Steam Wants Your $160

Since Monday, Steam has been having its Lunar New Year Sale that will last for a week. There are so many games on sale, like usual, and I have found plenty of good deals on my out of control wishlist. With this Chinese New Year themed event, you can accrue 100 tokens for every $1 spent for yourself or 111 tokens for every $1 spent as a gift. At first, you think that this may be a reasonable reward points exchange but then when you look at the items that you can spend your tokens on, it seems like Valve really, really wants you to spend your money... I mean, they always do but compared to previous sales event rewards, this one features goals that feel rather far-fetched and unobtainable.

The top 3 rewards are very costly. You can also spend tokens on new backgrounds and emotes.

You start off with a token amount based on your previous purchase before the event started plus a $5 discount for the first $30 spent but to get an additional $5 discount, they want you to spend $150! Oh my galaxy! And I thought getting that $5 gift card recently for buying $25 worth of frozen food at Target was a bad deal. It's clear here that the ultimate Premium Reward for this event is the Golden Profile and judging by its setup, this particular reward is going to be a yearly thing: You have to spend $40 just to unlock it until end of sale... Then you have to spend $120 to keep the golden profile for a year. I opted to spend my tokens on things that are permanent: the profile badge and the backgrounds plus emotes. This very specific amount of $160 for the Golden Profile combo is perhaps indicative of the average amount of money people spend during these Steam sales events because it wouldn't make any sense to price it so high if most people wouldn't be able to unlock it. I seriously think that people should avoid getting the Golden Profile at any tier level to discourage Valve from using timed features as rewards. If people are willing to spend money on that, what's next? It's a scary thought. Bad Valve... Your greed is showing.