Gundato: The fluctuation only really occurs around when the sales go live, and that might be a matter of propagating the updated data. As for the TWEE:DC price increasing, I suspect that was intentional :p
PincushionMan: Hey, Gundato, do you suppose it's possible that it is a marketing tool? A means to keep people visiting their site - and also at the same time discouraging ban-sama's price scraping tool? Not to mention the arbitrary product number/ProductID changes.
Too bad I missed out on the 1C bundle deal for $20. It's $50 more now.
I guess SELECT * FROM db WHERE Publisher = '1C' UPDATE discount(.75);
doesn't work when your base 1C pack price is $79.95. (D'oh!) Here's hoping they screw up again!
I sincerely doubt it has anything to do with didimatic (or whatever his site is called :p) or to keep people going to the Steam site. They have no ads and you already default to there from the client.
The only time you really want to force people to use your site is if you have ads (ad-revenue). Otherwise, more traffic tends to be bad :p. That is why RSS-feeds and the like are so popular. It minimizes traffic. If anything, I suspect Valve like didiomatic and the like. Gets their sales out there while minimizing bandwidth costs. I doubt they want it to replace them, but if people use that to browse the catalogue, it is cheaper. Make people come to the site to get suckered in by the fancy pictures and the like, but allow things like didomatic to exist to let people browse the non-front-page part of the sale
Nah, I suspect it is either that the deal regarding the sale was special for the games that fluctuated (like TWEE) had different deals regarding the sale. Or it is a way to discourage all of us who are waiting until July 4th to make our non-24 Hour purchases. Probably the latter.