But you didn't have to check 3 times a day to see if the game you want is on sale, because the game you want is on sale. You checked 3 times a day to see if the games on sale that you want gets a better discount for 8-48 hours.
With the new model, you get the same baseline discount you were getting before, just not the chance of a special discount on top of that. How is that better? Less stressful sure, more remunerative for publishers/developers absolutely, but better for players/consumers? I just don't get it.
IIRC there was some kind of chart (from SteamSpy maybe?) noting that the average discount was higher than last Summer.
So the point would be: no awesome prices for a short time, but good ones for the entire sale.
On the topic of engagement and the discovery queue, Valve needs to spend a lot of time and effort into refining the process by which the system analyses taste. Initially, I suspected they would have already done so and were using this sale as a way to further get into the heads of each customer, but I saw maybe two games of interest to me in all of the queues I tore through. The rest were simply being tossed to me because other people were buying or looking at them. The current system could give users choices in genres they weren't thinking about, introducing them to new styles of games to broaden their horizons, but it won't work nearly as well until you know what the individual user likes. After that, then you can start connecting the dots and throwing them something new.
With all of the metrics Valve takes during every experiment, I feel like this would be a no-brainer for such a system. I lost count of the number of really low quality island survival games it asked me to look at. The discovery queue hardly knew me at all. That's going to be big moving forward in a flash/dailies-less direction.
I'm no expert of how these things work, but I think for us (as in: hardcore customers) it just can't work as you'd like.
I mean, at a super quick glance on your profile, you have almost a thousand games, showcasing, for example, L4D2, Dear Esther and Monaco.
My guess would be that you own games from a great variety of genres, and even narrowing down to your top played (multiplayer fps), my guess is that you already own any game you'd like.
This considered, what is the queue supposed to do?
Inevitably it throws to you random games that are popular, or even saying candidly "just to see if you like it".
My guess is that the queue COULD (as in: I don't know) be of some use for "entry level" Steam users.
But when you have an account full of hundreds or thousands of games, half of them probably bundle trash that you don't even like but you OWN them (and maybe you also have plenty of hours of playtime for idling!), it's just impossible for the queue to come up with proper recommendations.
DA:I. DA:I is a perfect example of a game that has absolute no respect for the player's time whatsoever.
