Edit: KingRaptor helped me figure out it's a bug in steam's wishlist. It can bundle games without telling you then shows the combined discounted price.
Original post follows.
Title: Steam is lying about their discounts
This is a troubling trend I noticed today while browsing my wishlist on steam. One of the games seemed to have a double discount, but the price before discount was much higher than I remembered. The original price should have been under $20, but they had it listed as over $30. Checked steamdb.info, which is completely independent of steam, and sure enough the list price is $16.99.
I checked another game that had a double discount, and it was the same trend. List price of $7.99, but steam was showing $19.98 discounted to $7.63.
When did steam start engaging in this shady practice? Has this just started or has it been going on for a while?
I believe the developer is in complete control of the pricing on steam, so it would be the developer being shady
Could be, IDK. I've seen that with a regular discount and the price gets raised when a sale starts, but never with a double discount.
Perhaps someone that has published on steam could shed more light.
In the store I'm not seeing what you're seeing. I think what you're looking at is actually these two bundles, not the base games:
https://steamdb.info/bundle/35041/ https://steamdb.info/bundle/23853/
Also, as it was pointed out, Steam does not control pricing, that would be entirely in the hand of the publisher or developer, not to mention it is against TOS (and also illegal in some markets)
That looks like it. I checked one of the bundles.
Then tried adding to cart from my wishlist. It added both games, but on my wishlist it only shows the one game. That's just really buggy, and fortunately only unintentionally deceptive instead of intentionally.