While many gamers say that they don’t like the new format of Steam’s regular sales which has seen the end of daily and flash deals, the result of the sale says something completely different. According to Steam Spy, the year-to-year sales of the Steam Summer Sale suggests that gamers will more than happily take a discount with revenue increasing by almost 50% from the 2015 sale.

Last fall, Valve ended the practice of short deep discount periods during Steam sales. Previous Steam sales saw a base discount for a game that could go deeper if they were selected for a 48-hour Daily Deal or a shorter (between eight and 24 hours depending on the sale) Flash Sale or Community Pick. It is believed that the introduction of refunds forced Steam to cease the temporary deeper discounts because people could flood Steam with refund requests if a game they purchased goes on a deeper discount than they what they purchased it at.

Steam Spy reports that this year’s Steam Summer Sale saw Valve ring $236 million in revenue from about 37 million games sold through their virtual tills over the course of the 11-day sale. This is up almost 50% from the 2015 Summer Sale’s $160 million in revenue from 33 million games sold. The big difference between the two years is that last year’s sale did have daily and flash sales. Gamastura’s own polling of developers indicated that they saw large increases in revenue compared to last year’s Summer Sale.

Steam Spy also notes that while there is a year-on-year increase in the number of Steam users, the increase is not 50%. So it would seem that users are willing to spend more money during the sales. Given that they are also spending more per game ($6.38 per game in 2016 against $4.85 per game in 2015), it also seems like gamers are willing to buy games with smaller discounts, newer games or generally just more expensive games than they did previously.

It’s clear that while consoles will be a big part of the gaming ecosystem, PC gaming is not too insignificant to ignore, especially since it seems to be still growing at a good rate. No wonder why Microsoft wants to push Play Anywhere on its Xbox One games. Granted, they have to make the Microsoft Store worth using to get people to actually Play Anywhere.

Source: Gamasutra, @Steam_Spy

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