Christmas gifts can take many forms. They don’t have to be something material and tangible. They can perfectly be an experience, a feeling, a shared sensation. Sometimes it can be a digital asset. Sometimes, a simple number. Because gifts don’t have to have a tangible, traditional, and classic form for us to value them as such. Sometimes, they are simply what they have to be.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t gifts that wouldn’t excite us at first. If someone gives us Steam Points, we wouldn’t jump for joy. Part of the Steam platform, it is used to buy cosmetics for the profile and reward other users’ reviews, but nothing more. Therefore, it is very common to accumulate an obscene amount of points over the years that, on the other hand, have no particular use. And yet, this year, for one person, the best gift they could receive is a single steam point.
Recently, on the Steam Reddit page, a user asked a very specific question. They asked how it would be possible to get a single steam point. The reason was because they had 68,999 points and wanted to reach a nice round number like 69,000. What was the problem? There was no way to get a single point. And the possibility of getting more than one point and then spending points until reaching that round number was very difficult, if not directly impossible. Even if in the thread, many users were trying to figure out how to do it.
Then came December 25th. The day of excitement. And the same user came back to tell the miracle: their points balance had increased by a single digit overnight. They had exactly 69,000 steam points, just as they had always wanted.
Although clearly someone at Valve read the thread and made it possible, no one at the company communicated with the user about it. Which leads us to speculate that, perhaps, it wasn’t Valve at all. Not even Steam. It was a Christmas miracle. The holiday spirit itself manifesting, manipulating the Steam source code, and adding one more number to a balance that, anyway, doesn’t count for anything. Because, yes, it’s more likely that, like the current offers that you should take advantage of, it was done by a human being. But isn’t it nicer to think that it was the Christmas spirit?
