It got so bad that my wishlist was broken. I could feel the pain through the Internet as others threw money at Valve.

See, the trick is to own everything.

Then you don’t even care about sales anymore because you already own anything and everything thats on sale and interesting.

That used to be true with the flash sales, but hasn’t the past few years.

I think that was sometimes true in the past, but they ended that practice years ago.

As far as I’ve seen the prices stay the same throughout.

As others have said, prices should be mostly stable, especially for big names, but you still might see a few small devs who were like “Oh shit, its the summer sale, we should add a discount” halfway through.

That used to be the case, back when Steam Sales were a chaotic feeding frenzy of discounts. These days it’s pretty much the same throughout.

Better to pirate it.
The original devs were kicked out and the current owners are scummy.