Steam Sale Offers Inventive New Ways For Publishers To Deliberately Misunderstand Maths

Bargain-hungry gamers everywhere have reacted in delight to the latest Steam sale, excited by the possibility of once again acting as blind consumerist pigs for big publishing houses.

“I can’t get enough,” enthused gamer Lucy Peterson as an un-named big publishing house strapped her into a steel chair and began to warm up a terrifying device of spider-like limbs and glistening metal blades labelled ‘The Gouger’.

“I love the way that they deliberately raise the price of their games on Steam just before the sale, then offer a ‘50%’ discount that actually works out to be something like 20%!”

“It’s just so amazingly and blatantly unethical. I’m in awe,” she continued over the rising sound of a drill.

Big publishing houses have been deliberately misunderstanding mathematics for many years now in Australia, leading to a pricing phenomenon known as “The Australia Tax”, but this relatively new technique of just straight-up lying has got customers really excited.

“One of our favourite techniques right now is what we call ‘The Bundler’,” explained a big publishing house representative to Point & Clickbait as they used goat’s blood to paint a circle of ancient, eldritch runes around an altar made of purest basalt.

“What we do is jack up the price of the individual games just before the sale starts, then we bundle a few together, then discount the bundle. People see the discount and see the multiple games and think they’re getting a great deal, but they’re deluding themselves.”

“Well, I should say, we’re deluding them. We’re deliberately obfuscating the truth. I guess you could say it’s lying? If you wanted to use words according to their dictionary definitions, I mean? Yeah, I guess.”