Another Steam Sale, another event from Valve. Valve’s sale events have been wildly hit or miss, with some events being bizarrely constructed with esoteric rules or surprisingly straightforward. Thankfully, the 2019 Steam Winter Sale has an event that’s far more the latter, with purchases granting platform users with tokens that you can redeem for various effects and customization.
Called the Winter 2019 Steamville Holiday Market, it’s blissfully simple to wrap your mind around. Every $1 spent during the holiday sale will give you 100 Steamville tokens, that you can use to various effect. There are also Quests available that will have users exploring more of Steam’s functionality that is occasionally hidden behind the slew of games.
Every day brings a new quest that you can complete, and completing all quests gives pertinent questers a unique badge titled ‘Your Key to the City Badge’.
The idea of quests to encourage users to explore Valve’s more dynamic offerings via Steam Lab’s is a brilliant choice. Valve has poured resources into exploring the labyrinthian slew of games that the Steam platform offers, and when Steam Lab’s released it wasn’t necessarily encouraging users to explore the offerings. Using quests to bring them front and center once again to the attention of users is a fantastic way of receiving feedback on them.
If you’re a bit behind the power curve in terms of questing, there’s no need to fret; the list of quests adds a new one every day, yet doesn’t remove prior quests. So you can safely begin tackling them at any time and still gain the full amount of tokens.
Even without purchasing anything this Steam sale, relentless questers can grab a total of 2,000 tokens to use to purchase new emoticons, animated decals for steam chat (bringing the ever-popular :steamsalty: emoticon a new animated splendor), profile backgrounds that have a limited usage window, and chat room effects.
Some items are prohibitively expensive, however, with 5,000 coins necessary for a $5 off coupon towards any purchase, or for the unique Holiday profile that lasts until February 24, 2020.
Granted, that $5 off can bring a hot title to your library, with many games being under $5 for the duration of the Steam sale, so it isn’t to be necessarily scorned. On top of that, Steam not only doesn’t need to do sales, they also don’t need to add events for users to enjoy on top of the sales, so any type of platform development is ultimately to be appreciated, even if the tokens don’t seem necessarily favorable to some.
The Animated Chat Stickers are only 500 tokens a pop (with ten stickers out of 30 being 700), however, and it’s audaciously simple to grab 500 tokens in one day of quests by simply clicking around, making certain salty emoticons easily available for even the most Scrooge-like of platform users.
