this thing wasnt a deal of the week for six weeks.  and even at 800 it was still over priced.

The company has had many sales on Steam before the one mentioned in the article. What Valve probably requested in order to do another mid-week or weekend sale was to add achievements using their Steamworks sku which is free to developers.

Well, whilst I have no data to back it up, I think the average steam user probably buys more games and is very likely to take advantage of sales (as compared to a console userbase). I know I've bought more games on steam this year then I have on any console digital platform all together.

I've bought 2 games on xbla over the entire life of the console and I've bought 8 games on steam just this year.

I bought the pack during the sale some great games in it lots of fun. Glad to hear the company is getting back on it's feet. 

Whilst your anecdotal evidence is certainly an interesting addition, it can hardly be used to extrapolate the buying habits of all users of Steam and console online servives. My gamer profile here has me listed as having 80 PSN games (and is not fully updated), and Steam has me listed at 82 games, but I don't use that to suggest all digital customers are buying digital content in broadly equal amounts. Such a suggestion would be ridiculous.

I did say that I had no data to back up my opinion...

Very true. I suppose I'd've been better saying that I simply disagree with you. All my anecdotal evidence (Friend Lists and the like on various services) contradicts yours, but beyond that, all the news articles with successes and failures on all platforms, be it PC or console, leads me to suggest that Steam simply isn't anywhere near as influential as some people here seem to think. One chap, after all, said Steam sales would be 50x that of PSN or XBLA. To my eyes, that seems massively excessive, and almost certainly wrong.

50x is unrealistic.

Very. Everybody would be on Steam if that were the case, and would ignore the consoles as a waste of time and money. But they don't. Indeed, consoles are repeatedly scoring new exclusives and new ports from other services, so they must, at the very least, be offering something pretty good. In the end, the devs want to make money, and will go with the platform that provides most chance of this, whilst simultaneously providing the working environment they are willing to endure (sometimes one of those is more important than the other, depending upon the dev). Again, Steam can't be that much better, if it is even better, because if it was, XBLA and PSN wouldn't have so many new titles popping up on their services, but they do. New games every single week is not a small amount of product.

Also, I find it a bit odd to be arguing this, as I'm quite the advocate of Steam. I like it a lot.

Steam is a very powerful market place, this piece proves it. In any case, I suspect the reason for their lack of success is perhaps their game didn't fit the console controller or the market place on Xbox Live.