A Steam user on Christmas Eve had a question: How do you earn just one measly little Steam Point? They were at 68,999 points and wanted to hit 69,000 because, you know, it’s a nice number and all that. However, because of how Steam Points are earned, there seemed no simple way to get that one measly point. But then a Christmas miracle happened.
Steam Points are a part of Valve’s digital store that I often forget exists until I see one of my friends rocking some wild and ugly new animated profile wallpaper and think, “Oh right, I can make my already awful-looking user page worse using points!” You probably have a few thousand of these points sitting in your Steam account doing nothing. Maybe one day Valve will let you exchange them for coupons or something, but for now, they are only used to buy new cosmetic decorations for your Steam profile or to provide awards to user-generated content and comments. So they are effectively worthless, but that didn’t stop someone from wanting to have some fun with their heap of points.
On Christmas Eve, Reddit user CoffeeAndPistachios posted a screenshot of their then-current Steam Points balance, showing 68,999. They wondered if there was any way to reach the “nice” number of 69,000. What followed were all sorts of comments and theories arguing that it was impossible, or laying out schemes that involved buying a specifically priced game and then spending the exact amount of excess points to reach 69,000.
Then, on December 25, a miracle happened! That same user returned and posted that their Steam Points balance had increased by one single point and they didn’t know why. A bit of sleuthing revealed that a “Steam Support Adjustment” had occurred and added the single point, letting CoffeeAndPistachios reach 69,000. Nice.
Was it a lone Valve employee who, right before they left the building to celebrate the holidays, decided to grant one user a small gift? Or was it Santa hacking into Valve’s servers and messing with their databases?
Kotaku has contacted Valve for more information.
For now, though, we can all take comfort in knowing that someone who needed one point got that one point. And people say the world is a bad place devoid of kindness and love.
.