Honestly, what are people expecting? The sale was more or less the same as every other year unless you're wearing rose colored glasses. Not to mention the encore idea and others are them just trying something new. I'm just thankful we have this platform and don't bave to deal with shady sites where you don't even know where they get their games from.
Not sure if trolling or just new here.
The Steam Sale is hugely different since the introduction of refunds.
This is most definitely NOT the same thing as when Flash Sales and Daily Sales existed.
Discounts aren't as large- on new games and on old.
Steam also introduced an arbitrary bottom price of $0.49. This made it less likely to find price mistakes with the percentage off- every sale you'd find stuff that because of stacking discounts things that were $0.09, $0.19 or $0.25.
It's not rose color glasses- it's math.
There's plenty of for-instances, but I'll use just one: Battleblock Theatre. It's lowest all time price was from a Steam Sale, just after it was released. Because sale prices have to be for the full two week duration of the sale, the price cuts are a lot less aggressive.
The Encore sale isn't something new: It's a leftover from when there were time limited sales- someone could miss a daily sale, a time limited sale, and they'd collect many of them up (all the daily sales, some of the flash sales), and run them the last two days of the sale.
I'm sure for some people, Valve making all games refundable is a huge boon.
For me, it's been a mostly worthless ability, and for it to come at the cost of the top 10% of deals you'd ever get out of the portal, it's a bad trade.
Additionally, the trading card market used to be a WHOLE lot more robust. With card prices being $0.10-0.25, you could frequently and easily turn your steam sale cards directly into more games.
And that's not even touching on the better promos that used to get run... like the Gem Auction.
