Another month, another sale for PC owners that prefer to use Valve’s Steam platform. Not too many are going to complain (besides significant others when they see the bank account), being that it means fantastic prices for the fourth month in a row on PC titles ranging from unknown indie gems to massive triple-A productions. This Steam event is the Lunar New Year Sale, celebrating the Chinese New Year along with it being the Year of the Rat.
Steam Sales are always an exciting time for PC players, as it allows them to bulk their libraries with thirty more titles that will be played to varying amounts at some unknown time in the future to keep them copasetic in between the massive sale events.
https://twitter.com/Steam/status/1220407422956662785
Yet beyond the standard sales on many titles on the platform, Valve typically likes to incorporate events with the sales to keep users coming back to explore their options. The events have been wildly hit and miss in past offerings, ranging from a race where everyone happened to pick one team, to an idle-clicker mini-game that offered odd rewards and timeouts that saw clicking macros become hotly debated for a week.
It seems as though Valve is becoming a bit more familiar with various things that they can offer during events, however, and there seems to be a pattern beginning to emerge.
In the Lunar New Year Sale, users can receive an ‘Emperor’s Gift’ daily, consisting of some tokens that can be used in the event market. Along with the ‘Emperor’s Gift’ that comes in an adorable red parcel, users also can indulge their sense of curiosity with the origin story of the Chinese Zodiac. Every day, a new chapter of the origin is released, discussing the old fables that have been passed down for generations in the Chinese culture.
The tokens are aggregated with tokens received from purchasing titles; as was the case in the Winter event, $1 spent in the store gives you 100 tokens. Those tokens are then used in the event market, which is once again bringing animated stickers you can use in your Steam chats, animated profile backgrounds, or simply highlighting your username yellow for a period of time in your friend’s list.
The apparent paradigm is frankly well-received, after a lengthy history of users having to research precisely what a Steam event entails this time, and what hoops we’ll all have to hop through in order to maximize their impact. Keep those creative stickers and what-not coming, Valve.
