Valve updates Steam to make it easier for devs to assess how discounts impact sales

Valve has updated Steam’s revenue reporting system to make it easier for developers to “see the monetary impact of each discount that you have run.”

While it’s the same information available to developers looking at their sales & activations reports in Steamworks, the company said here it is “split out to align with the time frame for each of the past discounts you’ve run” between the current day and November 2021.

“As the developer or publisher of a game, pricing and discounting is in your hands, so you may find this information useful when considering your future discounting opportunities,” Valve explained.

When you visit your discount history page, you’ll see a table with all of the past discounts that you ran on each page package split into four columns:

1. “#” – This column shows the number of times that you’ve run a discount with the same % discount for the given USD base price
2. “Revenue” – The total revenue for the timeframe of the discount. This is gross worldwide revenue generated for the package between the start time and end time of the discount, shown as USD
3. “$ per day” – A calculation of revenue-per-day. This is intended to control for length of discount in comparisons, so you can better gauge whether discount or length contributed to the overall revenue of a promotion
4. “Units” – Total units sold during the discount period

You’ll also be able to see revenue and traffic details for the time period each discount ran, and see indicators that identify when prices were modified.

Valve did warn that the revenue may not “perfectly align” with data in the sales & activations Reports page for the same period, but this is because the sales & activations report page “shows the summary of revenue from all purchases for a given date, regardless of those purchases being discounted or full-priced.”

Providing you have permission to view ‘Manage Pricing and Discounts’ and ‘View Financial Info’ for each game, you’ll be able to access this information. For more, head to Steam.

Yesterday (September 15), we reported that Valve seemingly no longer permits games with “mature themes” to be released in early access.