Steam’s Summer Sale Grand Prix Is Knocking Indies Off Wishlists

Steam’s Summer Sale Grand Prix is making life hard for Indie games on Steam, as people remove them from their wishlist for a chance at better prizes.

The Steam Summer Sale started this week, and while it is on, there is a mini-game active that has people compete to finish various challenges to earn points for their team. The winners each day will receive “the most wished for the game” on people’s wishlists, and it will be given to random members of the winning team.

This has led to people trying to doctor their wishlists, leaving only high priced items on them. Now, this doesn’t appear to be how the prize works at all, instead of coming from overall lists of “most wished for games” that were, I assume, finalized before the event began. The result has been that some indie devs are seeing a massive drop in how many wishlists contain their game.

Hey @steam_games, loads of our indie clients are seeing 1000s of wishlist deletions due to the Steam Grand Prix – any chance you could look into it? Especially for small teams that’s a huge hit to take.

— Thomas.gif ?? (@Olima) June 27, 2019

It seems to be that quite a few indie developers have been affected by this. It’s a shame because getting your game onto wishlists is important to indie developers, and is actively promoted by Valve as a function that helps boost sales. It would seem that this is an unintended consequence of some poorly worded instructions about how the prize picking for the Steam Grand Prix would work.

Can confirm all my games are seeing 3x the number of wishlist deletions than purchases since the Steam Summer Sale started, except Lair of the Clockwork God, which is unreleased and so continues to rise steadily as normal.

— Dan Marshall (@danthat) June 27, 2019

Now would be a pretty good time for Valve to release some clarifying information about how the prize picking it done. It would be a shame to see people’s hard work promoting their games and getting people invested in them being undone by a poorly worded social game designed to promote the sale itself.