Valve Admits Steam ‘Grand Prix’ Sale Event isn’t Going to Plan

Steam Summer Sale

The Steam Summer sale is firmly upon us and, like me, I expect you’ve already had a look to try and grab yourself some gaming bargains. This event, however, marked something a little different than usual.

Steam effectively launched a competition which would give a number of winners the opportunity to claim a game, for free, from their wishlist. It was another semi-push from them to get people playing the games in their library that might have been gathering dust, but on the whole, seemed like a good idea. Everyone likes a free game after all!

In a report via PCGamesN, however, Valve has admitted that the Steam ‘Grand Prix’ event hasn’t entirely gone according to plan so far.

Confusion!

A lot of the issue seems to stem from the rather awkwardly clunky interface surrounding the ‘Grand Prix’ event. Put simply, it was hard to know exactly what you had to do to enter and even then, wasn’t explained particularly well.

Given that games were being offered for free, it even reportedly led to a mass ‘pruning’ of users wishlists to ensure that only high-value products or games were on there.

So, on the whole, it’s a bit of a mess. Steam is, however, trying to fix it!

“We’ve heard your feedback about the complexity of the Steam Grand Prix event. We designed something pretty complicated with a whole bunch of numbers and rules and recognize we should’ve been more clear. We want to apologize for the confusion that this has caused, and also apologize for the broken mechanics that have led to an unbalanced event.”

New & Improved

Steam has since applied a few updates to try and make the event a little more ‘user friendly’ for those who want to participate in it. It is, however, still ultimately a team based game so while you can make the efforts for your ‘crew’, it does require everyone else to do their bit as well.

Frankly, when I first saw the event, my immediate thoughts were that Steam was just trying this to make the sale stand out a little. There is, after all, added competition now with the Epic Games Store platform arriving late last year.

So, clearly there have been teething problems. Steam is, however, trying to put it right and you can’t fault them for that!

What do you think? Have you bought any games in the Steam sale? If so, which ones? – Let us know in the comments!