While Steam bundles offer great value for money, they often pose a major problem: a lot of gamers will own one or more of the titles being offered in the pack. Most people don't want to pay for games they've already bought, even if they are discounted. But now, Steam is changing the way it offers bundle deals by introducing dynamic pricing.
First reported by PCGamesN, Steam's new system will automatically offer players discounts on bundle deals based on how many titles they already own.
"With Steam Bundles, if a customer already [owns] some items in the Bundle, they will pay for and receive only the items not already in their account. This allows the best fans of your series or franchise to 'complete the set' and get a deal on the remaining items in the Bundle," Valve explained in an email to developers.
An extra benefit of this shake-up is that bundles will now be discounted when the games they contain are on timed sales. Meaning there should no longer be incidences when a bundle costs more than buying its individual components separately.
The new pricing system has already been applied to several Steam bundles, but the company hasn't yet officially announced the change. As Kotaku reports, the algorithm still needs to be fine-tuned, as some bundles are charging users money even when they own all the games in the pack.
Naturally, this is great news for both the game companies and those who buy their products. "Past Complete Packs were sometimes a bad deal for customers that already [owned] one or more of the products in the pack. Either it made bad economic sense for those customers to purchase the pack, or they just felt bad about doing so since it [looked] like they were paying for products they already [had]. The new Steam Bundles system addresses this," said Valve.
It's not clear when the system will be rolled out across the entire Steam platform, but chances are it'll arrive before the next big sale, so we can all look forward to filling our drives with even more games we'll never get round to playing.