BlackThorny: ...
Anyways, checking some titles on the site yield factual results,
It seems the Blackwell bundle offered two days ago on steam is indeed the lowest ever (beating GOG's 2.99),
And the Broken Sword games had their lowest run on steam about two years ago as I assumed (and I bought one at the time),
but there are some mishaps -
[url=http://isthereanydeal.com/#/page:game/price?plain=planescapetorment]Planescape Torment[/url] shows lowest ever at 3.99, while I clearly bought it for less as shows in my email : Planescape: Torment $9.99 Fall Insomnia Sale - $8.00 order total: $1.99
[url=http://isthereanydeal.com/#/page:game/price?plain=insecticideparti]Insecticide part 1[/url] shows as being the lowest ever at the current 0.29 (on 3 platforms) while I know for sure it was offered at some point for 0.19 as I saved that price.
I suppose more of the sort might happen, and I can't seem to figure a pattern when it's not working. So can I trust it?
considering
http://steamsales.rhekua.com/search.php?term=blackwell got it even more wrong and
http://steamdb.info/sales/ doesn't care about price history, what other places are there for price allocation?
Any website out there that tracks the prices of games on various retailers does so by either connecting to each retailers website through a documented API (or reverse engineered API) to obtain pricing information at that instant in time, or by scraping the web pages (ugly way) at that instant in time. So they will only know the prices that are available on a given store for a given set of titles at the specific instant in time their software takes a snapshot of the site's prices. They are of course not going to continuously barrage a website once per second in order to have up to the second exact pricing on every game though as that would seriously be abusing access to the website and probably get them firewalled off. They more likely poll the site at a much less interval such as once per day, once per hour,, once per half hour or something like that as that is more practical than bombarding a website over and over again constantly 24/7.
If however, the price of a product changes in any way in between two consecutive polls of a website, they wont notice it until the next time they poll, and if that price change vanishes in that time, they will not notice that it ever happened. So for example if a website that is tracking deals checks a game site once every hour, and a game goes on sale for 20 minutes a minute after they scanned the site, that same game will no longer be on sale an hour later when they scan the site again and they wont know it was on sale or what the price was in order to track it.
As a result, any super fast flash sales or insomina-sale type promos that are very short lived in the order of minutes to tens of minutes will most likely not get caught in the net of any deal-tracker websites scraping software and they wont be able to indicate these deals in their historical pricing databases.
There is no way to avoid that however without bombarding a website with web requests frequently enough to catch every sale price no matter how short the sale promo is - which is just infeasible. They could accentuate their auto-scraping by human entered data but that would be a lot of manual labour subject to typos and other human error too.
So the deal tracking websites (for any products, not just games) aren't 100% flawless databases of pricing information, but are rather just "pretty good, and better than any human can do by hand" sources of information. I doubt there is anything more accurate out there though.
HTH