The way of pricing of the different game bundles in Steam is going to change as they are moving towards a more dynamic model of bundle pricing. In this new model, the prices of the bundles will vary if you already own a game featured in the bundle you have purchased.
A copy of the official documentation sent to the developers by Valve has been obtained by PCGamesN. There has been no announcements made by Valve on this and it is unlikely for them to make one.
This new dynamic bundle pricing will provide you with discounts if you already own a game from the bundle. This also means that you’ll only be able to get the games which you don’t own when you buy the bundle.
“With Steam Bundles, if a customer already [owns] some items in the Bundle, they will pay for and receive only the items not already in their account,” the documentation reads. “This allows the best fans of your series or franchise to ‘complete the set’ and get a deal on the remaining items in the Bundle.”
Valve mentions that making the customers buy the same game even after owning is not good.
“Either it made bad economic sense for those customers to purchase the pack, or they just felt bad about doing so since it [looked] like they were paying for products they already [had]. The new Steam Bundles system addresses this,” Valve added.
The old style of pricing, which will be called “Must Purchase Together” bundles will remain even after the introduction of the new pricing system.
There would certainly be some added advantages with them like art books, soundtracks etc.
To add to this, the new pricing system will also fix the irregularity in bundle pricing which used to happen before. Sometimes the bundles costed the customer more than buying the each game individually.
The first bundle to follow the new pricing method will be the Headup Games Complete Bundle. It is yet unknown which other bundles will follow them and when.
However this wouldn’t apply to the third party bundles (Humble Bundle, etc) and only apply to the bundles bought directly from Steam.