Fair play to M Lechat, that is some pragmatism and understanding in the world that I would sorely be lacking. I feel sorry for the guy. I hope he comes up with a banger soon and the planets align for him. I'm not sure if the Steam Machines announcement helped or hindered him. Yes, it sunk the chances of mass visibility on the storefront... but then I'm assuming there'd be a vastly increased number of folk logging in to Steam to see the Steam Machines news, and exposed Planet Centauri to more views by the law of averages.

Saying Valve ruined the sale is weird to me. Are the Daily Deals from today ruined, because there's a banner for Where Winds Meet on the front page right now? You can also see on SteamDB, that the game got a (relatively) sizable increase in players, following the sale.

Drama sells, that's all this is about

Their big announcement had pushed all the sales lists down the page far enough that you couldn't see them without scrolling. That's different from how the page usually looks.

According to the Wayback Machine the banner looked the same as for all other big game releases (like right now for Where Winds Meet). Even on my 1600p screen, with the window on full height, the Daily Deal is halfway cut off. You might as well argue every big game that gets featured on the front page is ruining some sale or another. Where are the clickbait articles for those games?

I think it's mostly because these Devs were impacted by an actual mistake from valve recently, and then this happens during their apparent compensation for this. Tbf though I agree this article is mostly about clicks. They say the emails went out and they sold 5k copies, so it's not like the first time