Players are unhappy that games without a discount are becoming the main faces of Steam sales

Steam sale banners work on simple logic: the bigger the picture, the deeper the discount. So when a specific title stares back at you from the cover of yet another themed event, your brain automatically pencils in a red price tag with a minus sign next to it.

Which makes it all the stranger when the one game that didn't get a discount in the entire sale ends up front and center on the poster.

That's exactly what happened with Focus Entertainment's publisher sale on Steam. The banner puts the newest entry in the A Plague Tale series front and center, a game that came out literally a week before the sale started and, naturally, still sells at full price.

Everything else around it got cheaper, while the game on the cover kept standing there with a price tag that hasn't lost a single percent.

The phrase "publisher sale" played a nasty trick here. The game really is "for sale," meaning it's available to buy, just not "on sale," meaning no discount. Technically nothing's wrong, but in spirit it's a straight bait and switch.

• u/Unlikely_Advisor_553 put it best: "They forgot to mention it's a publisher with games for sale, not on sale /s"

• u/leviathab13186 added: "Well, it is 'for sale'"

The explanation is probably a lot less sinister than deliberate deception. Publishers hand Valve generic promo materials meant to represent the studio as a whole rather than one specific event, and the new release genuinely needs extra visibility.

u/itsPomy guessed as much: "If I had to guess it's probably a generic marketing picture they have to represent their studio and not specifically tailored to this one event." Another user, u/nan0ka, offered a different take: "If I had to guess they calculated that they needed the extra advertisement for their new release"

Something similar happened before, when Valve used art from the original Star Wars Battlefront for a May 4 sale, even though that game wasn't on Steam at the time.

The problem is that the marketing math only works halfway. Some players admitted they only found out the third entry in the series existed because of this very banner. As u/itsPomy put it: "Yeah ngl I didn't even know Plague Tale had a new sequel until today when I saw a random clip on yt shorts saying the environment was pretty lol"