Have you ever seen a bundle on Steam and thought “it would be a good deal if I didn’t already own half of the games in it?” That feeling may change very soon as Steam has reworked the bundle system and made dynamic bundle pricing available for bundles. This means that the price of bundles on Steam can drop based on the number of games you already own in it.

In a message to publishers obtained by PC Games N, Valve explaining that gamers “will pay for and receive only the items not already in their account. This allows the best fans of your series or franchise to ‘complete the set’ and get a deal on the remaining items in the Bundle.” Valve made their case from the customer’s perspective by telling publishers that “past Complete Packs were sometimes a bad deal for customers that already [owned] one or more of the products in the pack. Either it made bad economic sense for those customers to purchase the pack, or they just felt bad about doing so since it [looked] like they were paying for products they already [had]. The new Steam Bundles system addresses this.”

It’s important to note that this is a feature that is only available should a publisher choose to activate it on their deals. It’s entirely possible for publishers to be on the old all or none bundle system.

As an experiment, I looked at this weekend’s Square Enix Publisher Weekend to see if they have the discount enabled. As you can see from the before and after I logged in screenshots below, I have Rise of the Tomb Raider (review coming soon). Whether by design by SquEnix or Steam, the bundle scaled down proportionate to the base price of the two games (both regular $69.99 CAD so it cut the base price in half) and applied the Just Cause 3 discount. That is likely as a result of the 27% base bundle discount being the savings after the taking the specified 20% off ROTTR and 33% off of JC3 discounts on the games individually.

Interestingly, I found that other bundles like Hitman: Absolution: Elite Edition, the Deus Ex Collection, the Thief collection and the Eidos Anthology did not receive any flexible or scaled discounts despite already owning portions of the bundle. It seems as though the flexible / dynamic discounts on bundles can be implemented on a per bundle basis.

If you shop around for games, you’ll know that this isn’t new. GOG has been doing this for as long as I’ve used the website. Unlike Steam which wouldn’t let you acquire a 2nd copy of a game as part of a bundle if you buy it for yourself, GOG would recognize that you owned it and counted it as a game that you would have bought when calculating its trademark flexible discounts.

Source: PC Games N