At the time of writing this, Steam says I have 557 games. Steam sales and daily deals, along with Humble Bundles and the various other bundle websites out there, have created a massive collection of games I will probably never get around to playing. But sometimes I want a nice meaty bundle on Steam that contains a couple games I already own. According to PCGamesN, Steam bundles will be affected in price based on how many games from the bundle you already own.
This is huge news, and something that will most likely help publishers sell games in a publisher bundle or if fans are trying to own the entire series after getting a couple titles already. You can see how the discount works already if you check the Headup Games Complete bundle. For me, it retails at $67.22 CDN, but that price drops when I take a look at it with my Steam account logged in. I own one of the games already (Bridge Constructor), which means the total price drops to $65.36 CDN. This isn’t in effect for every bundle yet, but I noticed the Valve Complete Pack also took into account my library.
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. – Valve
Valve hasn’t even officially announced the new pricing structure, but it seems like a great idea for both the consumer and Valve. The quote above is from official documentation that developers received and made its way into PCGamesN’s hands.
As PCGamesN suggests, this seems like something that might roll out completely in a future sale, though they state a summer sale for when it will be introduced. I have a feeling since it’s already in place for some bundles, it will get its own unique sale week or weekend to push the new offer. This will also help Steam sales add a little bit of variety to them since the common complaint is the same games are always on sale. At least now bundles will become a more viable purchase for those who have lots already.
Source: PCGamesN