08 · Why You Buy Games During Sales You’ll Never Play
The Steam Summer Sale starts. You feel a familiar pull. You scroll through the discounts. A game catches your eye. 75% off. You’re not sure if you’ll play it. You buy it anyway.
Six months later, the game is still uninstalled. You feel mildly guilty when you see it. You might buy another one in the next sale.
This pattern is not a failure of self-control. It’s a feature of how sales are designed.
The question the sale makes you answer
When you’re not in a sale, the question your brain asks about a potential game is: do I want to play this.
When you’re in a sale, the question shifts to: am I willing to miss this discount.
These are completely different questions. The first one is hard to answer in the affirmative because most games you don’t urgently want to play. The second one is easy to answer in the affirmative because the discount has a deadline and the price feels low.
The sale framing changes the comparison set. You’re no longer comparing the game to not having it. You’re comparing the discounted price to the regular price. The latter comparison almost always favors buying.
Loss aversion meets perceived scarcity
Two well-documented biases compound here. Loss aversion makes the “missing the sale” option feel worse than it actually is. Perceived scarcity (the sale ends in 24 hours) elevates urgency above evaluation. Together they push the decision toward buying without ever engaging the question of whether you’ll actually play.
The Steam interface reinforces both. Countdown timers. Limited-time deals. Wishlist alerts. Each design element optimizes for buying, not for matching games to your actual needs.
What’s actually being optimized
Steam’s revenue, obviously. But also your sense of being a savvy buyer. You bought a $40 game for $10. You won. The game now exists in your library, evidence of the win. Whether you play it is a separate, less salient question.
The buying delivers the satisfaction. The playing is supposed to deliver more satisfaction, but it requires effort, and the satisfaction has already been collected.
What works
Don’t browse sales without a list. Decide in advance what you want, and only check those items. Don’t let the discovery happen at the same time as the discount.
Use the wishlist as a cooling-off period. Add anything that catches your eye to the wishlist. Don’t buy on first sight. A week later, decide. The urgency that made the purchase feel necessary will have evaporated.
Reframe the math. The question is not “is this $10 a good price for a $40 game.” The question is “would I pay $10 to play this in the next month.” If the answer is no, you’re not saving money. You’re spending $10 on storage.
Calculate cost-per-played-hour. If you spent $200 on Steam sales last year and played 20 hours of those games, you spent $10 per hour for entertainment you mostly didn’t enjoy. Sales feel cheap individually and add up to expensive in aggregate.
One more thing
Maida only sees what’s installed. It can’t be gamed by Steam sales. The games you bought during a sale and never installed don’t appear in Maida’s selection at all. This is a feature: the friction of installing forces a small commitment that the buying didn’t.
If the sale-buying loop has been bothering you, separating “owned” from “installed” is a quiet way to take the sale out of the equation.