Sale pricing on Steam games: 50% off = 3000% increase in sales

This is the same thing that Apple saw in the app store: when you get people comfortable with the idea of consistently buying, and it's easy, sales soar. It jives with how I think about purchases as well. A $40 purchase is a big deal, but it's very easy to spend $10 4 times.<p>It'll be interesting to see how far we can push this model. I don't believe in the micropayments or subscription models as a panacea, but it's pretty clear that digital distribution allows for greater volume at lower cost. Will great games like L4D make enough money at $10? $5? $1? Will app store games make enough at $0.10? $0.01?<p>It'll be interesting to see what it does to quality as well. Steam seems to be doing well with quality, even when distribution costs are nearly nothing, but the Apple's app store has seen a huge number of cheap, addictive games because they make more money for less development time. Hopefully it all balances out, but more and more, software will lose the ability to price itself as a physical good that comes in a box. Where does it settle?<p>In any case, I'm excited.

Part of the 3000% jump was probably due to the fact that this particular sale made the front page of reddit and digg, but still, it's quite impressive.

Does anyone have an idea on how to guess or find out how sales of a subscription based game would be affected by cuts in price, say from a baseline of $10/mo?<p>I've always thought that $10 is so little that the biggest barrier to paying is just the reluctance of getting out the credit card or the idea of paying at all, but maybe that's wrong.

Was there a drop in retail sails to compensate?

That's a pretty remarkable price elasticity of demand, and it kind of makes me wonder about the rationality of the purchasers. If a game costs $50, a 25% cut merely saves you $12.50 -- that is enough to more than double revenue? Odd.