GTAV Steam summer sale ad misleading, says Advertising Standards Agency (UK)

A

ashecitism

Member
http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2015/11/05/steam-gtav-misleading-advertising/

The Advertising Standards Agency in the UK has upheld a complaint against the Valve Corporation over a misleading Grand Theft Auto V [official site] ad during the Steam Summer Sale.

The kerfuffle is over advertising that suggested GTA V had been discounted by 25% (from £51.98 to £38.98) when in fact it was a bundle featuring GTA V which had been discounted.
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Complaints that the “before” price on GTA V (and Wolfenstein: The New Order) had been inflated to make a small reduction sound more impressive were dismissed but the the confusion between the GTA V bundle deal and the GTA V standalone game was enough that the misleading savings claims complaint was upheld.

The ruling describes Valve’s response:

“The stand-alone Grand Theft Auto game, which normally sold for £39.99, was not reduced. However, the claims that stated it was £38.98, with a saving of 25%, had appeared on the website in error for around three hours at the start of the sale. They said the price claims were the same as those for a separate Grand Theft Auto bundle, which was included in the sale. Because that type of bundle had not been offered before, their software had mislabelled the stand-alone game. They had removed the claims related to the game once they became aware of the error.”
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Aaaaand here’s the full ruling:

“We noted the claims related to the Grand Theft Auto game had appeared in error for around a three-hour period and that the item was not included in the promotion. While we acknowledged that the claims had been duplicated, and were intended to relate only to a separate product bundle, we noted the two items appeared side-by-side, which we considered consumers were likely to understand to mean that both the game and the bundle were included in the sale.

“We noted the claims for the game stated that consumers could make a saving of 25% on the previous price of £51.98, which we considered would be understood to represent a genuine saving against the usual selling price of the product at the time the ad appeared. However, we understood that was not the case and it had instead been sold by Steam at £39.99, rather than £51.98, since the date of its launch. Because a 25% saving was not available on the usual selling price of the product at the time the ad appeared, as claimed, we concluded that it was misleading.”
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The ad must not appear again in its current form. We told Steam to ensure their future savings claims did not mislead about the benefits available.
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So basically they’ve told Steam not to use the ad again (although the sale has been over for months) and to adhere to advertising standards guidelines in future.
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more at the link
 
Yeah, was total fuckin horse shit. And I bought the game full price, so its not even like I wanted to buy it at 25 percent off.
 
I hate this shit, Valve needs to be called out on it. I remember CoD had pulled dodgy stuff too.

Advertises $44 but the "upgrade" is $44 on top of the full priced game.
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Yeah, Valve needs to work on making it more obvious when only a specific package is being discounted. Take Soul Axiom, for instance: "it" has been discounted by 30% quite a few times and shows as 30% off in the specials list, but every time I've checked it's only the Soul Axiom + Master Reboot bundle that was discounted. Up until the other day, Soul Axiom itself hadn't been discounted since August, and I actually missed out on the deal because I just assumed the bundle was being discounted again. Bah!
 
Valve decides the sale prices? Isn't this pretty much rockstar's fault and them abusing steam ad/pricing system?
 
orava said:
Valve decides the sale prices? Isn't this pretty much rockstar's fault and them abusing steam ad/pricing system?
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I remember a dev explaining that Valve informs them of the upcoming sale, developers send in the maximum amount they are willing to cut (25%, 50, 75% and so on) and then Valve decides which games to feature. Obviously popular games will get featured even if the sale is lame (or in the case of GTA V, non existent).
 
Fuck Valve for not only allowing it but for putting that thing on every ad banner they ran for their sale.

Super scummy.
 
I'm sick of companies being allowed to say £49.99 discounted to £39.99 then dropping the price to £39.99 at release. Valve shouldn't allow companies to exploit the specials tab in this way.
 
SuperBanana said:
I hate this shit, Valve needs to be called out on it. I remember CoD had pulled dodgy stuff too.

Advertises $44 but the "upgrade" is $44 on top of the full priced game.
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lol

Yeah, they gotta stop doing this shit. I mean, who still buys the game after clicking on a misleading ad like this?
 
Valve doesn't care about the consumer, it just cares about getting what's in your pocket.

Valve is a business. Businesses are all the same.
 
I think the same thing happened for Resident Evil Revelations 2? Only part 1 had the advertised sale while the rest was a lot lower % or something.
 
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