The Steam Summer Sale has begun, bringing discounts meant to empty our wallets, but a serious error in this year’s metagame seems to be significantly impacting developers in a negative way.

With almost every seasonal sale on Steam, there is a metagame that involves users voting on their favorite game or crafting items to redeem for discounts and cosmetic items for their profiles. The theme for this summer sale is the Steam Grand Prix, a racing themed metagame not dissimilar from one we have seen in the past. The trouble began when users were asked to choose one of five teams, but an overwhelming number joined Team Corgi to reap the benefits of strength in numbers.

Theoretically, users would have distributed themselves randomly among the five groups without any one being strong or more populated than another, but this did not occur. Steam addressed the issue in a blog post and stated that they apologize for the broken mechanics leading to an unbalanced event.

This, however, was only one of two issues that occurred. The second problem has hurt smaller developers because of how the metagame rules were written. Players were told that they could win the top game on their wishlist for free.

Unfortunately, the rules were written in such a way that many users thought they needed to delete games on their wishlist, when instead they only needed to move the game they wanted to the top of their list.

The removal of games from the wishlists of users were largely from smaller indie developers and generally had lower price tags than AAA titles. This was due to the confusion that had users not wanting to “win” a cheaper game. Developers, meanwhile, say drastic changes in their placement on the lists.

These wish lists are important because if enough users have a game on their wish list, that game is more likely to be featured, or for a sale to come and for the user to be notified via email that a game they want is now discounted.

Steam has again apologized and is fixing how users are presented with rules for the metagame. Although, the damage is done, as many smaller developers report the same mass deletion of their games from wish lists.

The timing of the mistake could not come at a worse time for Steam, as Epic Games continues its relentless assault to become the preferred digital storefront. The Summer Sale at Epic Games had a few minor hiccups at the start, but overall has been excellent in its offerings and discounts for users. They also are giving away a free game per week until 2020.

Recently, Epic CEO Tim Sweeney has stated that hoarding exclusives is the only way to get the attention of users and Steam. They offer a more generous split of revenue with developers as well at 88% for them and 12% for Epic, compared to the 30% taken by Steam.

There is no doubt Steam’s error serves to bolster Epic’s reputation and may sway developers over to them in the future, as Epic has yet to experience this type of gaffe that would impact sales in such a negative way.