GTA V Steam Summer Sale Was "Misleading"

As always, Steam's Summer Sale kicked off this year in June including hundreds of games at exciting prices and one of them was Rockstar's best selling game GTA V but it wasn't actually available at discounted price. The publisher received some heavy criticism on misleading the customers but now it seems that Valve Corporation, the owner of Steam was the one responsible for the misleading as of the ruling against the company's Summer Sale ad by the UK's Advertising Standards Authority.

Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) of UK has upheld a customer complaint claiming that Valve Corporation advertised a "misleading" promotion of GTA V for PC version of Steam earlier this year during Summer Sale. The game was listed with the "25 percent off label", but actually the discounted price was the original base price of the game.

The normal version of the game having the price tag of £39.99 was removed from the store and then the remastered PC version was only available through advertised bundles which included Shark Cash Cards for GTA Online. Price of the bundle was £51.99 which with a 25% discount reduced to £39.98. This was enough for the ASA to put ban on the advertising.

Here's the full ruling:

We noted the claims related to the Grand Theft Auto game had appeared in error for around a three-hour period and that the item was not included in the promotion. While we acknowledged that the claims had been duplicated, and were intended to relate only to a separate product bundle, we noted the two items appeared side-by-side, which we considered consumers were likely to understand to mean that both the game and the bundle were included in the sale.

We noted the claims for the game stated that consumers could make a saving of 25% on the previous price of £51.98, which we considered would be understood to represent a genuine saving against the usual selling price of the product at the time the ad appeared. However, we understood that was not the case and it had instead been sold by Steam at £39.99, rather than £51.98, since the date of its launch. Because a 25% saving was not available on the usual selling price of the product at the time the ad appeared, as claimed, we concluded that it was misleading.

At the same time, GTA V standalone version was also listed on Steam with a price tag of £38.98 with a label of "25 percent off". In that matter, Valve responded the ASA with a reason of software error and fixed the issue within three hours. Valve might not be facing any serious consequences other than the ban on their advertisement although it is over now. ASA issued a warning that the ad must not appear again in it's current form.