Here in the UK I was under the impression that to claim that products are on sale, you should show the previous price and should have been selling at that price for a meaningful period of time.<p>It appears to be rampant practise on Steam to list an item and put it on sale almost immediately. I understand why sellers do this to attract more attention to the product, but ultimately I don't think it genuinely serves sellers and buyers positively.
The games are only temporarily marked down, what you are observing is discounting as a promotional tool because discounts get in front of more people than full-price games.<p>These are not perpetual discounts that would make the defacto real price be the discounted price. After the launch week/s the game price will revert and eventually fluctuate from being occasionally discounted, included in bundles, given away etc.<p>Discounts are an important sales tool for games - you can see major publishers today are pretty much constantly offering big discounts on one store at a time. Steam etc all have discounted game lists, websites track game deals, there's a huge subreddit for them at r/gamedeals, there's sites tracking the lowest-ever prices for games etc.