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?
~~This is just a hunch, but could there be a loophole possible with those promotions where you get a discount, but only if you own another related game? Maybe devs can just add discount for owning a free game and fake a permanent discount that way?~~
~~But as OP already said, we'd need a dev who's already published a game to confirm these kind of theories.~~
Edit: This comment is probably right and it's just an automatically applied bundle discount, but there's a bug in the Wishlist where it shows the combined price of the bundled games. If that's the case then Valve should really fix this ASAP, since it probably falls under false advertising in some countries, even if it's a bug.
Yep it's a bug. When I did an "Add to Cart" it added both games even though it only shows the one game on my wishlist.
I edited the post to reflect that.