Steam Grand Prix Summer Sale meta-game triggers mass wishlist deletions, causing backlash from developers

[AnotherGills 25]

This year’s Steam summer sale introduced the Steam Grand Prix, a meta-game which gives players the chance to win their “Most Wished For games”. The wording of this competition has caused confusion as many Steam users believed that winners would receive random games from their wishlist. This led to many Steam users removing cheaper games from their wishlist, most notably from independently developed games.

As such, many developers and publishers were less than thrilled with this year’s meta-game.  Developers receive notifications based on additions and deletions of games to users wishlists. Within hours of the Grand Prix launch, developers watched large amounts of users remove their games from wishlists in nearly real-time.

Dan Hindes, developer of the upcoming title, WildFire, tweeted about the situation, showing a graph chronicling wishlist deletions for Wildfire.

Thankfully, Valve addressed the furor before it could erupt, and modified the promotion’s guidelines. The new rules now clarify that “if your team makes it to the podium and you are randomly chosen to win something off your Steam Wishlist, then we’ll grant you the top item.”

Hopefully, this revision can ward off some of the damage caused by the wishlist purging.