased games on gog Summer Sale. that speaks for itself

It's not that they aren't getting applied, it's that with tax shoved on top of it, the discount is hardly a discount at all (to give an example of a game currently on sale in the Humble Store - Prey at 17.99, should in theory come out to less than its asking price with the 10% applied - because the full 20% can't be applied but that's a gripe for another day - but after tax comes out to just slightly under $20. It's hard to think anything is being saved when you're paying above asking prices, even slight as it may be, on things already on sale.

All the games I would see or be interested in Steam were already here in GOG with much higher pricing, so I didn't go and bite the bullet.
Specially when I just recently arrived in the United States.

But it is still cheaper than if you bought it on Steam, because the tax is added to the full price instead of the discounted one...

It definitely seems like the older Steam sales were more interesting than the new Steam sales... and the new GOG sales are more interesting than the new Steam sales as well.

I watch SpiffingBrit too.
Gaining points wasn't that hard to do in that event. You still need to spend lots of monies to be able to convert those points into tokens. SpiffingBrit got backers so he could just pick games.
The discounts weren't that great, for me, not much motivating purchases.

I can't disagree with that. Ultimately it's all a good argument to seek out the best prices where possible and at storefronts that don't shovel tax onto digital purchases.

I disapproved of the pay to win aspect of the sale.

Pay money to earn boost points to help your team fight for second or third place. (You didn't pick Corgi? Too bad - no first place for you)

Give us money and maybe your friends will have a statistically negligable chance of winning a free game.

Couldn't bring myself to buy anything though. I have enough of a GOG backlog to wait for the next sale.

Steam sales are not what they used to be and for the first time since being a Steam user I didn't actually purchase anything in this sale. The horrible race minigame didn't help and the gamification of it didn't either but ultimately the discounts were not that great but no real harm done either. My backlog is the size of the Grand Canyon so there's plenty to play for the foreseeable future.... too bad I'm too old and tired to play games now.

At this point discounts for games are really just regular things that cycle every couple of months at most, kind of like the discounts in the grocery store here. The only difference with a big sale is that you get them all at once.

On top of that I generally have most of the games I wanted to play right away already so my wishlist is mostly filled with a couple of things.
1) Games I'll probably preorder/buy on release
2) Games I want but not enough to buy till they're either 'complete edition/really cheap' and/or Humble Monthly included

So for me anything between release price and 66%+ sale, possibly with DLC's, is a black hole when it comes to purchasing.

1. Went to Steam to collect the "click through some list to get stuff that you can sell on the market"-bullshit (or open doors, or whatever it is you have to click to get something to sell on the market)
2. Saw the Grand Prix thing and clicked it
3. Saw that I have to read a manual for it
4. Left Steam and never came back until the sale was over

Reading a manual to make 2 or 3 Euro during the sale isn't worth my time. I didn't buy anything, because I don't really care for sales anymore. Sales made me buy too many games in the past and now I have a backlog that I'll never "finish" (I won't even try it). Now I'm back to buying selected games when I want to play them, not when something is on sale. Might be more expensive than to hoard games during sales, but I feel better with it.

definitely. maybe we're spoiled by regular mini-sales during a year, or maybe our enormous backlogs plays its role in less hyped approach to sale. I believe most of us have nice backlog and can play years without buying new game. At some point one gonna stop buying and start playing. Actually if all of us will start to process our backlogs gaming industry will collapse - there's too many games and so little time for one human to play even already purchased titles.

Yeah, it's all marketing perception. It would make sense to drop the price of Octopath Traveler to $40 now for example, but it works better for them if it feels like a limited time thing that you have to jump on. It's annoying when you want a specific game at a specific time though, since you feel like an idiot not buying it on sale. Who would pay $60 today if they suddenly decided they wanted to play Far Cry 5 for example? It would be insanity, so you have to wait.

Yeah, this summer sale was the first event with no fun for me. Stupid and silly fun, that is. That robot invasion clicker and salien tower defense were silly time wasters but I had a little fun. I've seen better sales. Maybe Valve needs to stop trying.

Valve makes shitty sales now. Nothing interesting.