It sounds like sales come on and the price of something goes down, but it turns out that before it was the same and what did they do, they increased it so it looks like it’s actually discounted? This and other tricks with adjusting product prices are a constant in all kinds of sales, and Steam is no exception, although it will soon cease to be, at least in the European Union, that is, the territory where things are about to start changing.

As gathered in TechSpot, application of the Omnibus Community Directive, also known as the Compliance and Modernization Directive aimed at strengthening consumer protections, will begin rolling out on Steam, where pricing practices have been largely unchecked forever. But isn’t the price and discount model popularized by Steam one of the aspects that make the platform great? Yes, but everything has its limits.

Limits like the ones Valve put in place a year ago to prevent abuse, which will now be reinforced with a very simple measure: view the minimum game price for the last monthi.e. that the game card contains the regular price, the current price and the minimum price for the last thirty days to try to weed out the smart guys who use the arrival of sales to trick the staff.

Steam now shows a 30-day low price in some European Union countries to comply with the Omnibus Directive. pic.twitter.com/BbTsNn2Zsp

—SteamDB (@SteamDB) June 3, 2023

A SteamDB tweet shows what these warnings will look like in games that must replay, they will be implemented only in the European Union, at least for now, and not in all member countries at the same time, but in blocks, depending on whether the regulation has been approved or not. Of course, depending on the success of the measure and the pressure exerted by other territories, it may expand.

It is worth noting that deceptive discount tactics are not something specific to Steam, but to all sales platforms, digital or not. In fact, these and other measures that Steam has applied and is applying – such as limits on ongoing discounts or extremes above or below – have been slow to be adopted in other areas, although Steam is the benchmark for the sector.

The interesting thing about this case is that Steam’s already banned discounts followed in less than 28 days last year, which is almost a month now applied to reporting the minimum price of games in a given time period, so the measure, still enforced by – according to Valve’s interpretation – an EU directive, acts as a band-aid to the previous one. Welcome anyway.

On a different note, but without changing the subject, it was also last year that Valve updated the recommended prices on Steam in line with inflation, i.e. upwards, also in relation to the conversion between currencies.